Social media harsh realities for any brand

When you are getting started in social media it is important to think carefully about what you as a business are looking to achieve and drive your activities from this, from a business-led social media strategy. Jumping straight to tools and hoping they will work for you often causes problems.

A second consideration should be what is possible with different tools and how you can use them in a way that truly benefits you. Working with any social media tool, just as with any marketing or communications tool needs proper thought. And with social media people often think you can put things up and wait for consumers to start ‘engaging’ with you. This almost always won’t happen. It is one of the myths of social media. You need to work hard to get engagement going.

These are some harsh realities and the myths that often exist about social media and timely for everybody to consider:

1. Nobody reads your blog unless the content is valuable and relevant, you have conversations and you build loyalty over time
2. Your Twitterstream is boring unless you make it interesting with content that is relevant to your target audience and have the right mix of personality and conversation
3. Your Facebook Fan Page will be empty unless you have valuable content, interaction and conversation there
4. Your new social networking site will not be used unless you have valuable and relevant content, give people a reason to engage and build audience diligently with good community management
5. Your great idea will not go viral unless your content is engaging and valuable and people really want to engage with you
6. Users will not generate content unless you make it easy, ensure there is something in it for users who are generating the content and facilitate this with good community management
7. Your employees will not help unless you enthuse, train, encourage and support them

Overall tools and technology are not the most important thing when any brand uses social media. Its your content and the people who manage and grow your activity who count!

B2B Lead Generation and Marketing Automation. Are they synonyms?

Today a lot of B2B companies are opting for marketing automation solutions. Makes good business sense, why lose out on those possible sales opportunities when you are doing everything possible to drive traffic to your website. But there is a serious problem, with the perception that is associated with using a marketing automation solution. For some reason, marketing automation on most occasions is mis-interpreted as a Lead generation solution.

When in reality, marketing automation is just a part of the Lead Generation process and not by any means the end.

As the name suggests marketing automation is about automating the marketing activities of any organization. So the automation of the repetitive marketing tasks results in increased efficiency in the organization. But this understanding has been many a times mis-interpreted to consider Lead Generation as part of the marketing automation process.

Such mis-interpretation has led B2B companies to spend precious dollars on a solution which actually only enables their marketing departments – because the sales teams couldn’t care less, they anyway consider most of the leads passed on by the marketing team as useless.

So is Marketing Automation a lost cause? Not if you see it as one of the means to your end objective – the lead generation process.The other two being - Website optimization and sales enablement

Website Optimization:

For any B2B company in today’s age where Internet dominates all channels of communication a good website can be critical to their business success. A website acts as the showcase window for the company and also, one which allows the company to engage its prospective customers in a very direct manner. Invariably it becomes the first point of contact between the prospect and the company and also the first point of the Lead generation process. Ensuring the company website meets the following requirements will go a long way in optimizing it for better lead generation.

Providing relevant content about the product

• Conveying the value proposition to hold interest of researchers on the website.
• Enabling the prospect to easily navigate to pages of interest
• Allow the prospects to easily trial or buy the product.

Marketing Automation:

Once you have optimized your website, its time to bring in the marketing automation guys. This solution will help you find leads on your website, it will sift through all your visitors to circle out those who might really be interested in your product. Also, it will help you automate the marketing process of reaching out to your prospects and keeping track of their responses – moving them up or down your sales probability scale.

The process of Lead generation does not end with finding interested prospects, but also includes the time and effort taken to nurture that lead till it is ready to buy your product. It is this process of Lead gathering, qualification and nurturing that marketing automation platforms help with. It makes the repetitive processes more efficient and tracking Lead progress easier.

The 3 most significant marketing processes the platform enables in the Lead generation process are -

• Customer Segementation
• Customer Data Integration
• Campaign Management

Sales Enablement:

The last node of the Lead generation process is also the most significant - sales enablement.

The Lead generation process will only be successful if all efforts put in by different people in the previous stages help the sales team understand and identify the context and intent of the sales opportunity at hand.

Marketing collaterals created should map and reflect the different levels of interests and inhibitions expressed by the lead during the nurturing process. It should also reflect the lead’s progress from a visitor looking for a solution to someone who is ready to buy the solution you offer.

Time plays a very significant role in making or breaking a sales deal. The other processes of lead generation cycle should be well equipped to identify a sale-ready or ‘hot’ lead from a lead that needs nurturing and inform the sales teams ensuring they connect with these leads in time. Triggering off alerts when opportunity strikes is something more advanced Marketing automation 2.0 solutions offer today, if the one your company uses does not it should be done manually to avoid loss of sale opportunities.

Either ways sales enablement is a process if ignored – it can kill the lead generation process much before it reaches a desired end. It should be ensured that all the data collected on the intent and interest of the lead should be accessible to the sales teams and should form the basis of their customized sales pitches.

It is these three functions that come together to make lead generation process a reality. The absence of any one of these functions can severely jeopardize the lead generation process and make your marketing automation platform ineffective.