The Next Big Thing: Integrating Social Data for Customer Engagement

Blog Post Originally Published in BtoB Magazine 

I recall three years ago, a colleague bet me $100 that Twitter would go away by the end of 2009. Well, I won that bet. But what’s surprising is even today, I hear from marketers that social media is just a fad. What a big mistake. If anything, social media will continue to penetrate more businesses—big and small. Recently, I was asked by Joseph Manna of Infusionsoft to moderate a panel at Social Media AZ (SMAZ) titled “Driving Results with Social Media for Growing Companies.” While the panelists did a great job of painting a holistic picture, what was alarming was that a majority of the audience did not know where to take social or even how to get started.

Remember, we’re moving at lightning speed so if you’re not there yet, you’d better learn how to get there–fast. For the rest of you, here are three major areas to consider for 2013.

Social becomes a lead gen tool

Corporate social media teams may be focusing on monitoring, listening and engaging, but the focus will likely shift, with executives demanding greater ROI from social media marketing. To make this happen, social media teams need to have the right tools, processes and strategy in place. When you’re budgeting for 2013, think about what single platform will help you tap into specific conversations about solutions, services, competitors, etc. (such as using specific keys and tags). The key here is the ability to identify opportunities, create workflows across the organization and work with sales and business development to convert those conversations into demand.

This is a huge undertaking, meaning social media strategists have to put on their sales cap. What is the sales team looking for? What are the conversations that are relevant, and what defines a lead (from a sales perspective)? You will also need to understand how to bring sales and the rest of the marketing organization into the process.

Integrating social profiles with CRM

In 2013, it will be about understanding where your customers and prospects are in their social engagement and journey. Doing an extensive social profiling of your user base will be crucial— to help sales, support and marketing connect the dots and understand how active they are on social media, what their profiles are, and how they can follow and listen to their customers’ conversations independently.

Scalability will be a big task when it comes to your social platform. You’ll need the ability to scale across the organization to identify social profiles, automatically input that information into your CRM system, and create alerts or workflows to notify your sales and marketing teams. Start small: Identify a tier 1 set of targets to start the profiling process and understand who they are, where they are, how active they are and what information they’re sharing. This will help you understand whether you’re investing in the right channels.

The all-in-one data

Next year, companies will want to integrate relevant social conversations from prospects and customers into their existing CRM system. Why? This gives marketing and sales as well as the executive team a holistic picture of all relevant social activities from your customers and prospects. By tapping into these conversations, sales can respond directly to those conversations.

Social media marketing teams no longer need to flag every opportunity, as this becomes very time intensive. By automating this process, information is captured within your CRM so when your salespeople look at an opportunity or contact, they can see exactly what their prospects are talking about. Radian6 and Salesforce allow this via their marketing cloud, and you can bet more players in the space will offer the same in the coming months. This is something all social media marketers need to start thinking about.

It’s time to start thinking of ways to move the needle on truly utilizing social data to drive your business forward, and I believe 2013 will be the year where social marketers will be put to the test on how they can successfully integrate across all respective functions to derive value inside and out.

Why Content Alone Cannot Rule the Kingdom

In 2010, I wrote a post on why bad headlines kill good content and why you need great content to support the headline to captivate the audience. This time, I’m going to take it a step further and touch on why content is more than just your currency; it’s the keys to the kingdom.

With so much content out there, a battle is heating up right before our eyes – the battle for attention and readership. Companies are getting more creative with ways they lure readers to click. By doing so, companies are 1) losing trust 2) missing a chance to build that relationship 3) wasting valuable time and 4) creating bad word of mouth.

The old wisdom says that content is king and headlines rule in today’s information age. With so much information flying across the web and consumers’ limited time to read, you have limited space and time to capture and captivate your audience. Unfortunately, companies are missing the boat on many levels. Why?

