Social media lead generation is something many new marketers are afraid to tackle. After all, social media is best used to build visibility, engagement and trust and influence. Right?

Maybe… We’ve been helping clients for over 3 years and we have a pile of data that shows social media is best for two very important steps in the buying process:

1. Build a loyal audience
2. Drive action and traffic to a conversion point (such as a “contact us” form)

Unfortunately, most conferences and workshops today don’t tackle the role of social media in the sales process and pipeline. We see too many examples that aren’t fit for a B2B audience and too many presentations that talk about engagement and other fuzzy concepts.

Social media is sales. It’s time we moved away from talking about hard-if-not-impossible-to-measure concepts such as, “engagement” and “influence” and it’s time to talk about building audiences that will be compelled to act as your voluntary spokespeople. It’s time we talked about how to activate these audiences to buy, spread the word, tell a friend, invite, donate etc.

How do we do this? I’ve presented more than 10 times this year about social media lead generation specifically for B2B companies in “non-sexy industries.” I chose examples from what some perceive as “non-sexy” because if they can create compelling messaging, everyone should be able to.

Any company can be “sexy” online, given the right marketing and branding. You’ll see such examples in the presentation below, which I recently gave to a group of amazing women entrepreneurs at the Women Business Development Center in Chicago.  Enjoy: