B2B Lead Generation for Social Media: Tips for Generating and Tracking Phone Leads

white paper

B2B Lead Generation for Social Media: Tips for Generating and Tracking Phone Leads

white paper

B2B Lead Generation for Social Media: Tips for Generating and Tracking Phone Leads 2

© 2013 Ifbyphone, Inc. | (866) 245-4479 | www.ifbyphone.com | twitter.com/Ifbyphone | Ifbyphone.com/blog

Executive SummarySocial media marketing is now a way of life for B2B

marketers. With new platforms emerging constantly and

more business owners looking to leverage these networks

than ever before, social media has become an essential

vehicle for engaging with customers, building brands,

establishing thought leadership, and generating leads

and business. A study by Chief Marketer on Social Media

Marketing1 found that:

• 65% of B2B marketers have acquired a customer

through LinkedIn

• 66% of monthly bloggers acquired a customer through

blogging

• 40% of B2B marketers acquired a customer through

Twitter

Yet according to the same study, 65% of marketers are not

tracking how their social media efforts are generating leads.

If you’re not tracking how your social media strategies are

generating leads, you can’t tell what’s working – and what

isn’t – in order to make informed adjustments. Finally, you

can’t prove to your executives how social media marketing

is impacting the one metric they truly care about: revenue.

This white paper provides tips for how B2B marketers can

increase engagement and generate leads via social media. It

also explains why it’s so important to track leads from social

media, and the technologies that can help you do it.


Original, useful content crafted with your target audience

in mind is at the core of every successful social media

strategy. If you have good content, you can use social

media marketing and lead generation strategies to expand

the reach of your content and generate leads.

To generate leads from social media, follow these basic

principles:

• Drive social media visitors to landing pages with a

clear call to action to download your content. Be sure

this content is gated behind a registration form that

requires people to provide their contact information.

• You don’t necessarily have to use content. Depending

on your business, you can use calls to action such as

‘request a demo’ or ‘contact us’ or ’start a free trial’.

• Lastly, always be sure to include a prominent phone

number on your web pages. You may be surprised to

find out how often marketers forget to do this simple

thing, but including a phone number is a great way to

generate high-value phone leads.

Of course, in order to generate more leads through social

media, you need to grow your social media influence and

presence. That means using every strategy you can to build

your social media following and to help your content go

viral. Below are some tips on how to increase engagement

and generate leads from your social media channels.

Tips for Increasing Engagement and Generating Leads from Social Media


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LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the largest social network of professionals on the

Internet – with more than 160 million users who are active

professionals seeking jobs, networking opportunities, and

expertise. Since LinkedIn is the largest professional social

network, it’s also an excellent medium for sharing content,

having discussions, and generating leads. Optimizing your

activity in LinkedIn groups, company pages, and advertising

will help you effectively generate more leads.

LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn groups provide users with a way to share content

and have discussions around specific topics. Here are some

tips for using groups:

• Join groups to expand your reach. LinkedIn has more

than one million user groups covering hundreds of

different industries.

• Start a group with a topic that is niche to your business.

Invite colleagues, former coworkers, and peers in your

industry to join and actively participate in your group.


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To Gate or Not to Gate?

Do you ever wonder which content you should be requiring people to register for and what you should be giving away for free? A good rule of thumb is that if the content is too sales-y or brief, you should give it away for free. Below are some suggestions on what to get and what not to gate.

Gated Content:

• White papers and eBooks that provide actionable tips and best practices

• Information that can help people do their jobs and grow their business without purchasing a product or service from your company

• Webinars

• In-depth research reports

Free Content:

• Sales content such as product one-pagers and brochures

• Case studies (unless it is an in-depth discussion of how-to’s and best practices)

• Infographics

• Blog posts

• Short videos and product demos


• Once you’ve joined groups and started some of your

own, you can participate in ongoing discussions within

these pages. Discussions should include links to related

content where participants can learn more about the

topic being explored.

• Links that you post in discussions can either go directly

to landing pages that have gated content (so you can

collect lead information), or else to other content (like a

blog post) that then links to that landing page. Be sure

to include a phone number for leads to call you.

• Ask questions and answer those from other LinkedIn

members to establish thought leadership and industry

expertise. This trust will make people more likely to click

on links you share in the future.

