Where do you go for the latest and greatest?

The statistics for social media with regards to B2B marketing are the following:

65% of B2B companies gained customers through LinkedIn
55% through blogging
43% through Facebook
40% through Twitter

As the statistics imply, LinkedIn is the best way to do B2B marketing whether to attract customers, investors, business partners, sponsors, etc. Make sure that your profile is completed and done professionally. It should also impress your target clients. In LinkedIn, it's significant to find your target groups and do networking. Be active within the group and interact with the people, ask questions and also provide answers to their questions. Add value and contribute ideas to the groups. Once you are known and trusted, take the opportunity to turn the conversations into a potential lead-builder for your business.

For blogging, it is important to provide fresh, unique content, about your company in a continuous as regular basis. The content for you blogs needs to be of value to your readers, It should either educate, empower, or help them solve problems or answer questions. Don't forget to have an area in your blog that says ‘subscribe' so they can type in their email address that you can use for database and contact information.

With Facebook holding contest and giving freebies are great strategies for lead generation. You can also run ads so keep a consistent visibility to other Facebook users. Facebook ads will help in highlighting the content on your Facebook page, website blog, products and services, etc. Same could be said with Twitter. The most important to keep in mind is to provide valuable content that your customers want.

LinkedIn is great for online and I feel that it is the most trusted popular online source.

As far as steady, reliable, sales. You cant beat word of mouth. There a tons of ways that you can do this. Basically, anything to create buzz. It does not need to be huge but if you can follow up a good job with something unexpected and additional then you can expect the customer to talk.

I had a roofer replace a friends roof a few years back. He did what he said, when he said it and within budget. My friend was happy with the service. I would suspect that he would have not mentioned his experience again but the contractor had his secretary come by the day after they finished the job with some sort of gift (I called him and talked to him about his idea).

If the customer was a person who liked flowers it may be a flower basket, if it was a young couple it might be a gift certificate for dinner......you get the idea.

Anyway, the success of this was huge an cost him nothing (he built the cost into his estimate). He said his referral's were up 60% in the last six months.