What is Social Demand Generation?

If you are a B2B player, you might be familiar with the term ‘Demand Generation’ and for all those who are not aware of this terminology, Demand Generation is the process of engaging your buyers throughout their buying cycle. When I mean buying cycle, it includes right from identifying the prospects to nurturing them into leads.

However, what is social demand generation? Is it something which has to do with social-media? Well my answer would be a big ‘No’. Even if you don’t have a strong presence in social media, you can still do ‘social-demand-generation’

The rise of social media has helped marketers to identify the online behavior and preferences of their target audience and also give them different set of tools and strategies to engage and nurture. But how many marketers are effectively using Social Media to engage their buyers or nurture them into hot leads?

If I ask someone, that how many Facebook Fans they’ve got? They can just look at their Facebook Page and would be able to give a number. However if I may ask how many of your Facebook Fans or your Twitter Followers have actually turned out to be your customers? The answer cannot be so accurate. That’s the problem with Social Media, as the results cannot be tracked accurately.

In this case, when the results cannot be tracked and when the ROI cannot be justified, what could be the possible solution? The answer could be the information that we gain out of our social media efforts and how that information can be used or accessed to our ongoing or future marketing campaigns. This process can be more or less related to the term ‘Social Demand Generation’.

Social Demand Generation adds value to your Marketing Automation efforts & CRM:

I guess I’m coming up with a lot of B2B terminologies like CRM and Marketing Automation. For those who are little aware of these terminologies, a CRM is a model for managing company’s interactions with current and future customers (Source: Wiki).It involves using technology to organize, automate and synchronize sales, marketing, customer service and technical support whereas marketing automation on the other hand, is a name given to an application platform which streamlines and speeds up the existing marketing processes inside an organization.

CRM usually have customer’s information like Name, Contact No, E-mail ID, Company, and Level of Interest in your products/services, type of response, date of meetings, follow-up details and other such common information. Do you think, you will able to devise out a personalized campaign for your target customer with that information?

Here comes the magic of ‘Social Demand Generation’ where you will able to identify more information about a prospect like his/her interests, preferences, recognitions & achievements, opinions, stage of buying cycle, requirements and a lot more you could ask for, to devise a personalized and a highly targeted campaign. Statistics suggest that personalized campaigns help to churn out a whopping 65% more favorable results than a mass e-mailer campaign or a no-where targeted spammy campaign.

The Marketing automation software can only speed up your marketing process but cannot convert a prospect into a customer. More than 56% of marketing automation users are not using it to its fullest potential because of lack of information about their prospects. This information can be acquired only when you add the practice of ‘Social Demand Generation’ to your marketing process.

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