• You can even generate leads from comments left in

LinkedIn groups. Sometimes people will ask questions

about your product/service and you can either respond

publicly in the discussion, or trace the lead back to their

profile and use that as a jumping off point for contact.

ds 3 Times More Likely to


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Become Accounts Ifbyphone’s marketing team uses our own call tracking technology to monitor the source of all our phone leads, including Google PPC. We used that data to compare conversion rates of PPC web form downloads to phone calls:

PPC Lead Type Conversion RateWeb Form Download 3.17%Phone Call 5.28%Total: 8.45%

We learned that our PPC landing pages drive nearly twice as many phone leads as web downloads. This is important because LinkedIn Company Pages

Businesses often take advantage of LinkedIn company

pages for recruiting, but these pages can also be a

valuable asset for engaging with customers, informing

prospects of the products and services your business

provides, and generating leads.

Also, if we only measured web form downloads, we might see the 3.17% conversion rate and panic. We might spend time and resources testing new messaging, calls to action, and landing variations to improve it. But when you include phone calls, you get a conversion rate of 8.45%, which is

Figure 1. LinkedIn groups enable you to create discussions and share content.


• The most effective company pages utilize target

keywords in company descriptions to improve search

visibility. The more you appear in search results, the

more followers your page will have.

• Cadence – posting on your company page should follow

a steady daily cadence.

• Messaging – keep your messaging consistent with your

brand, your website, and other social networks.

• Ensure that all of your product listings are up to date

and use keyword-rich text to describe your solutions.

Existing customers may come to this page looking to

learn more about your other services.

• Videos and images are key to attracting more followers

and leads – LinkedIn users are visual and respond well

to company pages rich with visual content.

• Add follow buttons on your website or blog to

encourage people to follow your company page on

LinkedIn.

• Like LinkedIn groups, posts on company pages can also

drive traffic to register for gated content and become

leads.

• Be sure to prominently display your phone number on

your LinkedIn company page. People looking to call

your business should be able to find your phone number

quickly.


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Figure 2. LinkedIn company pages are useful for promoting jobs, content, and products and services.


LinkedIn Advertising

Similar to Google search ads, LinkedIn ads are text ads

(with a small image) that link back to a web page of your

choosing. One of the main benefits of LinkedIn ads is their

ability to target members by geography, industry, LinkedIn

groups, demographics, job function, job title, and more.

You can run ads on LinkedIn members profile pages, on the

LinkedIn home page, and on search results pages, group

pages, and more. LinkedIn ads can be a powerful tool not

only for generating buzz about your company, but also for

generating leads. Have ads link back to a landing page that

asks people to provide their contact information for content,

to request a demo of your product or service, or to have a

sales person contact them. These pages should also include

a prominent phone number so members can call you.

LinkedIn Analytics

The new analytics tools on LinkedIn can help you gain

a better understanding of what posts are successful at

generating clicks and interactions. LinkedIn analytics will

show you how many impressions, clicks, interactions, and

followers were driven by each of your posts (see Figure 4).

With the wealth of information you can acquire from

LinkedIn analytics, you can see the types of professionals

(and their industries) who are actively participating with your

company on the world’s largest professional social network.

This information can help you tailor the content you create

to industries that produce the most qualified leads for your

business.


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Figure 3. Ads on LinkedIn can promote a specific product or service, a LinkedIn group, your company page, and more.

Figure 4. LinkedIn analytics helps you understand the effectiveness of your posts and content.


Twitter

Twitter has reached over 200 million active users. If your

company is lacking a Twitter social strategy, it’s missing

out on a huge audience of potential customers. Twitter is a

place where businesses can interact with other businesses

to establish thought leadership and share useful content,

but it can also be an effective vehicle for generating leads.

Twitter Chats

To get more exposure for your Twitter account and content,

you can engage users in a Twitter chat. Use a specific

hashtag (phrase beginning with a “#”) for your conversation

and encourage people to ask questions and participate in

your discussion using the #hashtag you have specified.

Twitter Search

Using a little piece of code in Twitter search, you can find

people who are posting about your target keywords. Enter

http ? “your keyword here” (see Figure 5) into the Twitter

search bar and Twitter will return results for people asking

questions and having discussions about your keyword. This

information helps you target and follow specific people who

are talking about what you do and the services you provide.


