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Taking a Business Approach to Social Media
Are You Connecting With Your Audience?
When it comes to social media, a lot of people try to make it a numbers game. “My brand has 10,000 Likes!” “Well, my brand has 100,000 Likes!”
It makes sense on the surface. The more Likes/Followers you have, the more popular you are, and the more people you’re reaching. But are you really reaching them?
Are the people who follow your posts looking at them and interacting with them? Are they taking the next steps towards making a purchase from your company? If not, then it’s all for nothing.
How many Likes or Followers you have is secondary. Social media management is, first and foremost, all about engagement and connection.
This concept has perhaps best been illustrated by Mark Schaefer, author of the marketing and branding handbook, ‘Known’.
Mark’s entire philosophy of social media in business is that it’s purpose is to create connections, and that it’s useless without them.
Or, in his own words, “Content is the currency of the social web, and sharing that content is the catalyst to new relationships and business benefits.”
Social Media Management in a Silo?
The problem many businesses have when it comes to social media, and marketing in general, is that they see it as a separate entity from the rest of the company.
While the marketing division is working to build popular social media pages, the rest of the organization is somewhere else, doing the actual work, and the two divisions rarely encounter one another.
It’s much more effective to work together, making sure that the goals of each division are aligned across the entire organization. That way, when you’re building your social media strategy, you’re not just thinking about Likes and Follows, or improving your company’s image.
You’re working to boost sales, increase revenue, and improve the bottom line. That’s the business approach to social media management. And here’s how you can go about achieving it.
Why?
Taking a business approach to your social media efforts should include beginning with its primary purpose.
Taking the time to reflect and ask yourself ‘why’ you need to use social media would be a good start.
What is the end game?
How will your social media efforts impact in your company and what will the desired results look like?
How will you measure success and how will your business based social media effort evolve over time?
Building Your Strategy
Your first step in social media management—or indeed, any marketing venture—is to develop your strategy.
Many companies make the mistake of thinking that all they need to do is have a Facebook page or a Twitter account and post things occasionally about their brand, and that alone will help bring in new customers. But there’s a lot more to it, particularly for a B2B company, where individual fans and followers aren’t the only major goal.
So before releasing any content under your company’s banner, sit down and figure out exactly what you want to get out of social media.
What are your goals? What are the goals of the company overall? To increase sales? Make higher value sales? Retain more customers over time? Now, how will your social media presence help you to achieve those goals?
Once you’ve done that, you can create buyer personas. This is an essential part of strategy building. Who are the people you’re trying to reach? Who are the decision makers in the companies you target? What positions do they usually hold, how much do they make, and what are they like as people?
It’s also important to look at your target audience in relation to your products or services. What problem is the buyer having that can be solved using your products? What end result are they looking for?
What obstacles might there be, to make them think your company might not be the best solution to their problem?
How is what the buyer is searching for at the beginning of their research different from their searches at subsequent stages of the buying cycle?
What are the deciding factors in the buyer’s choice, which will ultimately cause them to pick either you or your competitors?
By creating these buyer personas, you can target your audience more effectively, presenting them with content that they’re more likely to respond to.
Know Your Audience – Ask Them
Do you really know your audience?
Have you researched your audience to best understand their needs and insights at all stages of your audience’s research and or customer journey? Knowing your audience is not just about a customer profile and their demographics, but their behaviour and the insights they can provide.
One way to understand your audience and discover their insights is to interview them and to ask your current and future clients about their research and buying behaviour.
What are their priorities? Their definition of success? What business obstacles are preventing your audience from achieving their objectives and goals? What criteria do they use at each stage of the entire research and buying journey?
What are they typing into Google to get the information and answers they need at all stages of their journey?
This information is crucial if you want to understand your clients and future clients research and buying behaviour, and will also help you create content with the answers your audience needs.
Creating Worthwhile Content
If you want to connect with your social media followers, you need to give them something worthwhile to connect with. The content you post on your social media channels is an important part of your brand, and must be carefully curated as such.
So, what should you post? That depends on what your audience wants to consume.
Based on your buyer insights, what do they respond well to? If they prefer a lighthearted and friendly tone, you can post things like memes and photos, to make them laugh, or at least smile.
