9 Ways to Acquire New Leads and Customers with Social Media

Businesses are always looking for more customers and to generate new leads. Social media is a great place to build a community and engage with audiences for small businesses and startups. Not only can social media help you raise brand awareness, but it can also be used to acquire new leads and ultimately new customers.

Below are nine ways to acquire new leads and customers using social media.

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How Senior-Level Marketers Are Redefining Success and Integrating the Customer Journey [Slideshare]

Today’s marketing leader must be more agile, data-focused, and customer-obsessed than ever before. For The State of Marketing Leadership, a joint research report from LinkedIn and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we surveyed more than 900 senior-level marketers on LinkedIn to learn what’s top-of-mind in their roles—whether director, VP, or CMO. 

We sought out to learn senior-level marketers’ top marketing goals and objectives, their measurements for success, their effectiveness with marketing technologies, and where they see growth in the future.

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The 2015 State of Marketing: Marketers’ Top Priorities Across Digital Channels

At the beginning of the year, my team released the 2015 State of Marketing. In the report we surveyed over 5,000 marketers globally and asked about their budgets, priorities, channels, strategies, and metrics for 2015.

We researched the most pressing business challenges, the top areas for increased spending, the hottest trends in social, mobile, and email marketing, and more. We found that 84% of marketers plan to increase or maintain their marketing budget in 2015. Thirty-eight percent of marketers also plan to shift spending from traditional mass advertising to advertising on digital channels in 2015.

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5 Marketing Resolutions to Make in 2015

As we enter into 2015, we are bound to see countless resolutions made (and broken) over the next few weeks. With the beginning of a new year also comes yearly planning, sales forecasts, and goal setting in your professional life as well. As you start to map out your strategic plans and goals for your marketing organization in 2015, I've included five resolutions below that should be on every marketer’s resolution list for 2015.

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Top Trends from 2014’s Email Client Market Share

Every month, Litmus, an email marketing testing and analytics software, analyzes and publishes the latest data on email client market share from their system. They've been tracking email opens across a different devices and clients for over four years.

Their research has seen the entire industry changed as mobile opens grew from 8% of email opens in 2011 to 48% at the end of 2014. Desktop opens also decreased from 58% in 2011 to 22% at the end of 2014. Below is their graph on the environment growth over the past four years. 

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Super Bowl XLIX Social Media Trends and Analysis #Infographic

Super Bowl XLIX is officially in the books. The New England Patriots have been named World Champions once again, Katy Perry wowed the world riding in on a lion, and many people now understand what it is that GoDaddy.com actually offers. After a night of parties, cheering, and some of the most prolific advertising of the year, our team here at Salesforce Marketing Cloud is providing you with a comprehensive analysis of Super Bowl XLIX advertising and social media trends.

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Top CES 2015 Social Trends

This week CES took over Las Vegas. Amid the celebrity sightings, guest speakers, concerts, and driverless cars, the top consumer electronics brands in the world all converge for one epic week of product announcements, keynotes, smart "things," and selfie sticks. 

The reoccurring themes of this year's show were wearable technology, health and fitness, and automobiles. Sony launched the 4K Action Cam. Samsung announced a new 4K TV that bends on command. Mercedes revealed their self-driving concept car. Audi showed off a smart watch that can control a car. And Toyota announced they are planning to release their fuel cell patents to the world.

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Holiday Marketing: Then and Now

As the month of Christmas campaigns unfolds, I wanted to put together a list to top holiday campaigns over the last few years — except I thought I would give it a little twist. Technology has certainly changed the way brands and their audiences are interacting and communicating. This has also left an impact on holiday campaigns. 

Below I’ve featured some vintage Christmas campaigns and advertisements and highlighted some of their modern-day counterparts. I hope you enjoy!

These campaigns are not creations by or related to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. We just admire these campaigns and strategies.

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Top Social Brands and Other Insights from the Black Friday and Cyber Monday Weekend

Over the past week a team here at Salesforce Marketing Cloud has been analyzing social media trends and data to provide you with the top digital marketing trends for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the entire Thanksgiving weekend. We have been posting that data and analysis every day over the weekend here

As we finished our analysis, I aggregated some data and found some interesting Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend insights and stats to share.

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75 Digital Marketing Stats from Salesforce Marketing Cloud Research

Over the past year, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has conducted a number of original research studies, benchmark reports, and marketing leadership surveys. All of this new research has given us quite a library of data and mind-blowing statistics on how both brands and consumers use technology to interact with each other.

I've compiled many of these statistics into a single list of 75 digital marketing stats from 2014 research. 

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The 50 Greatest Social Media Best Practices

Social media has changed the communication landscape for marketers. We know it can be hard to keep up, so the next time you’re in a pinch and don’t know how to solve a social media problem, consult this list—you might find the answer you’re looking for among these 50 social media best practices 

We’ve compiled the best benchmark tactics based on customer reviews, colleague interviews, and internal research into one comprehensive guide, 50 Social Media Best Practices. We covered everything from social media listening and engaging to advertising and measurement.

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18 New Content Marketing Benchmarks for 2015

Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs recently released the fifth annual B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America and the third annual B2C Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America reports. These reports are full of statistics and trends in content marketing, but here are some key takeaways for content marketers when it comes to building a cohesive customer journey. I've broken out the key takeaways by B2B and B2C.

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