B2B Demand Generation; Raise Your Hand!

Demand generation, is the focus of targeted marketing programs, which attempt to drive awareness and interest in a company's products and or services.

As a B2B company, we are a solution to a perceived problem.  Some sort of compelling event has recently mandated a need for change and the search is on for a better more effective solution.  Although a change is understood to be needed, the opportunities for solutions could be infinite.

The guy in this ad was able to find a match for a service and talent that he possessed, with someone that found it useful.  Volkswagen might not have known they needed a pen twirling salesman to do their newest commercials, but he made them "raise their hand", and say, "we want you".

      

How do we create a demand for the pen twirling solution that we possess?  And when your potential client says to you, "well this company does the same thing for less money", are you going to be able to show them that you can twirl two pens?

There are multiple steps required when building a solid demand gen process:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Preference
• Intent

I have included a Demand Generation Best Practices  outline that was provided by Jesse Noyes and our wonderful friends at Eloqua.

2011, the year of Marketing 2.0, Sales 2.0 and everything that is one giant step more fantastic than it once was.  The Demand Generation Best Practices is a great place to start.  In the upcoming series of blogs I will go through each of the four steps mentioned above that support a strong demand generation initiative and tie in those best practices supplied by Jesse Noyes

@aaronmandelbaum

Social Media for Beginners

I was reviewing my copy of the Social Media Playbook(A beginners guide to everything social!) that was so generously put together by some great people at Eloqua. (Jess3 and Joe Chernov @jchernov) (If you aren't familiar with Eloqua or their work, definitely check them out.)
And, as advertised, I would like to share with you my learnings from the presentation, but I recommend you still take a look at the Social Media Playbook yourself:

TWITTER

· Continue to engage consistently and authentically while adding strategic thinking and planning to your companies effectiveness

· The most important first step in social media is to listen before speak

· Recognize others, cite sources in blogs, reference contributors

· If you are supporting your own company’s information with SM platforms be sure that Twitter/Linkedin Bio’s reflect the employment.

· Less than 11% of all US Internet users visit twitter, with 5%-7% of those actually participating in the platform

· The shelf life of tweets in terms of impact ranges from a few hours to a few minutes

· As you grow, be selective of the number of people that you follow… Stay around 1,000

· Tweets can be 140 characters but try to limit to 100-120 so that if someone wants to retweet it there is room for a comment or personalization by the retweeter

· Reciprocity is the currency of the web

· Don’t be afraid to show personality

· Too much corporate promotion can lead followers to tune you out

· Almost all sites that assign account holders a twitter score place a high value on activity level

· 90% about others 10% about you

· Participate in existing conversations by using established hash tags

· Your organization should also be sure to comment on industry related topics

· Hootsuite-Can schedule tweets to go out on specific date and time… Can manage multiple twitter accounts

· Twubs-Allows you to save capture and archive hash tag based discussions



FACE BOOK

· Internet users spend more time on Facebook than Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Microsoft, Wikipedia, and Amazon COMBINED…

· Spike in web traffic due to shared FB links

· FB has yet to offer metrics similar to Google analytics, which would enable Page administrators to gain a deeper understanding of their page’s fans and visitors.



BLOGS

· Your blog should ideally be the hub of your company’s content creation wheel by providing relevant commentary and news that positions you as an insider in your particular industry

· Support colleagues, tweet about it, share a link

· The more diverse, expert and useful your posts are, the greater your chances are to increase leads

· Follow up with a lead with a link to a colleague’s blog as a suggestion to further the relationship

· Build relationships with influencers and leads

· Follow competitors Blogs



LINKEDIN

· 60 million registered users

· The platform allows you to identify the types of connections that your connections have and to see how far away the people you want to get to are.

· Have the potential to rank well for your name in search results



YOUTUBE

· Google rewards multimedia content with a higher search rank



WIKIPEDIA

· The most important reference site on the internet

· 5th most visited website in the US and 6th in the world


Content marketing or inbound marketing, increasingly is becoming a lead generation discipline. Sirius Decisions predicts that by 2015 more than 75% of leads will be sourced by inbound channels