You have built out your social media campaign, you have a sales team waiting for leads, and you have a database of customers… now what?  All the advice out there seems to cater to online consumer sales. How do you get a return on your investment from your social media activities for business to business marketing?

The easy answer has been to use discounts to get people to call or visit your website.  Sales and promotional discounts are just one part of marketing, and cannot solely be relied on in business to business marketing.  The power of social media is not always obvious. You can turn your social media into a revenue generating function.  Are you taking full advantage of your social media network?

Direct Marketing & Social

Direct marketing is a proven method for targeting leads and optimizing return.  The idea is to target, track, and offer relevant products and services to the people most likely to buy. Direct marketing can take the form of printing, mail, email, and now social media is beginning to mature and become an integral part of direct marketing, and vice-versa.  Using information and organization, marketing can become more effective as it goes from mass communication to targeted and personalized sharing. Most customer relations management software suites allow syncing with social media activities, such as tagging contacts when they like, retweet, favorite, +1 one of your posts. Direct marketing allows a successful social media campaign to be turned into actual profits, instead of just a collection of “likes” or discounted promotions.

Social media provides information about contacts, it offers new channels of communication to build brand recognition, and offers new modes of sharing.  Extracting and converting that information into useful tidbits for your business can help identify opportunities.  Social media provides tools to get in touch with customers and leads.

Personal Communication

Social media gives you a new route of communication. The key is not to be annoying or spammy. Twitter and Linkedin have proven to be very effective platforms for opening up communication or getting more contact information.  Social Media gives you access to your business clients like no other medium previously.  You can see an individual’s habits and interests. Don’t waste the opportunity to get to know clients and leads, and relate to them better.

Quality Lead Generating

There’s a lot more to social media than just getting followers, you can focus on getting the right followers.  Get involved with your network. You social brand should interact with your network. You can add your expertise into relevant discussions and use those discussions as a platform for getting brand exposure.Your connections automatically act to promote your brand when they interact with your pages and share your content. Your association with your original connections acts as subconscious endorsements, starting off with a higher level of trust.

Lead Scoring

Social media activities can help you determine whether leads are likely to buy or are worth pursuing.  Social media connections often reveal a lot of information about their business and personal lives.  The social users interactions with your brand may indicate that they are more likely to buy or evangelize your brand.  More active users may be better candidates to receive a phone call or a direct mail piece. Someone who is happy with one of your products or services would probably find your other products or services satisfying.

Follow Up Finding, identifying, and selling to leads requires persistence and proper allocation of resources. Using social media to keep your brand present in the minds of people is the obvious action to take.  Just like when you get a new lead through a traditional source, or a lead reaches out through a traditional method, you need to follow up.  Along with phone, email, and direct mail, you have a new means of finding, touching, and listening. The real value is in the depth of each contact, the follow up and optimization of your lead generation.