This should come as no surprise to those who are business minded. Linkedin is more of a no non-sense social networking site. “I don’t wanna see pictures of your gandchild, I wanna know what your company can do for me”. This mentality rules out Facebook and Twitter seems less than organized for targeted searches of a professional nature.

Business minded people are drawn to Linkedin and the numbers don’t lie. Check out this bar graph assembled by HubSpot:

Some tricks to using LinkedIn for growing your business include paying attention to what’s already working for you on the site. Look at what draws customers in and do more of that. It just makes sense. Why do you think big company’s always ask, “How did you hear about us?”.

Also, stay vigilant. Just because blogs about your industry are mentioning you and bringing in leads doesn’t mean that is the only vehicle you should rely on. Keep expanding your horizons and testing the waters. Exposure in different circles can be crucial to expanding your base of customers.

Word of mouth is still the best way to gain fame in any arena. People love to reccommend services. It makes them feel connected. If someone has an overwhelmingly positive experience or unique story about your services, attempt to capture that feedback and get it visible to other potential clients.

Not that Facebook isn’t a good place to advertise, but to me, it seems like more of a ‘family and friends’ network. Concentrate on something designed for strict business and marketing connections.

Ann wanted to know how happy the group was with the lead generation results of their social media campaigns. “Are your efforts on LinkedIn and Twitter paying off?” she queried. “How many leads have you generated? How many specific pieces of business have you picked up? I know a lot of bright people who are really active on these sites and very few are seeing results. How about you?”

Her question, and too many of her 30-plus responses, illustrated the disconnection between the expectations of marketers who are out on the frontlines every day and marketing gurus proclaiming the wonders of social media. After all, if you Google ”Top 10 B2B Trends in 2011” you’ll see social media listed on every one of them.

Then why, if Ann’s discussion is any indication, are so many marketers dissatisfied with the results they’re getting from it?

I took this question to Sergio Balegno, Director of Research for company of InTouch. He authors MarketingSherpa’s Social Media & PR Benchmark Guides, is considered a foremost authority on social media strategy, is quoted by the media extensively and presents at institutions likeHarvard.

He’s also been in marketing for more than three decades, well before the internet was even on the scene. This gives him some not-so-typical long-term perspective in a world that demands instant gratification.

If anyone could provide insight to why this is going on, it’s Sergio. Here’s his take:

“I had a B2B communications firm from the mid-80s to 2000. When we got into the ‘90s we started hearing about the World Wide Web. I brought the concept to our customers: some adopted it very quickly the other half shrugged it off as a passing fad.

“Essentially, we’re at critical mass: marketers need to prove social media’s value, and there is a need for CRM tools that can track that. Mzinga is one company leading the way with its OmniSocial platform, the study will review more.”

Considering Sergio’s response, marketers are expecting way too much too soon. Paradoxically, this in itself demonstrates the remarkable speed at which social media is being integrated into marketing initiatives.

We can’t yet calculate with the most exacting precision how many leads are generated from social media, but considering how quickly technology is evolving, the ability to do so will be here in no time. I expect if Ann poses her question again at the end of 2012, her responses will be far different.

What do you think?

Finally, Sergio gave me some penetrating insight at the end of our conversation: “After 30 years in marketing, I thought I had seen all of the changes that could possibly take place, and then social media changed everything again. Our brand is no longer what we say it is, it’s what our customers say it is.”

If you want to hear more from Sergio, be sure to sign up for MarketingSherpa’s brand new Inbound Marketing Newsletter, which will announce when the 2011 Social Marketing Benchmark guide is released. The newsletter is published bi-weekly and explores the power of new marketing tools, including social media, to attract customers without advertising. Click here to see the inaugural edition. Click here to subscribe.

Originally published on the B2B Lead Generation Blog

I traveled with Guy Maser VP of Marketing for GlobalSpec and I thought he had a great message about helping marketers get the most out of their internet lead generation investment. Today, his article in BtoB Magazine gives a great summary of his presentation from the roadshow and is worth a read.

Guys writes, “The backbone of traditional marketing has long been the 4Ps: product, pricing, placement and promotion. While these fundamentals still hold true, the Internet has changed marketing and the fundamentals we apply to it. New and innovative online marketing tactics help companies build their brand and generate leads online. Some of the leads are “hot” and ready to buy while others are long-term and need nurturing. To turn these leads into customers, marketing and sales teams must have dedicated and collaborative lead management practices. This environment has brought about a need to complement the classic 4Ps of marketing with a variation called the 4Ts: target, tactics, transact and track. Implementing the 4Ts can help you get the most out of the Internet in your b-to-b sales and marketing efforts, and can help improve the alignment between sales and marketing within an organization.”

BtoB Magazine: Lead Generation and Management Strategies that Get Results

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In the article, I argue that many B2B companies have a chasm between the pay-per-click campaigns that generate clicks and the campaigns that help turn those clicks into customers. When the goal of search marketing is to drive high-quality leads to sales, no B2B pay-per-click campaign is complete without these additional "post-click" steps:

• Send the click to a targeted landing page that’s optimized for the ad and keyword.
• Gather explicit and implicit data to analyze and score the lead, passing the hot leads to your sales force.
• Use lead nurturing to stay in touch and build a relationship with leads that are not yet sales ready.
• Track leads through the revenue pipeline, measure the impact of each click on revenue, and apply closed-loop learning to tune your campaign and optimize bids.

In other words, B2B search marketing needs be an integrated part of a complete demand generation process that includes landing pages, lead analytics, lead nurturing, and closed-loop measurement.

