As a marketer, your most important job is to generate leads for your business.  But what good are those leads if they’re not managed properly?  These 7 statistics show that if you’re not taking advantage of lead nurturing, you’re losing customers and revenue, and very quickly.

1. Only 25% of leads are legitimate and should go to sales.  50% are qualified but not ready to buy. (Source: Gleanster Research)

Nearly half of your leads will not be ready for a sales call immediately after their first conversion.  But that doesn’t mean you should just ignore these leads or throw them right out the window along with the bad leads.  A key component of a good lead management system is implementing lead nurturing, which allows you to develop relationships with your leads in a timely and effective way by setting up targeted email campaigns.  By following up with these leads and providing valuable content to further educate them about your industry, company, and product or service, you move them farther down your sales funnel until they are ready to become customers.

2. Lead nurturing emails get 4-10 times the response rate compared to standalone email blasts. (Source: SilverPop/DemandGen Report)

The true power of lead nurturing lies in its two most important features – timing and targeting.  You should plan the timing of your emails based on your typical sales cycle, and experiment with different times to see what resonates best with your audience.  Arguably more important, though, is the targeting of your emails.  You should place your leads into appropriate campaigns based on their previous actions on your website, and send them content that is relevant to that topic.  The more precisely and effectively your emails are timed and targeted, the higher your response rates will be.

3. 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. (Source: InsideSales.com)

One of the many benefits of lead nurturing is that you can establish contact with your newly converted leads immediately.  This is crucial because response rates decline rapidly as the age of a lead increases.  By setting up your lead nurturing emails to run automatically, you no longer have to worry about forgetting to follow up with your leads right away, and you make the whole process much simpler and much more effective.

4. 66% of buyers indicate that “consistent and relevant communication provided by both sales and marketing organizations” is a key influence in choosing a solution provider. (Source: Genius.com/DemandGen Report)

Another important benefit of lead nurturing is that it allows you to maintain consistent communication with your leads.  Oftentimes, it takes more than one email to effectively bring your lead from being unqualified to ready for that sales call.  With lead nurturing, you set up your emails to send automatically at strategically determined times.  You can then collect data about the behavior of each lead and the actions they take with respect to each email they receive, and use this information to plan the next steps of your email strategy.  The idea is to not lose contact with your leads unless the likelihood that they can be nurtured to become qualified for sales is severely reduced.

5. Segmented emails get 50% more clicks. (Source: MarketingSherpa)

The importance of segmenting your leads into appropriate nurturing campaigns cannot be stressed enough.  Find segmentation opportunities based on the lead intelligence data you collect, such as their first conversion event (i.e. did they become a lead by downloading your ebook?  Signing up for your free trial?), what parts of your site they have visited, and so on.  Figure out what topics or aspects of your product they seem most interested in, and send them content that reflects that topic.  By closely mapping your content to your leads, you increase the likelihood that they will click through in your emails.

6. Nurtured leads have 9% higher average deal sizes and 23% shorter sales cycles. (Source: Market2Lead)

By adequately preparing your leads through nurturing campaigns, you are refining the list of leads you hand over to your sales team to include only those that are qualified, or sales-ready.  This makes the sale easier on both sides, since the lead is already educated on your company and product, and presumably ready to buy, which of course makes the sales pitch easier.  This reduces the sales cycle, thereby making your sales team and your entire funnel far more efficient.

7. Only 33% of B2B marketers say they have an effective lead nurturing process. (Source: Executive Benchmark Assessment Survey/DemandGen Report)

Most marketers aren’t nurturing their leads, and many of the ones that are aren’t doing it right.  Lead nurturing is an extremely powerful tool.  After all, with all that effort you put into generating leads for your business, why would you want to put half of them to waste?

Start building better relationships with your leads, stay ahead of the competition, and turn more of your leads into customers with effective lead nurturing.

Are you using lead nurturing?  What would you say is the most critical part of your lead management strategy?

Many marketers who have discovered tips or tricks about their field keep those items close to their chest. It’s understandable why they would want to preserve these secrets, whether for competitive advantage, job security or simple jealousy. They use these strategies to help create leads for their sales teams, and watch their secret tools or methods mature over time and find ways to improve them or get a little more out of them. A lot of these hidden tools and tricks are around finding ways to pull in more leads to the top of your marketing funnel, whether to increase your social media reach, list size, or any other attribute that you are being measured on as a marketer. Here are five steps that you should be doing to make your B2B marketing efforts more effective online.