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Figure 5. Search for Twitter users talking about your topic.

Figure 6. Sample results from a Twitter search.



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Twitter Advertising

For companies looking to take their Twitter activity to the

next level, Twitter also offers Twitter ads. Advertising on

Twitter, much like search engine or display advertising, helps

your business generate more leads and broadens your

reach beyond your base of followers. You create campaigns

with specific targeting criteria such as interests, geography,

gender, or device type. You then specify your bids and

budget, much like bidding on keywords with Google

AdWords.

Twitter uses a Cost Per Engagement (CPE) model. So

instead of Cost Per Impression (CPM) or Cost Per Click

(CPC), you pay based on the number of engagements

you generate. An engagement takes a number of forms,

including retweets, clicks, follows, replies or favorites.

What’s nice about this model is you’ll only be charged when

someone actually engages with your brand in one of these

forms: you pay for your successes, not necessarily for the

existence of the ad itself. There are three different types

of advertising to consider: promoted accounts, promoted

tweets, and promoted trends.

Twitter is great platform for generating leads through

sharing content (be sure to share content that is behind a

registration page). It’s also an excellent place to interact

with your existing customers and inform them of additional

products and services that they may be interested in using.

Vine

Vine is useful for creating quick, creative, and fun marketing

videos that you can promote on your other social networks.

You have six seconds to get your message across in a Vine

video, so it isn’t the best vehicle to express elaborate ideas.

But it can be useful to generate buzz for a new product

launch or marketing campaign. Don’t be fooled by the six-

second limit, though; it can take an hour or two of editing to

make sure the video is just right.

To generate leads through Vine you can include a phone

number or email address in your video. For example, you

can make the last image or slide in your video a “Call Us

Now” call to action with a trackable phone number. You

can also have the Vine caption point to gated content or

a contact us form to gather contact information. Vine can

be also be successful when it is used as a the first step in

a content chain that links to other content that eventually

leads them to fill out a registration form.



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Facebook

With more than 800 million daily active users, Facebook

is a social channel that marketers cannot afford to ignore.

The following are ways to generate a buzz and encourage

engagement on Facebook:

• Contests. Facebook is an excellent platform for B2B

marketers to host giveaways and contests. “Like

this post and be entered to win a free month of…”

or “Caption this photo to win…” are just a couple of

examples.

• Promoted posts. You can boost any post on Facebook

to help you get more exposure, likes, engagement,

comments, etc. The best promoted posts contain

compelling visual elements, offers, exclusive events, or

questions.

• Recruiting. Facebook has proved itself to be an

excellent medium for recruiting top talent across a wide

variety of industries. B2B marketers can use Facebook

to share knowledge of their company’s culture and

benefits. Visual elements are core to recruiting with

Facebook and attracting top talent.

• Visual content. All posts that your business shares on

Facebook should contain photos or videos. Build up

your business page with company videos, employee

photos, etc. and encourage employees to engage with

your business on Facebook.

Facebook is an excellent social platform for building brand

awareness, generating buzz for promotions and events, and

establishing company culture. While lead generation can be

more challenging through Facebook, it isn’t impossible. The

same way you might generate leads through content sharing

on Twitter applies to Facebook: link to landing pages with

clear calls to action and forms for viewers to download your

content, request a demo or consultation, etc.

As always, be sure your landing page includes a prominent

phone number for people to call to talk to you, and of

course make sure your business phone number is displayed

on the “About Us” section of your company page.



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Google+

According to a 2013 article in Venture Beat, Google+ grew

33% from June 2012 to May 2013.2 Now, with more than

359 million active users, Google+ is quickly becoming one

of the world’s largest and most active social networks. It’s a

network that not only can help you generate leads through

content sharing, it can also help improve your SEO visibility.

Google+ and SEO

According to a 2013 study done by Moz, after page

authority, a URL’s number of Google+1s is more highly

correlated with search rankings than any other factor.3 The

study goes on to say that Google+ has qualities that make

it impact search engine rankings better than traditional SEO

practices. Simply put, if you don’t have an active Google+

page, your business is missing out on a prime opportunity

to improve your visibility in search results. Read on for more

Google+ tips:

• +1 links. The more people who like your business page,

the higher your Google+ page will rank in search engine

results.

