Mediaboss Marketing

Summary: The Chief Marketing Officer of LexisNexis describes how to achieve traditional marketing and demand generation objectives with social media.

The relationship between IT and marketing is symbolic of larger changes taking place in enterprise technology. The proliferation of sophisticated end-user software, often based in the cloud, has created deep technology expertise in functional areas such as marketing.

I asked the Chief Marketing Officer of LexisNexis, Steve Mann, for a snapshot of marketing innovation that intersects technology and business. He decided to write a guest post on Social Lead Management, which seeks to convert social media followers into sales leads. It's important because social media gets much attention even though the ROI is often unclear and hard to justify. At the same, the marketing funnel and generating qualified leads are critical issues for any company, so the topic cannot be ignored.

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According to a recent State of Digital Marketing report, only one-third of B2C and one-fifth of B2B companies create revenue from leads generated on social media. Although many organizations do create leads from their digital and social efforts, this report indicates they are not the correct leads ones that will convert to revenue.

At the same time, executive management places pressure on the CMO and marketing organization to demonstrate value and ROI from social media. The unvarnished truth: for all the social media chest pounding, many CEOs still doubt marketing investments in developing and deploying a social strategy.

Social Lead Management

The big unknown in this social media morass is how to discover and motivate the likely to buy social followers to say, yes, Im interested so they enter the top of your demand funnel; or, for those already in the funnel, to accelerate them to close. Social Lead Management (SLM) can solve both problems.

SLM is an emerging discipline that has two components:

For the relatively short time its been around, predictive analytics has focused in areas such as campaign yield optimization, lead scoring, and prioritizing likely-to-buy individuals in traditional demand funnels. Although vendors such as Lattice Engines, SAS and Inkiru (acquired by Walmart) focus here, implementation costs can be significant and successful deployment requires clean customer and prospect data. For these reasons, existing solutions are not ideal.

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CMO strategy session: The new discipline of 'social lead management'