Marketing’s Curse: Everyone talks a big game, but only few can prove it.
Want to see examples of B2B social selling paying off in a big way?
In initial consultations with a business that is interested in B2B social selling, one of the biggest hurdles is being able to show that social selling will work for them. I can show case studies, talk about previous successes, and educate business leaders on the benefits that social selling can provide — but without some third-party examples to show social proof that sliver of doubt will remain until the results start to speak for themselves.
This happens because so many B2B businesses hear horror stories from other companies that invested in social selling, but never achieved results that made it worth their time. Maybe they hired a social media marketing agency that was incompetent or simply suffered from a lack of commitment.
Just yesterday, I spoke to a VP of marketing who told me that they had already worked with someone to drive results via Twitter. And yes, that agency also helped them get followers. But strangely, all these followers never engaged and ended up disappearing after a few days.
It’s easy to explain that their social media support simply went on to buy followers and that it’s not surprising that this didn’t yield any business results. But the question remains – how can your outcomes be different, when someone else uses the same words and then delivers scam-marketing? The truth is – you can’t. It’s the curse of everything related to marketing. Everyone can talk a good game, but because it’s just words, it really means nothing. As long as you’re just talking about doing the job, it comes down to trusting the person in front of you. It’s like a job interview: everyone can talk about doing the job – it’s how someone actually does the job, where you’ll see the difference in execution and results.
In this article, I want to highlight some examples of B2B social selling and the results they were able to provide to the companies that approached their strategies with conviction and commitment:
JLL Uses Social Video to Attract Qualified Leads
This is a great example of how social selling can work in even the most competitive industries. Jones Lang LaSalle is an investment company that specializes in real estate. Specifically, they help commercial real estate owners manage large commercial properties.
After speaking with their customers about the value that their marketing materials were delivering, they found that many of their customers thought that the white papers that they were delivering contained, for the most part, the same information that their competitors were delivering. They weren’t differentiating themselves or adding value to their clients.
They huddled and revamped their strategy to focus more heavily on video marketing. By producing YouTube videos that featured sales reps from within their organization and candid conversations with property managers, they were able to deliver new insights to their audience that helped them to stand out.
In this video, Jeff Molander, details how the company used videos with excellent direct response copywriting to attract qualified leads.
InContact Leverages LinkedIn & Automation to Grow Revenue
InContact, amid sluggish growth, launched an experiment within their sales team to grow sales. They decided to implement social selling within a specific segment of their team and compare that segment’s results to that of the rest of the sales department. A small group of reps were chosen and trained to use LinkedIn to share content and engage with prospects. The rest of the sales team continued using traditional tactics.
After six months of leveraging social selling techniques, the reps that used LinkedIn saw that they had increased their average revenue per sale by 122%. Reps that also used marketing automation software Eloqua in conjunction with social selling saw 157% increase in their average revenue per sale.
It’s safe to say that InContact’s experiment in social selling was a stunning success and changed the way they viewed the strategy.
LogMyCalls Using Blogging to Grow Leads Quickly
If you’ve done your research, you know that blogging is a great complement to social selling. It gives you a platform to publish your thoughts, display your expertise, and provide valuable resources to your following.
But — one of the biggest reasons why many companies fail to gain traction from their blogging efforts is because they simply don’t publish often enough. To stay on prospect’s radars, you have to publish enough content to continually stay top of mind.
LogMyCalls knew this. When their inbound marketing manager, McKay Allan, set his sights on growing a social media lead generation system, he decided that blogging was the channel that would give them the best chance of success. He launched a “150 Blog Posts in 50 Days” challenge, shifting the company’s resources toward content production. Yes, that’s right. Three blog posts per day. They used their social channels to distribute the content to their audience.
Within 90 days, the results were clear. The campaign generated a 400% increase in leads within that timeframe while providing their sales team with a large library of content to use in their sales discussions.
Now, we talked a lot about results today. If you want to hear how we’re driving tangible business results for our clients and what specifically we’ve done for them – give us a call. We’ll be happy to walk you through our process and give you specific examples and references. And yes…you can trust us that the followers you gain through our work will engage with you and they won’t just magically disappear again after a few days. Promise.
This article was previously published on SocialSellinator’s blog.
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