Social Media B2B

A Boston inbound marketing agency has started a B2B social media contest for marketers. 451 Marketing is soliciting entries from business to business companies asking them to explain how social media can help their company grow. The winning entry will receive a 6 month lead generation program worth $42,000.

This simple contest does a lot of things for 451 Marketing. The first and most obvious one is that it has the potential to get their name out in front of a lot of people, many of whom could be prospects. It gives them something to tweet about for the next three months, and longer, as the entry deadline is September 1, 2009. It also drives traffic to their site, since all entries will be posted on their blog for review and generate comment by their readers. It also gives them a collection of social media examples to refer to in conversations and customer pitches. Since we are still in the early stages of adoption of social media in B2B, everyone is looking for good examples to talk about.

The two requirements for entry are that you must be a B2B company with over 50 employees and that your company sales are over $10 million. Don’t tell their competition, but they just identified their target market. Companies can submit entries by email to B2Bsocial@451marketing.com. The five top entries with the most comments of the blog will be finalists, and the winner will be chosen by 451 Marketing.

Overall, I like the idea of using social media to promote a contest about social media, but there is always the concern that the contest will not receive enough entries. This is something that we will know as the contest progresses. This means they need to target the potential entrants (business prospects) with their message and make sure it is seen.

There are two ways to improve the visibility of the contest. One is to provide a link to the contest from their home page. The other is to get more social. Yes, there are lots of tweets about it, but they are only informational. What about fun tweets? What about targeted tweets to potential entrants? What about encouraging tweets? What about links to a video showing the advantages of lead generation? What about more than just a blog feed on their Facebook fan page? And being more social would allow people to enter the contest in ways other than email? Why not Twitter, Facebook, or even video?

So check out the contest if you meet the requirements, and maybe you can get a free boost to your marketing mix.

Related posts:

1. B2B Twitterer Awards: Do Your Tweets Have What It Takes? Now in its second year, the B2B Twitterer of the...
2. Can Social Media Contests + Crowdsourcing = B2B Marketing Success? All B2B companies have products or services that they are...
3. Increase B2B Lead Generation Using Social Media The following guest post is by Jep Castelein, Principal Consultant...
4. B2B Social Media Example Autodesk: Integrating Products And Social Media We love examples of companies doing the right things...
5. 5 Reasons Social Media For B2B Is Not “A Fad In Search Of A Purpose” Sometimes you find a post that you so passionately disagree...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.