How Social Media Can Be Your Best Source For Leads

We’ve all heard that social media does not work for B2B marketing.
Well, I hate to debunk a myth, but this one has more holes in it than most BigFoot rumors. In fact, social media can very easily be your biggest source of leads for your company.
 LinkedIn does not do so hot as a direct response promotion tool. So, if you’re blasting your audience with a “sign up now” or a “take a free demo” offer, then you won’t see the returns you’re hoping for. But where LinkedIn excels is as a content discovery tool.
People aren’t just going on LinkedIn to find jobs and spy on their competitors. They’re spending more time on the network browsing articles and looking for things to read. And that’s how you can reel them in.
But please, before you hit GO on that ad campaign, don’t select the ads campaign option. You’ll instead want to make a sponsored update.
You’ll do this because of a phenomenon called banner blindness. This means that people on their digital devices actually don’t even recognize banners and ads anymore. They’ve trained their eyes to avoid those areas of the page. And the ads option on LinkedIn puts your message right smack dab in the banner dead zone.
But a sponsored update is akin to a native ad. Users don’t often realize it’s an ad because it’s only marked as an ad by the greyed-out letters in the top left hand corner. And the sponsored update scrolls right down the middle of their screen.
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LinkedIn has a content discovery platform called Pulse. It’s a news aggregator and content curation tool that categorizes articles and allows users to read them on mobile devices or desktop. And one of the main sources of articles for Pulse are the posts that LinkedIn users share. That means that if Pulse picks up your post, it could potentially be seen by thousands of people.
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But once they come to the site, you can’t just expect that one interaction to be enough to seal the deal.
So you need to set up retargeting/remarketing ads. The three networks I recommend for retargeting are AdWords, Twitter and Facebook.
Once you have your retargeting cookies on your audience’s browsers, you’ll be able to keep you message in front of them for anywhere from 30 to 180 days.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/miketempleman/2015/07/22/how-social-media-can-be-your-best-source-for-leads/