Summary: This case study was derived from an actual program used by a high-tech test equipment firm during their initial two-year start-up period. The business had no established brand recognition or customer base.

The company management worked with outside communication resources to develop strong support materials and to manage a small business marketing program of tradeshows, targeted emailing and a strong push into social media to match their target audience profile.

The social media allowed them to distribute “thought-leadership” content and build on-line relationships with key influencers within their prospect base. The media channels they used were: a company blog, LinkedIn Groups, Twitter, Face Book, YouTube, flickr, Marketwire, Pitchengine, and email.

Their commitment to an on-going investment in a steady but relatively low-cost program paid off. By January 2010 over 50 % of their meeting requests came from in-bound web leads. Their 2009 revenues tripled over 2008 despite facing the same economic downturn as everyone else in the B2B market.

Six critical considerations for building a successful social media campaign

1. The sales and marketing effort must coordinate and complement each other. Both groups must get on, and stay on, the same page. Make sure the sales people have the same support as the content/marketing people have. Even their personal LinkedIn profile should be provided to make sure it reinforces the image and message you want to convey.
2. You really need to understand your prospect, where they are congregating, and what they are talking about. This means you need to build a monitoring system and make sure both marketing and sales are getting the input.
3. Connect with information hungry buyers by creating and sharing value-based content via social media channels and email. Make your info “sharable to help others find you. Automate your prospecting to manage the identification and qualifying process
4. Your contact points in the various social media channels become the spokes for the hub. Organize and control your presence to maintain a continuity of look and content. Seek out your audience and communicate with them where they congregate.
5. Make sure all your content links back to your central hub. This is either your website or blog, the place where even more value-based information is available. Building confidence and supporting your reputation is a critical function to attracting prospects.
6. The social media program is intended to work as a broad net to harvest prospects and bring them back to the central hub where they can find out much more about your products or services. Collecting an email contact point via on-line registration is the key to building an email database of qualified prospects who have asked for more input. A value-based follow-up program keeps these potential buyers in the loop. Once they become customers the information needs to change to reinforce their decisions, continue relationship building and look for up-sell or cross-sell opportunities.

Source: MarketingSherpa LLC

If you have any questions or comments about this article or would like to know more about how SOMA can help you develop, implement and maintain a social media marketing program to help generate leads for your small business please contact us:

704-542-9104 / www.somallc.com