Network More Efficiently with Followerwonk

Followerwonk is a Twitter networking tool that helps you identify other Twitter users with specific interests, sorted by how popular they are. There are a number of tools out there that do things that are similar to this, but Followerwonk is better than them for a few reasons: You don’t need to sign in or give it information about yourself, it’s very fast, and it doesn’t just do the basics like “Find users like me”. As marketers, we usually aren’t trying to find more people who are just like us, but instead trying to find people in certain segments or topic areas.

Their sorting and ranking is also useful because it places the likely influencers and predictors of the field at the top of the rankings very reliably, and so you can quickly assemble the list of 10 or 15 primary people that you would like to reach out to. You can reach out to them directly from Followerwonk once you’ve established who in a specific field that you want to contact, and engage with them. If you’re instead just trying to build followers, you can also do a search for the people who follow the most people, and then follow them from Followerwonk – They are the people most likely to end up following you back.

Make Sure Your Social Media Presence Has Forms

This is a mistake that a lot of marketers make when using in social media – Forgetting to include the lead form. We frequently get caught up in the other parts of social media like “conversing” and “engaging” and “joining the conversation” that we forget to include our own motives in our work. Make sure that some of your tweets go to landing pages on your site or refer back to content offers that you have. A good rule of thumb is that if you’ve made ten tweets but haven’t linked to something that could generate leads for you, it’s the perfect time to do so. Some marketing automation software packages can also help you track this and handle it for you. If you have other interactive tweets and actions happening, that means that you have the engaged following that you need to be successful with this.

Special Offers To Your Unengaged Recipients

Build a mailing list segment of people who haven’t been responsive to your last five emails to them, and then send them a special offer and ask them what they are looking for but haven’t seen. You can get very valuable feedback and advice, and generate leads that were otherwise unresponsive. Consider this a different type of lead nurturing campaign, customized to an unresponsive set of leads or prospects.

In one test, a re-engagement email was sent to otherwise inactive contacts that included a final offer and asked them for feedback on what they’d received so far. Almost 5% of those emailed “woke up” and became actively engaged in some way, by responding to the question or following through on the offer. While that may not seem like a great number, these were previously inactive subscribers, and so were basically dead weight on the mailing list. By getting some action out of them, they were more valuable than before, and the marketer was able to remove the other emails from the list, maintaining list health and reducing the cost of future campaigns.

Make Sure Your Website Is Optimized

This can feel like an obvious item to be aware of, but it’s tricky – It’s too easy to lose track of old pages and outdated offers on your website when you’re a busy marketer. Twice a year, take a quick inventory of your offers and their conversion rates, and then check pages on your site that haven’t been changed in the last six months. If they’re displaying offers or forms that are not converting well anymore, consider switching them out with newer offers or ones that are proving more effective. By getting into a regular six month cycle of this, you will be more aware of what is succeeding or flopping on your website, and better able to turn around pages that aren’t delivering on their potential value to you.

Check Your Historical Analytics

Finally, hand in hand with the previous point, make sure that you are consistently examining your analytics, not just against the previous month, but also against last year’s month and the year before that, if available. Look at your growth, accomplishments, and the milestones that helped set you along that way. If business hasn’t been as strong as the past, carefully review what different segments of traffic and activity looked like in past years. Is it traffic or leads from a particular source or type of source that has decreased? This can help you better understand where you need to focus your efforts to grow again, or where your real problems lie.

What other tips or ideas do you have for success in lead generation?

Photo Credit: Flickr: Some rights reserved by boklm

The idea of automating marketing is scary to some. It should be. In theory it seems like a good idea; better results for less work. However, there are several key factors in the success of a of marketing automation campaign. While setting up a campaign from the beginning is critical, so is maintaining and optimizing that campaign over time.

Let’s take a look at three of the key factors that you need to check regularly to improve your marketing automation campaigns.

1. Too Many Messages

Is your marketing automation campaign sending your prospects and leads to many messages? It is important to view your leads as the human beings they are. Look at your results and the performance of messages over time for the individual people on your campaign lists. Are these messages getting opened? Are people clicking on your offers? If someone isn’t showing a positive response to the emails they’re receiving, have a backup plan that will further engage them. “Maybe the next message will motivate them” isn’t a good plan. Your messages must be useful, informative, and relevant.

