lead generation

Written by Jason Miller.

To the folks out there who say that Facebook is not an effective lead generation tool for B2B, I will tell them that they need a new strategy.

Facebook boasts the largest user base of any social network and it’s essential that you have a presence here or your business will simply be missing opportunities.

Guest Post by: Phil Fernandez

I had the pleasure of hearing the keynote Andre Pino, principal analyst for Forrester Research, delivered at our recent Marketo User Summit, coining himself a “Recovering CMO” and giving insight into the changing dynamic for companies trying to achieve top-line growth. Having been in the trenches for a number of years, Pino acknowledges that, until now, marketers didn’t have the tools to monetize their efforts.

Guest Post by: Maria Pergolino

At my previous company my success was measured by number of leads. If I hit the right number, I was in the clear. If the total lead count was high, I was awesome. If I was short of my lead goal, I had some explaining to do. Makes sense, right? More leads equals more won deals. Management could understand these metrics. It was easy for the VP of Sales to see my results via a dashboard in the CRM system. Life was good. Well, that is unless you were a sales rep. (Don’t worry. I learned the right way fast, becoming a demand generation machine!)

Guest Post by: Maria Pergolino

As part of our ongoing B2B sales and marketing thought leadership interviews, I spoke with Carlos Vidal, Principal at Sales Benchmark Index (SBI). SBI is a strategic advisory firm that helps executives understand how well their sales forces are performing relative to peer group and World-Class levels. SBI is differentiated through the use of empirical data -- a repository of over 11,200 companies, across 19 industries, 11 years of history and over 315 sales metrics.

Yesterday, I described the important role that strong, risk-mitigating brands plays in inbound lead generation. This is where B2B social media marketing comes in, since it provides a way for any company, not just large multi-national corporations, to build strong brands that in turn generate quality inbound leads.

Here are four key ways that social media builds brands.

Social media can be many things: a place to network with friends, a way to follow market trends and monitor brand sentiment, a customer service tool for identifying unhappy customers. But is it a tool for demand generation? I believe the answer is yes, but that it requires a different mindset for lead generation and measuring ROI.

by: Jon Miller

by: Jon Miller