• Geotagging. If your business page is set up with

location settings, when users search keywords that are

relevant to your page, your search engine results will

include your address and potentially a map with your

location. It’s ideal for local users searching for your

business, especially on a mobile device.

• Google circles. Circles are one way that Google+ lets

you segment your followers and people you follow into

different audiences. You can share different information

with certain circles, based on their interests or needs.

A popular way to segment your circles is by buyer

personas. Circles help you provide relevant content to

specific groups on users.

• Hangouts. Hangouts are chats and workshops that

you and other businesses can host and participate

in through Google+. You can connect over video

with current customers to address customer service

issues. You can also use this as a tool to connect with

prospects through a weekly chat series or training

sessions.

• +1 button. Make sure you include the +1 button on your

website. To set it up, follow the instructions found on

https://developers.google.com/+/web/+1button/

• Social extensions. You can now use +1’s you receive

on your Google+ page as a social extension in your

Google AdWords PPC ads (see Figure 7).


Again, in order to be successful at generating leads through

Google+, you should drive traffic to a registration page that

also includes a phone number.

Blogs

Most businesses by now have figured out that blogging is a

necessary piece of their marketing strategy. It helps you stay

relevant in search engine results pages, establish thought

leadership, announce product launches and updates, and

upsell and cross-sell to customers.

Blogging can also be a great way for B2B social marketers

to generate leads. You can include a clear call to action

within or at the end of your blog post that guides your

readers to download gated content on your website, request

a demo, email you, or call your business to learn more.

Make sure that your business phone number is prominently

displayed on your blog to make it easy for readers to call

you if they have an immediate interest in your post. For

gated content, be sure it expands on your blog topic. It

should provide actionable insight that readers can follow to

help their own business – not simply a sales pitch.

It’s important to monitor comments on your blog in the

same way you would monitor LinkedIn group comments.

It’s a good idea to require people posting comments on

your blog to provide an email address, that way when

someone posts a comment asking for pricing or additional

information, you can have a sales rep follow up with them

immediately. You may also want to approve comments

first instead of having them automatically go live – spam is

always present, and sometimes takes innocuous forms.

Finally, it can be a good idea in your blogs to link to free

non-gated content on occasion. Regularly sharing free

content will help you to retain followers and encourage

people to share your blogs with their networks. And don’t

forget to make sharing easier by including +1, Facebook,

LinkedIn, and Twitter share buttons.


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Figure 7. Google +1 social extension lets you show how many followers and +1’s your company has on Google+.



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SlideShare, YouTube, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon

SlideShare, YouTube, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon are

all visual social media networks. To succeed in each of

these networks, you should produce a steady stream of

compelling (even humorous) visual content in the form of

photos, videos, and slide decks.

SlideShare has more than 60 million monthly visitors.4 It’s

an ideal platform for sharing webinar decks, PDFs and other

visual presentations. The six most-used tags on the network

are statistics, business, marketing, trends, research, and

social media, making it a very relevant social platform for

B2B marketers.

SlideShare has a free plan that enables you to upload

content under a certain size, and also offers paid plans

where you can collect leads from content, view analytics,

upload videos, and more. Educational content performs

better than salesy content, so choose what to share wisely.

YouTube is an excellent place to host recordings of

webinars, product launch videos, demos, and other creative

video assets that your customers and prospects will find

useful. Be sure to have your own company channel set up

and include a description for each video using keyword-rich

text. You can include links in your videos that drive viewers

to downloadable content with registration forms or contact

us requests.

Be sure to display a phone number in your video messages

to encourage people to call your business. If you use a

unique call tracking number (more on that later on), you’ll

be able to tell how many phone calls your YouTube video

generates. You can also advertise on YouTube as part of the

Google Display Network (GDN) to generate leads through

banner ads and text ads.


StumbleUpon is an online content discovery tool and

one of the Internet’s top sites for web traffic referral. To

give StumbleUpon a try, set up your company profile and

begin submitting content to promote. It’s always a good

idea to promote other people’s content just as often (or

more often) as your own, so you don’t appear too self-

promotional. You should also focus on promoting only your

most useful content in order to cultivate a reputation as a

trusted and valuable sharer. Give your content good titles

and descriptions so it stands out, and include important

keyword tags to help people find it. StumbleUpon also

offers paid promotion options if wish to spend budget to

achieve short-term boosts in content traffic.