Equip yourself to recognize when a lead isn’t responding, and handle the unresponsive lead accordingly. If someone doesn’t click on a link in three messages in a row, consider them “disengaged.” This type of disengaged recipient needs further qualification. Either you are sending them too many messages or your messages are not properly targeted.  Test new targeting strategies as well as a lower content frequency to determine how to maximize engagement. Also consider sending a special monthly email to the disengaged recipients on your list and ask for feedback or if they’d like to be removed from your list. Ultimately, when it comes to frequency in messaging, the goal is to treat your future customers the way they want to be treated.

2. List Expiration

Leads don’t stay at the same company forever. Job changes are one of the biggest challenges to maintaining a quality email marketing list. As a marketer it is your job to create proactive solutions to this problem.  This means actively pursuing strategies to have leads re-subscribe with their updated contact information.

The key to encouraging re-subscription is fresh content. As a marketer you need to provide a reason for a person to come back and reconvert. One way to do this is to create fresh blog content and use calls-to-action on your blog to reconvert visitors, and to make sure that you invite your visitors, leads, and list members to engage with you in other avenues, like social media.

3. Campaign Maintenance

Marketing automation isn’t like a Ron Popeil Rotisserie. You can’t simply set it and forget it. Campaigns need regular maintenance.  Create a monthly checklist for your marketing automation campaigns. Evaluate your marketing analytics data to determine performance. Based on the data determine how your content or message targeting needs to be adjusted. The most important part of this step is to schedule the time regularly to ensure that optimization is consistent and opportunities aren’t missed.

Don’t take your marketing automation for granted. Automation doesn’t mean touchless. Use these check points as well as other marketing automation best practices to improve your lead to customer conversion rate and drive more revenue for your business.

One of the most important decisions made in B2B marketing centers around choosing the right media (print, online, social, events, pr, tv/radio etc) to deliver your message. The question each year is how much of your budget do you assign to each category.  Overwhelmingly marketers are being bombarded with the notion that print as a media is becoming a less relevant part of the mix.

Is that true though?

Not based on recent research conducted by Readex Research. In a Media Usage Studies survey of 2,095 professionals between September 2010 and May 2011, when asked which media is used regularly in their work, respondents shared that:

• 77%  regularly use of search engines,
• 74% regularly use print publications,
• 74% regularly use e-newsletters,
• 55% trade/industry publications websites.

Furthermore, the survey revealed that “Of the nine forms of media listed, 55% indicated they used five or more, and only 5% indicated they used only one.” What we learn here is that instead of one media form (digital) replacing another (print), individuals are increasing the number of media types they are using in their work.

Translation: To increase the strength of your marketing, your message needs to permeate all the media channels being used by your customers. And according to this survey, PRINT must be one of them.

Peter Drucker is attributed with saying that ―Business has only two basic functions – marketing and innovation. Why is marketing so important? Perhaps the answer lies in Phil Kotler’s point of view that:

Marketing has the main responsibility for achieving profitable revenue growth derived from acquiring and retaining profitable customers.

Marketing jointly and equally shares the responsibility for generating revenue with our very important partners in the sales organization. I confess. I’m confused by the recent emphasis on Marketing being focused on revenue.  We now have blogs, websites and roadshows dedicated to the topic of marketing and revenue. Hasn’t Marketing always been focused on revenue?  I mean, isn’t that the job, growing the top line?  Did I miss something over the past 30 years?

Maybe the reason for the recent surge is that so many marketers have focused on generating awareness and leads without real clarity around how investments in these efforts drive revenue.  Today’s executives expect more than awareness and a higher number of qualified leads from marketing – they want a measurable return on their marketing investment and they want marketing to be able to communicate how it is relevant.  Perhaps, the microscopic scrutiny on marketing that has put marketing in the hot seat has also brought the topic of revenue generation into sharper focus.

But here’s the rub and the trap.  As a marketer, when was the last time you marketed to a bucket of revenue?  This is not the question you should ask.  The questions to ask are: how many customer “deals”, both net new and additional business from existing customers, constitute this number?  And how many of these is Marketing expected to drive?  Why?  Because as marketers our job to help the company acquire, keep and grow the value of profitable customers. This approach allows Marketing to help the organization take a customer-centric approach rather than focus on an internal revenue number.

To make this approach work, Marketing needs to translate the revenue number into how many customers and which ones. Ideally marketing should be informing our respective organizations which customers and prospects to target because as marketers we are the ones who are supposed to identifying the best customer and market opportunities from our customer and market segmentation and sizing efforts.