If they respond better to a more professional approach, then establish yourself as an expert who’s knowledgeable in your field.
You can post things like links to the latest news and articles that are relevant to your industry. Or if your target audience is more in tune with a helpful and friendly demeanor, you can post quick tips and advice that will appeal to them (this idea is particularly ideal for Twitter).
All the content doesn’t have to be yours: you can share things you find around the web, and on other social media channels like your own.
Just be sure always to give credit where it’s due. Whatever you post, make sure it’s something relevant to your field, which your target audience will be interested in.
Keep your buyer personas in mind at all times, and know who the target is for each piece of content you release. And never release anything that isn’t aligned with the overarching strategy you’ve developed.
Encouraging Interaction
Once you’ve settled on the type of content you want people to associate with your brand, you need to think about how to get your fans and followers to interact with it. It’s not enough that they follow your page and occasionally scroll through your posts.
If you want to convert them into leads or sales, they need to be invested in who you are and what you’re doing.
Images are particularly effective in this regard, as they catch the eye more effectively than plain text. So, tag posts with an image whenever possible, and keep your descriptions short and to the point.
When you post links, you should craft your headlines to grab people’s attention and make them want to know more.
Some organizations use inflammatory or intentionally deceptive headlines, called clickbait, to accomplish this. This is a bad approach, though. Sure, it may entice people to click the link, but when the content fails to deliver on what was promised, it often leaves the reader feeling angry or annoyed and therefore less receptive to the actual message being conveyed.
Instead, try taking a single fact or interesting quote from the content you’re posting, which will make the reader curious to know the context.
One great way to encourage interaction is simply to ask questions. “Do you agree with this?” “What’s an example from your own life?” simple prompts that lead people to replying to or commenting on your posts and bring them one step closer to conversion to a solid lead.
When they do comment, engage with them. Have someone on your marketing team whose job it is to monitor your social media accounts, replying to comments, addressing concerns, and generally interacting with your followers. This will open the lines of communication and show people that you’re more than just a faceless brand. You’re someone who really cares about and wants to help them.
Taking the Next Steps
Most importantly, be sure to include a clear way for people to get more information about your brand and products, if they want. Post links to a landing pages on your site—places where people can provide their contact information and show that they’re interested in what you offer — turning that interest into new leads which you can begin to nurture in earnest.
Don’t be afraid to experiment a bit!
Post new and different types of content and use different techniques, to see what people respond to.
Try new things and measure the results, then focus on what gets the best reactions. Find the approach that works best for you, to generate leads and increase sales.
This is the ultimate goal of your social media presence: to generate leads and ultimately make sales.
Your Facebook page or Twitter account is just the method of introducing people to your brand and showing them who and what you are.
By establishing a connection with your social media audience, you can gain their trust and become an important part of their online world. And if you can build that kind of relationship, you’re paving the way to make them lifelong customers.
gnooko Digital Marketing
Robert (Rob) Burns is the Managing Partner of gnooko Digital Marketing. Rob is a recognized specialist in digital business development strategy and its implementation. Rob has over 20 years’ experience advising companies of all sizes in various business development, sales, and marketing roles. In addition to global conglomerates, Rob has also assisted small and medium sized companies with digital marketing strategy, solutions, tactics and implementation.
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What is a Marketing Technology Stack and How Can It Help My Business?
Modern digital marketing involves sorting through a lot of data. The more successful you are, the more data there is. Data includes visitors to your website, Likes and Follows on social media, and viewers who become leads. These leads who need to be nurtured and eventually converted into sales, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. To be successful at marketing, you need to be able to manage all this data effectively.
Fortunately, there are plenty of online tools to help you do that. These tools are called marketing technology and range from marketing automation to social media management to analytics tools and more. Do you want to be successful in promoting your brand? Your best bet is to gather together all the marketing technology tools you need and assemble them into a Martech stack. A Martech stack is a group of digital tools that function together and help you manage your marketing strategy.
Of course, there are all different kinds of Martech stacks you can put together, for a variety of different needs. Here’s how to choose the right one for your business.