Pinterest isn’t only for fashionistas and wedding planners.

If you have a compelling photo attached with a blog post or

white paper, don’t be afraid to share it on Pinterest. As long

as the written content is accompanied by attention grabbing

visual elements, it will share well on this platform. Once your

content gets the attention of pinners, you can encourage

them to click on your image to learn more. Then send them

to landing pages with relevant, gated content.

Businesses have also had success sharing infographics

on Pinterest. By including a prominent phone number on

your infographic, you can encourage viewers to call your

business to learn more about the content you shared.


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4 Tips from Olivia, Ifbyphone’s Social Media Specialist

1. Be consistent with your voice and keep the content as personalized as possible. Your audience wants to feel like they are engaging with a real person on social media, not just canned marketing messaging.

2. Don’t fear Pinterest – If you have great content accompanied by interesting images, your content will share well on this platform. Even if your product isn’t inherently visual, don’t be afraid to find images to illustrate the concepts you want to share.

3. Decide when to gate content with a form and when it should be free to your visitors. Not all content is created equal - you must be willing to give some away for free on your social networks.

4. Maintain a steady cadence on each of your networks. If you are posting 3-4 times per day on each network, stagger the times you post throughout the day. No one wants 4 of your tweets showing up in their news feed in a row. Also, use tools like followerwonk to find out when users are most likely to engage with your content. You may be posting at the least ideal time for your audience.

See more marketing tips from Olivia by subscribing to our blog: http://feeds.feedburner.com/IfbyphoneBlog


Social Marketing for Mobile Devices

No social media strategy is complete without accounting

for mobile. Social media usage accounts for 31% of all

mobile Internet time – nearly twice as much as the time

users spend on email, the second most popular smartphone

activity. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube,

Google+...you name it, people are accessing it on their

smartphones.

Social media can be an effective tool for generating visits

to your mobile site and landing pages. That’s why it’s

important that when you drive people to your web pages

via social media, be sure those pages are optimized for

mobile viewing. Also, when your social media marketing

sends people to landing pages to register for content, keep

in mind that smartphone users would usually rather call

a business than fill out a form – it’s just easier and more

natural when you’re surfing with a smartphone. So be sure

to include a phone number prominently on your page and

make it clickable to instantly trigger a call from the visitor’s

smartphone (see Figure 8).


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Figure 8. Click-to-call phone numbers on web pages trigger immediate calls from smartphone users.



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When it comes to proving the value of social media

marketing to execs (many of whom are social media

skeptics), marketers often look at the wrong data. While

top-of-the-funnel metrics such as clicks, likes, shares, and

engagement are all important metrics and useful in helping

you determine which content works best, most execs

don’t care about the top of the funnel. They care about the

middle-of-the-funnel metrics such as form registrations,

phone calls, store visits, and more that actually impact

the bottom of the funnel, i.e., accounts, revenue, and ROI.

That’s why B2B marketers should focus on data that shows

how their work generates qualified leads and revenue.

Marketers and execs alike should keep in mind that, when

it comes to lead gen, social media may not perform at the

same speed or level as other campaigns. Social media

conversion rates, days to close, and number of accounts

generated will probably be less than that of paid search,

webinars, and other campaigns.

How to Track Web Leads from Social Media

Tracking web form registrations from social media is the

first step to tracking leads. When someone visits one of

your landing pages and fills out a web form, the lead should

be tagged as belonging to the appropriate social media

source that referred it. You should then track that lead

through your sales funnel to see if it becomes revenue.

Doing this requires three pieces of technology, two of which

you are probably already using: marketing automation and

a CRM system. Marketing automation tools like Marketo,

Eloqua, and Pardot enable you to capture leads from web

forms and tie those leads to the marketing source (in this

case, the social media service and specific activity) that

referred them. This means that you can create reports

on how many leads each of your social media channels

generate.