Armed with information about the state and size of the target market, their needs and wants, and how our offer best meets these needs and wants, we can develop strategies and programs designed to connect with these customers, increase and accelerate their consideration, and motivate their conversion to purchase.

Now as a marketer, you can go about setting marketing key performance indicators and program performance targets that will enable you to measure Marketing’s impact on revenue.  For example, let’s say you need some number of net new customers for a business unit by the end of the year.  Before you can set a target for the number of customer deals Marketing will generate, you will need to know the typical sales cycle type and cost to acquire a net new customer for this business unit.  This information can then be used to establish a target number for marketing qualified leads, the cost per lead and a target conversion rate for how many of these will be accepted by sales. And before you establish these numbers you will most likely want to set a performance range for how many customers/prospects a program will enable you to connect with and a target conversion rate and cost for these.

Driving revenue for the business takes working the numbers, then tracking and reporting on the performance to the numbers. Taking a customer-centric view rather than an internally oriented revenue-centric view and “doing the math” facilitates creating a marketing organization that is relevant, can measure its value, and more importantly affect revenue.

What do you think? Do we need a return to the fundamentals? Or are you as surprised as me about all this talk about something that should not need to be said? What do you think is happening to our profession?

Photocredit  Some rights reserved by balanced.crafts

B2B corporate blogs are still integral to the marcom mix and a source of leads.

In short… NO! A blog is still an integral part of the B2B marcom mix.  In fact, for many companies, the blog IS the company’s face of social media, especially when used to convey thought leadership beyond 140 characters.  Even more, the B2B corporate blog is helping generate leads and revenue  as well as boosting other online marketing metrics such as search ranking.

Corporate blogs lead to “leads.”

Mike Volpe of HubSpot says in his blog post, How to Turn a Blog into a B2B Lead Generation Machine, that the HubSpot blog generates more traffic than the main company website and is an excellent source of leads. A HubSpot study shows that 65% of businesses blog. For Joe Chernov, vice president of Content Marketing for Eloqua the investment in the corporate blog was worth it for Eloqua. “We launched our corporate blog, It’s All About Revenue about 18 months ago. The blog today is the fastest growing referrers of traffic to our corporate website. Visitors from our blog to our website are among the ‘best’ traffic we drive. They tend to view more pages, bounce less frequently, and ‘convert’ (fill out a form) at a higher rate than other traffic sources,” says Joe.

For B2B, Are Corporate Blogs and Social Media Mutually Exclusive?

Joe explains that the corporate blog is the hub and social media the spokes—mutually reliant, but different.  He sees the corporate blog as the starting point for the content that tends to spread best on social channels—everything from videos to infographics to provocative articles. It [content] starts on the blog and then is distributed over social channels that point back to the blog.

How Can B2B Marketers Leverage Blogs within an Integrated Marketing Communications Program?

Joe says that when the blog is the hub of the marcom wheel, it overlaps all outbound communications including ads. For example, he explains that the blog gives marketers an excellent opportunity to provide context for an online ad campaign. “The marketer can share the back story on the creative, or dive into what sites the ad will run on and why. It gives readers an opportunity to familiarize themselves with the people behind the logo. And I believe that people trust other people more than they trust logos. So the more a brand can be humanized, the better,” says Joe.

No… the B2B corporate blog is NOT dead.  And yes, when used in conjunction with other social media such as Twitter and LinkedIn, the blog can be a lucrative source of qualified leads.  However, other forms of social media, though often guideposts pointing back to your latest blog post, offer much more than a promotional pointer.  Vehicles such as Twitter, Google +, LinkedIn and others can be used in conjunction with the blog to further engage prospects and build relationships in the social sphere which is what social media is all about, and such relationships can lead to real business opportunities.

Is Your Business Blogging?

Billy Mitchell, partner/senior creative director of B2B agency, MLT Creative, is getting to the bottom of why businesses don’t blog.  He’s running a LinkedIn poll. (You’ll probably need to be logged into your LinkedIn account to see it.) As of 9/29, results indicate that businesses aren’t blogging because they don’t have the resources to do it, followed by lack of top management support. Why are you or are you not blogging?

Additional B2B Corporate Blog Resources:

Jeff Bullas has all the infographics you’ll ever need on blogging including corporate blogging. http://www.jeffbullas.com/2011/09/16/past-present-and-future-of-blogging-3-infographics/

Corporate blogging:  value versus risk by Ross Dawson share valuable, practical blogging advice that every B2B marcom profession should read.

