How to Leverage Content on Social Media for Effective Lead Generation
As a B2B marketer, your leads are your life net – you need them for survival. Because of this, you constantly need to find ways to leverage existing resources for effective lead generation. If your search has led you to social media, then you’re in the right place.
With an estimated 2.34 billion users worldwide (and an expected 2.95 billion by 2020), social media is becoming more important for lead generation than ever. When managed and strategized properly, social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are extremely valuable not only for collecting leads, but also for strengthening relationships with prospects and customers across the entire lifecycle.
In order to better align social media with your lead generation objectives, it can be helpful to examine what similar companies in the B2B space are doing effectively. Let’s take Certiport as an example.
From blog posts to webinars and eBooks, Certiport maintains a complete library of interesting, informative, and engaging content. Its marketing team wanted to augment all of this great content to capture more leads from social media. Turning vision into reality, Certiport got highly organized and strategic about its social media initiatives, driving a staggering 386% increase in conversions.
About Certiport: A Pearson VUE business, Certiport is the leading provider of certification exam development, delivery and program management services delivered through an expansive network of over 14,000 Certiport Authorized Testing Centers worldwide.
How did Certiport reach such a milestone?
By moving to Oktopost, the B2B social media management platform, Certiport was able to implement three powerful capabilities:
1. Social Campaign Management
Pushing out content across social media on a consistent basis was a challenging task for Certiport’s marketing team. This meant that only 10% of their marketing campaigns included a social media component. What they needed was a more organized way for managing their social content and overall marketing objectives.
How Oktopost helps?
Using Oktopost’s Social Campaign Management, Ceriport’s marketing team can segment and categorize all of their content into beautifully color-coded campaigns. Each campaign can be dedicated to a specific content topic, medium, author, marketing quarter, etc. The campaign structure enables Certiport to distribute a larger volume of social content, while enhancing the way they measure and report their final results.
2. Conversion Tracking
Given the amount of time and effort companies like Certiport put into creating and distributing content on social media, it’s important to measure their success. While measuring traffic and engagement is certainly important, these metrics can hardly be tied to real business outcomes. Tracking conversions, on the other hand, gives you a more concrete understanding of your social media ROI.
How Oktopost helps?
With Oktopost’s Social Analytics, Certiport can track full-funnel metrics – everything from engagement to lead generation. In other words, Certiport’s marketing team can attribute leads to every single content piece, network, or campaign, allowing them to identify what’s working, what’s not, and what can be improved.
3. Marketing Automation Integration
Once you’ve attributed leads to social media, what’s next? Like many B2B companies, Certiport uses a marketing automation platform to manage and keep track of all its B2B leads, while building close relationships with every single one.
How Oktopost helps?
Oktopost’s provides a deep integration with leading marketing automation platforms including Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Act-On, and others. The integration with Eloqua allows Certiport to add a whole new dimension of social data that didn’t exist before. Using this data, Certiport can create effective lead nurturing, scoring, and attribution programs that include social touches. For example, it can segment leads based on clicks, content topics, campaign tags, channels, and more, in order to effectively nurture them with the most relevant content.
To learn more about how Oktopost enables Certiport to leverage existing content on social media for effective lead generation, check out this case study.