What’s more, when you integrate your marketing automation

tools with a CRM system like Salesforce.com or SugarCRM,

you can track each of those social media leads through

the sales cycle, and that means being able to prove to

execs that each of your various social marketing activities

has generated X amount of web leads, Y amount of

opportunities, and Z amount of revenue.

Proving the Value of Social Media Takes the Right Data


The Often-Overlooked Analytics Tool: Call Tracking

If your social strategy is effective, tracking web leads

makes a strong statement about the value of social media

marketing. But it still only tells part of the story. What if

instead of filling out your form, the lead picks up the phone

and calls you? Can you tell exactly which social channel and

activity drove that call? Can you tell if the call even came

from social media at all?

Failing to track the inbound phone calls your social media is

generating can be problematic for two big reasons:

1. You might not be getting credit for a ton of social

marketing leads. If someone reads a blog and calls

sales, for example, or calls after watching a video you

post on LinkedIn or after reading about a contest you

posted on Facebook, you can’t prove it. And any CPL

(cost-per-lead) data will be wrong because your lead

numbers are off, making it appear as if you are spending

more per lead than you actually are.

2. Inbound phone calls are often from leads who are ready

to engage with a sales manager, and therefore more

likely to become revenue than a web lead. (An internal

study of our own leads at Ifbyphone uncovered that

phone leads are 3x more likely to become accounts.)

Phone leads are also the lead type more sales managers

prefer (see Figure 9). Phone calls are the leads you most

need to track back to your social channels.

That’s why the third tool marketing teams should use is

a call tracking tool. Call tracking software enables you to

include unique trackable phone numbers in your social

media pages, profiles, landing pages, and posts (as well as

the content you drive people to through social channels).

Even if a lead visits your web site before calling you, call

tracking tools can still tell you how that caller found your site

and the specific social post they called from.


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Figure 9. Larger percentage of sales managers rate telephone leads as “excellent” or “good” – more than any other lead type.


What Is Call Tracking?

Call tracking is a form of lead attribution and marketing

analytics technology. Marketers use it to track inbound

phone calls back to the specific marketing source that

originated them and then follow those leads through the

sales cycle to revenue.

Call tracking enables marketers to understand what

marketing sources – including offline, online, and mobile

ads; campaigns; keyword searches; web pages; pieces of

content; direct mail or email blasts; and social media activity

– generate phone leads and revenue – and which don’t.

How Call Tracking Works

Call tracking technology works by giving you clean trackable

phone numbers (local, toll-free, or vanity) that you insert in

your marketing material. When someone calls one of those

numbers, you’ll know exactly what source they’re calling

from and be able to pin that source data with the lead

information. If that lead goes on to become an opportunity

or a customer, you can tie those events and revenue back to

the original source, so you can understand and prove how

your marketing is impacting lead generation and sales.

For tracking leads that call you directly from offline ads (like

print or TV), content (like eBooks, webinars, or videos), and

social media profile pages (like LinkedIn and Facebook), call

tracking is a fairly basic concept. You simply:

1. Insert a trackable phone number obtained from the call

tracking software in your marketing materials or on your

profile pages.

2. Attribute those numbers in the software to their

respective source.

3. Tell the software where to route the call, and you’re off.

All calls will still come to you, and the callers won’t know

the difference, but you will be able to tie the call back to

the specific source that originated it.

4. Use call tracking software to generate reports on the

calls each source generates.


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For online and mobile sources such as Twitter or LinkedIn

PPC ads where people visit a web page first before calling,

call tracking works a bit differently by using a technique

called dynamic number insertion (DNI). DNI automatically

displays a unique call tracking phone number on your web

pages based on the referral source.

Here’s a summary of how it works:

1. First, you should include a phone number prominently

on your web pages for people to call.

2. You then replace that phone number in the HMTL with

a small snippet of call tracking JavaScript code you get

from the call tracking software.

3. The code then automatically displays a unique phone

number on your web pages for each visitor based on

how they got there (i.e., Google or Bing keyword search,

Twitter PPC ad, banner ad, social media post, etc.).

4. When the visitor calls the number, the phone lead is

attributed in call tracking reports to the right referral

source, including the exact keyword search.

