B2B Inbound Blog

Demystifying B2B Social Media Marketing and ROI Measurement

  

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It's been widely reported social media marketing among B2B is steadily on the rise and is predicted to trend upwards even more in 2010. This despite continued resistance among senior management and CEO's fearing losing control of their message, inappropriate employee engagement and the need for damage control due to negative attacks. And, what about social media ROI?

These are all valid concerns, yet fully addressable once an organization comes to grips with the place for social media marketing for their business.

B2B customers are on the bus

This rise of social media engagement among B2B marketers is largely due to market demand. Simply put, B2B prospects and customers are, in large measure, having their purchase decisions more influenced through engagement on social networks from those they trust, than from corporate speak (via press releases, advertising and even the company web site). Wouldn't your B2B company rather be riding, if not in the drivers seat of the same bus your market is on?

You can get a good feel for where B2B companies and customers are with social media engagement. Take a few minutes and watch this video from the Earnest Agency:

Begin with an active engagement strategy

Engagement is a two-way street. It's not enough to just know what's going on. Or to only respond in a defensive manner. Worse still is to try and use social media as a broadcast or direct response advertising platform. To effectively gain from social media you must be ready to first give. And that means you must build productive relationships that supports the interests and needs of your friends and followers. Like I once heard Tim O'Reilly say, "Create more value than you capture."

Move on to tracking and measuring your B2B social media engagement

So, you need a social media strategy based on active engagement. You also need some way to measure and maximize the investment in time and resources required to be productive, and profitable.

A recent post on Social Media Examiner discussed four ways to measure social media's impact on your brand. Namely they are to measure your exposure, engagement, influence, and the lead generation funnel. Each measurement includes recommendations for using both free and paid tools.

Fine, if you want to go to the added expense of paid tools. Or, if you have the time and resources you could maybe cobble together some free tools and technologies to track the key metrics. But, there's another solution, much more affordable and ideally suited for small to medium size businesses. It's the Social Media Tool built-in to the HubSpot CMS marketing software.

Marketing software with integrated tools makes social media ROI possible

I've come to believe participation in social media is part art and part science. You need both. The art of it has to do with the why and how of engagement. The science part has to do with the results and being able to track and measure your engagement.

Take HubSpot software for example. The HubSpot Social Media Tool integrates nicely with an inbound marketing approach and provides the following:

• Tracking/monitoring mentions from all the filtered social networks for selected keywords and brand names.
• Filtered networks currently include: Brand names and industry terms you select, Blogs, Delicious, Digg, LinkedIn, Reddit, Sphinn, Twitter, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo Buzz and YouTube.
• A daily report with a link to the mentions (social media conversations) via your HubSpot Dashboard's HubFeed. The great thing about this is you decide, based on keywords, which mentions are brought in to your monitoring tool:

•  Ability to read, share, respond and interact with the conversations you select right from within the social media tool (Social Media Feed). No need to login to each separate network saving you time and making engagement easy and very efficient.

• Ability to integrate automatic publishing to your selected social media accounts whenever you publish blog articles.
• Measure and analyze your Reach from your social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) plus the number of blog subscribers you have and number of leads - all in the Analyze Reach tool. Allows you to see how your networks (reach) is growing month over month and year to date. You can also export the data to an Excel spreadsheet.

• There's more you can do with the built-in HubSpot Social Media Tool. You can create "Follow Me" widgets and easily showcase them on the pages of your site to help you gain more friends, fans and followers. But the best I'm saving for last...

Yes, you can measure social media ROI!

With a smart marketing CMS like HubSpot you can certainly track, measure and in many cases grade key metrics: number of visitors, leads, blog subscribers and commenter's, inbound links and your reach from social media. These alone may get the CEO to take notice. But, the holy grail of all these metrics is social media ROI. How will all this inbound marketing and social media activity translate to business value and bring in revenue? Well, with HubSpot marketing software there's a tool for that too.

HubSpot not only integrates and automates social media monitoring and publishing with the ability to track reach, it also lets you see how social media is contributing to growing your traffic, leads and even customers. Sources within the Analyze tab tracks all sources of traffic to your site. Whether from direct, referral, PPC, email marketing, any marketing event you set up, AND from social media. 

HubSpot closed loop marketing analytics lets you see which of your inbound marketing efforts (sources) are paying off the most by tracking each visit, lead and customer conversion by source of entry. The possibilities of this from a marketing perspective for a small- to medium-sized B2B company is amazing. With this level of tracking you now can know what's working, what isn't and where to invest time and money for the greatest return.

For example, HubSpot knows that lead you marked as a sale came from Twitter. Here's how. When you tweeted that link to your followers using the blog auto publish feature, some visitor from Twitter linked to your blog, read your remarkable content, then clicked on your call-to-action and converted on your landing page becoming a lead in your HubSpot system. You nurtured them with more relevant and helpful content until the day they agreed to become your customer. So, when in your HubSpot or integrated CRM you marked them as a customer HubSpot knows; it knows that visitor first came to you from Twitter.

It's a tool not a pill

You do this inbound and social media marketing for growing your business. It may seem like magic, but it's not. It takes thought, effort, determination, persistence and time. It's like my running shoes. I won't stay fit unless I put them on and hit the road. HubSpot software with all the built in tools and marketing integration is no different. In fact, a 3 month study between HubSpot active and limited time users showed the active users received approximately 28% more leads than did the limited users.

What are your challenges engaging and measuring social media for your business? What's worked for you?

Find out if HubSpot software can work for you. Request a free demo or trial consultation. See how the Social Media Tool, Blog Auto Publish, Reach and Closed Loop Analytics work within the HubSpot Software.