Get a F#ck!ng Blog Already by Brian Solis says not to underestimate the corporate blog.

Mashable’s 15 Excellent Corporate Blogs to Learn From by Erica Swallow includes 15 good practice blogs in both B2B and B2C.

Deb Weil’s book The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get it Right is a must-read for every B2B corporate and marketing communications professional.

Haven’t started your corporate blog yet?

While it’s understandable that you may believe there is no need for you or your business to stake a claim on the blogosphere, the truth is, if you are looking for a new way to start and grow new customer relationships, starting a corporate blog may be just the thing you need to do.

A B2B blog (business to business blog) differs greatly from your average business blog  that sells products directly to customers (known as a B2C blog).  The goal with a B2C blog is to complete the sale. B2B blogs, on the other hand, deal directly with other businesses, and therefore are designed to build long term relationships.

Here are some things you should know when starting your own B2B blog.

Aim For Uniformity

When building your blog, remember to follow your brand. If your company logo is in the top right hand corner of every page of your website, it should be in the top right corner of your blog as well. When you send your customers email newsletters, do you use a conversational tone of voice? If so, maintain that same tone on your blog. Every aspect of your company’s brand should be reflected in every piece of content you produce, from your website, to your blog, to your advertisements.

Go In With A Plan

Before your blog goes live, make sure you know what topics you intend on covering. The worst thing a blog can do is launch with flare and gusto, and then go dark as you get lax when it comes to posting consistently. Readers expect new content and they want it on a regular basis. You must develop the ability to effectively plan and schedule your blog’s content. If you begin to fall behind on your posts, you may risk the loyalty of your readers.

Keep Your Readers Informed

The whole point of having a blog is to make sure that the people who visit you have something interesting or entertaining to read. It’s important to go in with a plan, but you have to be flexible. If your company or product makes the news, or if a law changes that may concern the businesses that purchase your products, let them know. Don’t be so strict in your schedule that you may miss the opportunity to give your readers some important information.

Format

Readers like to know what to expect when they visit a blog. Apart from updating the content on your blog regularly, you should try to stick to a predetermined format. This goes for the amount of images in each post, as well as the length of the post in general.

Be Realistic

If you don’t see your blogs traffic building by leaps and bounds once you start your blog, don’t worry. B2B blogs take longer to build a following than B2C blogs because of their long term relationship building nature. Be patient. Focus on providing your readers with useful, relevant, informative content on a regular basis, and you’ll see your community grow.

As we know, B2B marketing is about starting and growing relationships with your clients. Concentrate on the relationship as opposed to the sale, and your clients will become loyal.

Photo Credit: Some rights reserved by Philo Nordlund

As the economy tries to gain a solid footing, and small businesses wonder if they’ll be hiring or laying off employees the remainder of the year, business owners are wise to review their marketing strategy for what remains of this year and going forward in 2012.

While some small businesses are living in fear, worrying that their revenues will not improve anytime soon, others view the shaky economy as an opportunity to further expand their marketing efforts, picking up some business that other companies lack the ability or will to go after.

How to Grasp Opportunities

Small businesses that are willing to take chances and increase their marketing efforts this time around do stand the chance to gain ground on their competitors.

With the economy stagnant at best, small business owners should review the potential for growth that does exist in some markets.

Ways to go about this include reviewing:

• How consumers are behaving – While many consumers have tightened up their purse strings, they still need goods and services. Take a look at what your small business offers and how lowering your prices may actually lead to more sales. For an analogy, the guy selling gas at $4.05 a gallon on one corner may think he’s making more revenue than the guy across the street at $3.90 a gallon, but who do you think will actually get more customers?
• How your advertising efforts are being deployed – While you may be pulling back on print and television ads (if you’re running them in the first place), what are your efforts online? Social media provides a great opportunity to promote your goods and services, with the only expense basically being time and effort. Using Facebook fan pages, Twitter profiles etc. prove invaluable ways to promote your company;
• Are you getting the most out of your employees? – Most employers have a heart and do not like the idea of layoffs. Not only do unemployment costs come into play, but no company wants to get a reputation as a graveyard for jobs over time. That being said, one way to avoid layoffs is dispersing more of the work around the office. Employers want to know they’re getting their money’s worth out of each and every employee. If you’re not able to hire more full-time staff right now and the work is piling up, either disperse the work to current employees or bring on temp help;
• Stand out from the competition – If you haven’t been already, determine how to best stand out from competitors. Your niche in your market is even more important now given the shaky economy. Review what your strategy was coming into the year, where you were a year ago and where you want to be a year from now.

