According to the recently published “2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends research” report by CMI, 87% of B2B marketers now use social media to promote their message and social media is now the most commonly used marketing tactic to engage with a B2B marketer’s audience.
CMI found that 54% of B2B marketers plan on increasing content marketing spending next year. With increasing budgets, the biggest challenges B2B marketers face are creating content and measuring the marketing effectiveness, with many marketers using web traffic and sales lead quality as a success indicator.
Out of the top 5 social media marketing channels, LinkedIn is the most popular with an 83% adoption rate, up from 71% in 2011. Facebook and Twitter came in second and third with 80%, followed by YouTube and Google+. With LinkedIn leading the social media marketing channels, we have put together three easy ways for you to immediately increase your brand presence online.
1. Launch the Slideshare application
Slideshare allows you to automatically share your sales presentations on LinkedIn. Using Slideshare, you can feature customer success stories, product updates or your latest white paper summary.
2. Export your contacts to email
When logged into LinkedIn, export your contact list each quarter and merge your connections into your CRM. Send a short email to them and use it invite your connections to sign up to your company newsletter. Automate this process by including a confirmation once they have signed up.
3. Add a call to action
You don’t have to limit your call to actions on your landing pages or email marketing campaigns, create a call to action in your profile summary or headline. Explain how you and your business can help benefit the reader. Your call to action can be listing a phone number, email address or to visit your website.
There is no doubt that social media is an important part of a modern inbound marketing strategy. With LinkedIn, B2B marketers can apply the same techniques to increase consumer sales in the B2C industry to reach new ways of increasing brand awareness and lead generation. When used to its full potential, social media will power your brand and maximize your sales performance. 87% of B2B marketers swear by it.
Click here to find out why 11,000+ businesses trust SuperOffice >>
___________________________________________________
Steven Macdonald+ is a guest blogger for SuperOffice. For more articles by Steven, please visit tribes.no
