independent news: B2B Web Marketing: Using HubSpot to Drive Sales via Social Media

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

B2B Web Marketing: Using HubSpot to Drive Sales via Social Media

Posted by Ray Wright on Tue, May 07, 2013 @ 11:36 PM

Ray Wright B2B web marketing strategist The big challenge with web marketing today is that time has replaced dollars as the currency when it comes to building a successful online strategy. In the past, companies with bigger dollar budgets (and better agencies!) out spent their competition to get the best advertising placements. Today, while advertising still takes a large portion of enterprise budgets, it?s less effective. More must be done with digital marketing because the ?eyeballs? have moved to a wide number of locations on the Internet and, in particular, social media sites.? And the buyers who own those eyeballs are not looking for product information but thought leadership content; survey results, infographics, forward looking articles, business analysis and help addressing their business challenges.

Analyzing your buyers? journeys and determining what kind of information will most attract new leads is itself time consuming. But then the real fun starts! You have to not only create that content but then deploy, promote, engage and continuously update it in order for it to be relevant, interesting and thought provoking whenever a prospect stumbles upon it. Beyond that you need to be able to identify which online users of your content represent real leads versus those who are only interested in educating themselves on the topics you publish. Engaging with potential leads and nurturing them through the sales cycle also takes significant resources. So to manage your time investment it?s important to be able to select the best prospects to pursue. When it comes to social media usage, it?s all too easy to become overwhelmed.

Yet social media are increasingly useful for B2B conversations with customers, employees, peers and prospects. Now you can ask for recommendations, pose challenges, look for offers, engage in conversations or make suggestions across a broad range of platforms. However, attempting to monitor those conversations to find out who the influencers are, what topics are trending, who is saying what about your company or asking for advice about the kind of solutions you provide, takes a significant amount of time ? even with the software tools currently available. Add the need to respond and engage into the mix and we?re talking about a very serious investment in human resources.

The answer to this conundrum is ?automation?. Automation saves time, period! Take HubSpot?s new Social Inbox capability, as an example. Now you can not only reduce the time required to monitor and evaluate social media conversations, you can be selective about which conversations or which contacts you wish to monitor and, automate the triggering of outward responses and internal notifications. Essentially, having social media conversations becomes as easy as using an email inbox.

Now you can:

Monitor social media conversations and alert sales when someone requests information about your company or its products and services.
Monitor keywords and Twitter lists to identify opportunities to pursue ? for example, those requesting relevant recommendations.
Gather intelligence about the interests and concerns of decision makers from companies on your target account or qualified lead lists.
Monitor competitor conversations to see who they are conversing with and what topics they?re talking about.
Receive alerts so you can follow-up with prospects in a timely fashion while they are still interested
Track your success rates and modify your social media qualification criteria in order to optimize your ROI and your sales and marketing effectiveness.
Even leverage your sales and other employee?s social media connections to get introductions to decision makers and influencers

This same capability also enables you to measure the ROI of your social media efforts. By integrating social data into your marketing analytics, HubSpot shows you how many leads and customers were generated via social channels and who they are. Plug-in a CRM system to track pipeline activities and you will have closed the loop and can measure both ROI and value.

Now you can use social media to truly drive sales, while doing more with less.

To understand more about developing and using your buyer?s journey to inform your B2B web marketing strategy read the Maastary Buyer's Journey Development Guide. Click on the button below to access a downloadable copy.

? Buyer's Journey Development Guide