Given the recent plunge of the Dow, the wrangling over the debt ceiling, and uncertainty on whether or not President Obama will get or even deserves to be re-elected in 2012, it is important for small business owners to ramp up their marketing efforts, not slash them.

Most importantly, tell a story to consumers of why your small business can provide for them unlike the competition.

A major part of your strategy is reminding your present customers why they should stay with you and not consider jumping ship. Lastly, reach out to potential new customers and explain to them why they should come aboard.

With no crystal ball to determine where this economy is headed, those small businesses who best market themselves will likely be the ones who emerge a little battered and bruised but still standing when all is said and done.

New social media marketers are jumping into the field every day. This is reasonable – with hundreds of millions of people active on each network, from all backgrounds and different interests, it’s important to create interesting content and to get in front of them. Having worked with many people new to online marketing or social media, you can see many of them making the same mistakes over again, despite other people already having struggled with the same issue.

I’d like to share three crucial best practices that I’ve developed from working with dozens of businesses to develop their social media presence and generate leads. If you have your own ideas as well or things you’ve seen businesses stumble on when getting started, I’d love to hear them as well!

Tip One: Show Visitors Specific Offers

A very common mistake that marketers make when promoting their offers on their social media profile is not making it clear what will happen next when someone converts. Visitors always like to know very clearly what they are getting in return for their contact information, or if it’s really going to be helpful for them.

For example, take a look at SteelMaster’s Facebook page below. They have several guides available for download right from the Facebook page. Clicking on one of these images takes you to a short form to get your contact information, and then the whitepaper is directly mailed to them. Before a visitor is asked to leave Facebook however, Steelmaster is showing them the types of content that they have available and the cover of each one so that users can easily determine which offer is right for them, right away.

This kind of path also helps it be very clear to Steelmaster which leads they are generating from Facebook – A quick look at referral traffic from Facebook will tell them what leads are coming in because of their excellent presence on Facebook.

Tip Two: Try Different Content And Formats

Inbound marketing always follows the ABCs: Always Be Creating. Or, maybe that’s “Always Beating Competition”. Either way, one of the biggest errors you can make when working in B2B social media is to not be constantly experimenting with different offers or formats of content. People will always respond to various types of content differently. Not everyone enjoys on-demand webinars, and would prefer to read an eBook or start a free trial instead.

At HubSpot, that is a big part of why our best offers are our “kits”, like our Lead Generation kit. They come with several different types of content that are all available behind just one form, so that there’s something for everyone. If someone doesn’t like one type of content or isn’t as interested, there is still a good chance of offering content to them that they’ll like, without needing to make multiple landing pages or excessive amounts of A/B testing.

If you can’t assemble a “Kit” like this easily, another great way to make sure that you’re maximizing leads from social media is to rotate offers, try out new types of content, and see what visitors could be interested in your content but haven’t converted yet.

Tip Three: Place Your Offers Everywhere

Don’t be shy to place relevant offers across all of the social media profiles that you own. When someone arrives at your Facebook page and they don’t Like you yet, invite them to Like you via an image. Afterwards, show them an offer or form to convert on. It’s the perfect time – You’ve already established that they are interested in you and want to learn more and engage. Start collecting more great leads from those visitors.

Optio Solutions (above) does a great job of this by offering people a cup of coffee in return for a conversion on their form and learning about how they want to be your business’s new collections agency. They’ve positioned this offer in a few places, but one of the spots where it is very effective is the homepage of Facebook if you don’t Like them yet.

By making it easy for people to become a lead and a solid offer, they’ve started to generate real leads from Facebook. Something like this is definitely inventive and a big change from most B2B messaging in social media. It’s easier to walk the line of self-promotion and community building if your offers and content are natural. Always be constructive, not obstructive.

Have you seen other great tactics be effective on social media? Let us know!

In this follow up to 5 Steps to Building a Solid Content Marketing Foundation, I interview Kimberlee Wilkes from Wilkes Business Solutions to find out how to take the next step with your content marketing strategy and begin to use social media to interact with and engage your audience.

This interview picks up where Step 5: Add More Channels left off: You’ve set up your foundation of blog content and follow-up offers and expanded your reach by linking posts and offers to your company’s LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter pages. Now it’s time to turn that one way dialogue into a 2 way conversation and make it easier for your readers to share your content with their networks.