With the rapid growth of social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and now Google+, businesses around the world have incorporated the use of such platforms as part of their marketing and branding strategy. While there is no dispute that these platforms offer exposure to a broad population, it has been a struggle for these platforms to demonstrate a compelling ROI to the business community. The GM decision to pull out their Ads from Facebook that was initially reported by the Wall Street Journal is just one of the recent example.
According to the latest survey by Hubspot, only LinkedIn has demonstrated the ability to convert traffic to leads for the B2B community that is on par with “traditional” marketing avenues by demonstrating a 2.6% conversion rate. Obviously, given the size of the population on these sites, the ability to effectively convert the visitors to actual leads could be a powerful business tool!
The numbers speak for themselves regarding the challenge and reaffirms the notional information that has been shared by some of Fortune 500 companies that have joined awesomize.me including HP, Siemens, Honda, Dell, and At&t.
Why Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter have yet to crack the B2B puzzle?
Simple! The genesis of each of these platforms was to share information not generate sales. Consequently, they are naturally geared towards an advertising model. None of these channels have made the transition in understanding and capitalizing upon the fundamental difference between Lead Generation (Lead Gen) and advertising programs. The differences are simple:
- Just because there are over 1 B people on these channels, it doesn’t mean they will pay attention to a company’s specific page or product even after your company has implemented a
social media strategy
- Lead generation programs are focused on promoting your content, not the positioning or messaging that is supposed to drive the demand. I learned that from our past experience with my first B2B startup platform, telezoo.com (1999-2003) that was generating an average of of $300,000 revenue from Cisco and Siemens of the world.
- Since all the existing social media sites are geared toward advertising model, they can only put your message in front of an audience. Capturing a lead requires multiple steps and most the advertising programs offered by the existing social media site include messaging or positioning, but no focus on promoting your content.
Think about it! when was the last time you needed a professional patent service or networking solution or a delivery service, etc. for either personal use or your company and you thought of Facebook, twitter, Google+ or even LinkedIn?
awesomize.me is about to change that
With the launch of the new features on awesomize.me, a solution to this dilemma may be here. Thus enabling companies to crack the code and leverage social media for B2B purposes by:
a) Creating pages that goes beyond a simple company fan page and provides the ability to have pages for each of a company’s products/services
b) Creating a page for the community of current and future customers through blogs and a question page that is integrated into a company’s existing social media channels into each page of those pages you create on awesomize.me
c) Providing analytics that allows you to leverage the power of objective ratings by existing clients to acquire new ones
A simple conceptual graphic showing the awesomize.me ecosystem and its ability to solve the B2B challenge is below.
This is just the beginning. Stay tuned for more news and forthcoming developments including awesome blogs and awesome leads as awesomize.me will empower your company to finally get the ROI you have been waiting for from social media. Meanwhile, to provide you with maximum sales & marketing exposure to your business and solution offering, we encourage you to continue …
a) creating a pages for each one of your products and services on awesomize.me
b) adding as much content as possible in each one of your pages. They will be found by others every time they being searched either on awesomize.me or even the major search engines like Google and Bing.
c) getting more engaged using awesomize.me awesome question feature
Feel free to connect with me via awesomize.me
Tagged: advertising, b2b, b2b2c, Business-to-Business, business-to-consumer, Facbook advertising, online Ads, social b2b2c, social business, social enterprise, social marketing, social media, social media b2b, social media for b2b, social networking for b2b