Content is not king. Valuable and optimized content is. It’s also the new currency by which you build your brand equity and thought leadership. In a blog post titled “What’s a Content King without a Kingdom?” (by @Copyblogger), the writer says, “I think it’s smarter to say that content is indispensable. It’s what people go online to find, and it’s what Google loves. There are only a few online marketing models that don’t require valuable content, and those few are getting tougher by the day, and result in no long-term assets.”

Some marketers think that building great content is enough. Post it and they will magically come and download/read your stuff. Untrue. You need to use methods to spread the word and build awareness around the content using new and old ways.

Build the Kingdom First

Getting back to what @Copyblogger wrote, you have to have the kingdom first in order to anoint the (valuable) content as king. Building your kingdom takes time and the right amount of investment. But once you build it (Facebook Page, LinkedIn, Slideshare, YouTube and Twitter), it’ll be well worth it. However, companies should not mistake social media as the holy grail of new marketing. While it’s great to leverage these channels to gain additional awareness and create word of mouth buzz, this strategy will not sustain as a standalone. Mix in traditional marketing to ramp up your efforts. According to @Copyblogger, your content has a right to the throne thanks to its valuable information, clever hook and killer headline. But brave and loyal allies are needed to create an insurrection against Queen Inattention. These allies are not impersonal Facebook “friends,” they’re real friends and colleagues, and they believe in you and your content.

• Create a Facebook Landing Page that links to your website or landing page (see sample).
• Create an editorial series to help promote the content by extracting key information from the collateral, such as stats and quotes to provide a continuous stream of related information to drive awareness.
• Upload the content on Slideshare and bring it into LinkedIn. Use key search terms to ensure the content is SEO-friendly.
• Upload your videos on YouTube and pull in the YouTube video into your website. Also, promote it on the front page or a landing page with all of the related information around that content.

Leverage Traditional Marketing

 Marketers and companies invest a lot of time building their database and their customer base to help push information out. This is an investment that companies make over time. The challenge is not everyone in your database will be part of the social communities that you have so diligently built. Combining these two areas will ensure you’re sharing your valuable content across your “dream” target lists to ensure the continuous nurturing and education of your database.
Our job is to inform and educate – build content that will ultimately add insight into the trends and challenges faced by your customers and prospects. Using traditional marketing tactics to reach your target groups will help continually touch them on an ongoing basis. This can be done through:

• E-mail campaigns – Bring the most compelling aspect of the content up front and sell readers on the value of the content and why it’s going to help improve business performance.
• Monthly newsletters – This is probably one of the most important tools you can have. This is where you can consolidate all of the content you’re building for your prospects and customers and deliver it to them on a regular basis. One stop. Done. This can include thought leadership, product news, company updates, a personal note from the CEO, etc.
• Targeted nurturing campaigns – You have a database of warm leads, but they haven’t moved to the sales cycle. This is a great opportunity for you to continually touch them with great educational content to keep them warm, and hopefully it’ll get them to act. But if you’re not top of mind, they will forget about you so why not find a way to take the content you have worked so hard on and nurture them and help them move along the sales process.
• Customer/partner communication – Get your customers and partners excited through continuous education and by sharing critical information. Turn them into your evangelists and, in turn, encourage them to share with their communities.

Why Public Relations is Marketing’s Best Friend

PR is an invaluable tool. No longer is PR just about media coverage; it’s an extension of your marketing initiatives to drive leads and awareness at the same time. This is a great opportunity to show your thought leadership through press releases and help with sentiment and share of voice. Using a press release, you can highlight the key areas of the content and how the content will help companies address specific challenges. Another important purpose the press release serves – it’s a central resource center for everything related to the topic that you’re pitching.

Leave the readers with the option to download the collateral, view your video on YouTube, check out your Facebook Page for more info, follow you on Twitter to get information like this and future news.

Never miss an opportunity to promote in some shape or form. If there are channels and tactics out there that you can use to get as much mileage as possible, do it. Just because you have it doesn’t mean people will find it. Today, it’s about getting the right information to your customers and prospects.