Putting Social Media Marketing to Work Like IBM

Ready to put BtoB social media marketing to work for your small business to increase leads and sales like IBM?  See my earlier post here about how IBM has generated millions in sales based on social media and blogs by sales folks and others.

Here’s a quick next-steps checklist to help you get started:

1.    Identify people in your company to create exceptional content. IBM suggests that subject matter experts are the best. (Usually not sales people.) Business buyers and prospects want from-the-trenches technical help to make buying decisions.  Here are some content ideas:

• Develop easy-to-locate information that answers questions quickly for your crazy-busy prospects.

• Include information that helps a prospect ‘fill in’ her business case to her boss to purchase your products and services.

• Create valuable case studies about niche problems you can solve better than anyone else.  This 1-2-3 format works for many small BtoB companies I’ve worked with: problem, solution, result.

Impact Interactions has built online communities for BtoB companies for 10 years.  Their research shows senior executives use information from online BtoB communities to build business cases for purchasing upgrades and new solutions.

• Write a short story that explains clearly to new website visitors, prospects how to use your products or services.  Get help to make it into a how-to video that shines like IndustrialInterface.com

2.     Determine the keywords or industry terms that are most popular with your prospects for online searching.  Then use these terms to monitor websites where your prospects are discussing their issues and questions.
 Click here for a keyword tool I created. Copyblogger has great articles on choosing keywords for blogs that apply for websites too.

3.    Share your how-to and informational content on the social media websites frequented by your prospects.

DemandGenReport.com’s survey titled “Transforming the BtoB Buying Process,” showed that 90 percent of BtoB buyers said “blogs impacted their research during the “Solution Analysis” phase and 3 in 4 respondents said social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Delicious were utilized during the early Analysis phases.”

4. Launch a company blog that’s updated at least weekly.

• Prepare a plan and assign someone to monitor websites where your industry, your competitors and your products are being discussed.

5.  Choose your metrics to track success.  Create a list of metrics that will best help your business to measure and evaluate social media efforts. For IBM it is: number of leads created, lead value, win revenue and win rate.

• If you’re just starting, your metrics might include:  number of new visitors to website, number of pieces of content downloaded, number of new enewsletter subscribers, number of leads generated, number of returning visitors to website, or new sales.

• Or any other data points that let you know how social media is helping you to grow your business!

Have any ideas to get results from social media like IBM?  Let me know in the comments below.

Photo: iStock.