By Nick Johnson - August 23rd, 2011

We at USM are obviously interested in the impact social media has on marketing strategies (it's why we've produced this). So we've recently kicked off a new experiment, to try to assess the value o...

We at USM are obviously interested in the impact social media has on marketing strategies (it's why we've produced this). So we've recently kicked off a new experiment, to try to assess the value of social media-based marketing, versus more traditional forms.

We're a B2B business - not B2C - and obviously we acknowledge the difference in social media's utility for these two forms of company. But I thought I would share the plans we have in the hope that they'll be of use to you, too.

Our marketing campaigns for conferences and reports generally include activity over the following marketing channels:

  1. 'Internal emails' to pre-qualified contacts who have already bought or downloaded some of our previous products
  2. 'External emails' to groups of subscribers to relevant magazines and newsletters, people with relevant job titles, etc
  3. Direct mailing of brochures to a mix of the two groups above (not included in the experiment)
  4. SEO and Google AdWords campaigns to give us visibility on search queries relevant to our conferences
  5. Social Media activity - specifically through relevant LinkedIn and Facebook groups, and via series of Twitter updates.

This is a long-term experiment, but the first stage is to assess the utility of the above channels for lead generation. We've recently produced a free briefing of corporate social media case studies and have used this as the piece of content to highlight for the lead generation campaign. Our new marketing executive, Tommy, has been sending out messages across the channels above and tracking results.

We'll report back next week with what we've found during stage one.

In the meantime, we would love to hear your feedback on the set up of the experiment, as well as suggestions for how we can develop this over the next few months.

Thanks,

Nick

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