Check out the article: Four Steps to Better Business Leads From Search.

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The question is, when designing the website, planning the sales strategy, and tweaking landing pages, how *exactly* should one go about it?

The debates can be endless, and it’s good to have principles in hand rather than simply falling back on the “just test it” mantra (which does make sense too).

One approach to getting prospects to trust you (and to offer contact info), of course, is to offer a white paper. Again, though — how to produce it, what tone do you take, how to promote it?

I remember when I produced an ebook (not exactly a white paper, because I charge for it and it doesn’t offer some of the things that white papers do) I was so thankful I could fall back on a resource from someone who’d done it before (in particular, Marcia Yudkin).

Now, I’m thankful again! In the midst of some of these B2B conundrums, I recently read Writing White Papers, by enterprise “B2B” marketing expert Michael Stelzner. The book is amazingly comprehensive, covering every aspect of producing and marketing white papers.

I particularly like the stipulations as to tone; he explains today’s sophisticated enterprise customer wants you to sell to them without being “salesy.” No one minds an intelligent latent sales pitch. But that means paying attention to how much you offer in return for the leads you seek.

Anyway, back to our website design and testing conundrums, I’m looking forward to tapping Mike for ongoing tips to augment our own expertise… expertise he demonstrates in this timely post on his blog, comparing white papers to a “demo” in the world of gaming. Give interested prospects enough to “play with,” and they’ll give up their contact info.

It goes without saying that being extra forthright about how much email contact they’ll receive, in what form, is a big part of the mix. Disclose your intentions fully, and don’t mislead prospects, in order to avoid a bad rap in the industry.

It’s perhaps not coincidental that this type of thinking has found its way into Google’s assessments of Landing Page Quality for AdWords ranking purposes… not all “users” are created equal, but the kind of respect accorded to high-end business customers is also worth offering to B2C customers too.

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Andrew Goodman is Principal of Page Zero Media, a marketing consultancy which focuses on maximizing clients’ paid search marketing campaigns.

In 1999 Andrew co-founded Traffick.com, an acclaimed “guide to portals” which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.

I’ve written a number of times that educational content is an important tool for lead generation.

If you’re involved in marketing to IT or financial buyers, you should consider using white papers or e-books.

I’m a big proponent of educational marketing, because it allows you to reach people early in their buying process.

Just remember, they should be EARLY in their buying process!

Early-stage leads – those who are not ready to speak to a sales person yet – can be developed further with an effective lead nurturing program.

Do you qualify leads before sending them to your sales team? After doing numerous lead qualification programs, we have found that only 5 to 15 percent of those who download white papers are truly sales-ready leads.

So don’t pass white paper inquiries to your sales people until they’re more rigorously qualified as sales-ready leads.

We’ve found that when you send educational content of any kind, it’s important to followup with a human touch; namely, followup phone calls. During each call your goal is to be a trusted advisor, and not simply focused on whether they are ready to buy.

Ask why they downloaded the white paper. What questions were they hoping to get answered and how else could you be helpful? Can you send them other relevant and educational content?

As noted in “Sales leads are too valuable for sales people alone,” you need to look at how you can help your sales people, who likely don’t have time to do followup on early-stage leads.

If possible, you’ll need a separate function, internally or outsourced, that can manage the lead qualification and followup process for you.

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Brian Carroll is the CEO of InTouch Inc. InTouch is a 50-person company focused on delivering effective lead generation solutions for “the complex sale.”

Brian authors the very interesting B2B Lead Generation Blog which focuses on B2B lead generation, sales leads, and marketing for the complex sale.

The article features tools that will aid sales people, entrepreneurs, and professionals with their personal lead generation efforts. However, these tools will won’t do the hard work of building your relationships for you.

My research shows that executive buyers choose the sales person who has been a resource and developed a relationship with them regardless of their timing to buy. Time and time again it is proven that customers want the salespeople they deal with to understand their business, their needs, and the pressures under which they operate. These people are called trusted advisors.

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Brian Carroll is the CEO of InTouch Inc. InTouch is a 50-person company focused on delivering effective lead generation solutions for “the complex sale.”

Brian authors the very interesting B2B Lead Generation Blog which focuses on B2B lead generation, sales leads, and marketing for the complex sale.

Traditionally this market had no involvement for consumers themselves, but between advertisers (and their agencies) and publishers. What’s new is market mechanisms that are cannibalizing publishers that realize arbitrage opportunities through consumer involvement. I haven’t seen any clear taxonomy of offerings, maybe this could be a start for someone:

Can you add other examples to this list, or point us to better resources?

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Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory.

He also writes Ross Mayfield’s Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings.

However, Scott Mason’s article in DM News, which was written primarily for B2C marketers, illustrates an important truth for us all: Lead generation isn’t just about instant gratification.

Mason writes:

The perennial rewards of lead generation are reaped from patient tending to potential customers over time. My CEO reminisced about a call from a client who raved about the ROI boost from a lead generation campaign that he canceled almost a year earlier. Now that the client was earning three and four times the return on his original lead generation investment, he realized the error he made by canceling the campaign.

I would add that consistency is required too. Good lead generation identifies, initiates, and nurtures relationships with the right people, regardless of their timing to buy, until they are sales-ready leads.

Link: DMNews.com | News | Lead Generation Pays Over Long Term

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Brian Carroll is the CEO of InTouch Inc. InTouch is a 50-person company focused on delivering effective lead generation solutions for “the complex sale.”

Brian authors the very interesting B2B Lead Generation Blog which focuses on B2B lead generation, sales leads, and marketing for the complex sale.