And like marketing automation tools, you can integrate

call tracking tools with your CRM system (see Figure

10) to follow each phone lead from social media through

to revenue. If you use these three technologies (marketing

automation, call tracking, and CRM) together, you have the

data you need to paint a simple, powerful picture of social

media’s effectiveness at generating leads and customers.

Instead of forcing execs to sit through 30 slides of data on

how social media marketing is driving likes and retweets,

you can show them what they really care about: a single

impactful slide proving how your social strategy (along with

all your other marketing) is generating leads and revenue.


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Figure 10. Include social phone call data in your CRM dashboards and reports.



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If you decide to explore call tracking, you may wish to try

a technology called voice-based marketing automation

(VBMA). VBMA is cloud-based software built specifically

for marketers. With VBMA, marketers can easily implement

call tracking for all of their marketing campaigns (including

social media) and integrate that data with their CRM and

even Google Analytics and Universal Analytics data.

What’s more, call tracking is just one piece of VBMA. It also

includes phone lead routing, recording, scoring, and more

that marketers use to fully understand and control their

phone leads the same way they do for their web leads.

• Call routing: Ensure phone leads go to the right sales

rep by routing inbound calls to groups of sales agents

or individual agents based the caller’s geography, time

of day, the marketing sources they called from, and

more. Agents can answer calls from anywhere on any

device they choose.

• Lead scoring: If you want to qualify inbound

calls before passing to sales, VBMA provides IVR

(interactive voice response) technology than can

automatically score phone leads using any questions

you choose. The IVR will only pass high-scoring leads to

sales.

• Call recording: Call recordings provide a wealth of

information for marketers to mine. What terminology do

prospects use? How do they describe their pain points?

Use this knowledge to build more effective marketing

campaigns and sales pitches.

• Convert web leads into instant sales calls: When a

lead fills out a wen form, the longer it takes sales to

contact them, the worse the chances of conversion.

VBMA can help by triggering an immediate call to your

sales reps whenever someone fills out a form. If the rep

accepts, VBMA will then call the lead and connect the

two in conversation.

To learn more about the different ways you can use

VBMA for lead reporting, scoring, routing, recording, and

management read, “Tracking Phone Leads: The Missing

Piece of Marketing Automation.”

Voice-Based Marketing Automation for Social Media Call Tracking and More

http://public.ifbyphone.com/landingpage/the-missing-piece-of-marketing-automation/

http://public.ifbyphone.com/landingpage/the-missing-piece-of-marketing-automation/


The first step in a successful social media strategy is original

and useful content. Once your business has established a

set cadence for content creation, you can follow the tips

outlined in this white paper for each social media channel to

increase engagement, generate and track leads, and prove

ROI to execs.


21

Next Steps

Call (866) 245-4479 to learn how Ifbyphone can help you track leads back to social media. You can also request a demo of Ifbyphone’s solution at www.ifbyphone.com.

Sources:1. Chief Marketer, Social Media Marketing Survey, 2011

2. Venture Beat, July 2013

3. Moz, August 2013

4. Social Media Examiner, March 2013

Conclusion

About Ifbyphone

Ifbyphone, the leader in voice-based marketing automation

(VBMA), connects, measures and optimizes sales and

service calls for businesses and organizations. Ifbyphone’s

VBMA solutions capture and manage phone leads and

information that often slip through the cracks of traditional

marketing automation and CRM software solutions.

The Ifbyphone product suite is a set of software-as-a-service

applications including call tracking, hosted IVR (interactive

voice response), call routing, virtual call center and voice

broadcasting. Organizations of all sizes in all industries use

Ifbyphone, including marketing agencies, lead generation,

e-commerce, direct response, financial services and

insurance, health care, retail and logistics, and SaaS and

technology. For more information, visit www.ifbyphone.com

www.ifbyphone.com

Twitter: http://twitter.com/ifbyphone

Facebook: http://facebook.com/ifbyphone

(866) 245-4479

300 West Adams Street, 9th Floor

Chicago, IL 60606

© 2013 Ifbyphone, Inc. All rights reserved.

http://www.ifbyphone.com

http://twitter.com/ifbyphone

http://facebook.com/ifbyphone

B2B Lead Generation for Social Media: Tips for Generating and Tracking Phone Leads

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Transcript of B2B Lead Generation for Social Media: Tips for Generating and Tracking Phone Leads