Determining Your Needs
Every company is different, so ideally, every Martech stack should be different as well. Even all-encompassing software platforms generally only address one aspect of your business. Fortunately for you, there are literally thousands of different software applications out there, each with a different purpose and focused on meeting different needs. In fact, at the current count, there are over 6,000 different tools, according to a recent report by marketing technologist Scott Brinker, who quantified and categorized all of them by focus and function.
Obviously, you don’t need 6,000 different marketing technology solutions. But which ones do you need?
What you need to do first is take a long, hard look at what your company’s overall needs are, and what you need to do to meet them.
Define goals and objectives of your marketing strategy?
What do you want to accomplish, and how do you intend to go about it? Do you want to focus more on social media? Content creation? E-mail marketing?
Ideally, you’ll have some combination of those and others, but it’s still important to know just how much of your resources you plan on devoting to each, and how important they’ll be in your overall strategy.
Available Resources
There are also questions like how big your company is, whether you’re B2B or B2C, what kind of resources you have at your disposal (not just money, but personnel, tools, expertise, infrastructure, etc.), and whether you plan to perform certain tasks in-house or outsource them to another firm.
Once you’ve thoroughly analyzed your company and its marketing needs, you can start determining what kind of software tools you’ll need. For instance, Customer Relationship Management software helps you sort through customer data and interactions to facilitate future interactions and sales.
Marketing Automation software keeps track of customers’ interactions with your content to determine when they’re ready to be converted to sales. The functions are similar, but serve different needs, for different types of companies. Which one best suits you?
The Greeks said, “Know Thyself.” This is as important with companies and organizations as it is with individuals. The more you know about who your company is and what it needs, the better you’ll be able to assemble a Martech stack that works for you.
Choosing Your Tools
Once you’ve figured out the basic type of marketing tools you need, it’s time to choose specific ones for your company. Again, there are several factors to determine this, based on who and what you are.
Think about your decisions carefully. There are a lot of marketing tools out there that you can download for free.
Unfortunately, most of these don’t have the functionality you need to sustain an actual business. Similarly, there are plenty of tools which cost an arm and a leg and come with all sorts of bells and whistles that your company doesn’t need and will never us
Strategy Alignment
Your marketing technology solution should align with your initial overall company objectives and digital strategy.
How do you accomplish this? First, you do your research. Look online at what options are out there and find reviews of the various products, to get a feel for how they function and whether they’re aligned with your strategy.
Talk to peers in your field as well, to see what they use, and if they’re satisfied with them. Will what works for them also work for you?
What are some needs that are specific to your company and not your competitors, which your marketing technology also needs to meet? Many products also offer free demo versions, or limited-time trials, which allow you to test the product out for yourself and see if it’s right for you. Consider all your options when deciding.
Building Your Stack
Once you’ve completed your research, it’s time to start building your marketing technology stack. That is, assembling all the different programs, platforms, tools, and applications your company needs to achieve its objectives, and putting them together into a single, comprehensive hub from which you can perform all necessary marketing tasks.
Start with the foundation: the biggest, most important tools in your arsenal. These are the ones on which your entire digital marketing strategy will ultimately be built. Here are a few of the things you’re most likely to need
A Social Media Hub
A social media hub is a single dashboard from which you can monitor and control all your different social media channels. One of the most popular is HootSuite, which lets you track posts, comments, mentions, and more across all different social media platforms, and measure the overall effectiveness of your content in each location.
Using a social media hub will allow you to put all of your different social channels, across all the different platforms, under one roof. You can easily take a single piece of content and tailor it separately for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, posting it all three places at the touch of a button.
You can also manage comments and other interactions from a single location, engaging with your audience and responding to questions and other concerns. It’s also great for listening, which is very important in social media marketing.
By listening to what your clients and potential clients are saying via social media, you’re in a better position to address their needs and concerns. By listening to what your competitors are saying on social media, you can get a better idea of what you’re up against and keep from falling behind.
HootSuite allows you to monitor important conversations on social media to aid you with listening.
E-mail Marketing
E-mail marketing can be a tricky business. Messages sent to people unsolicited and en masse aren’t likely to be read, but will instead go straight into the recipients’ spam folders. This is more than just a waste of effort: in many places it’s illegal. Canada has very strict anti-spam laws, which can result in fines of over $40,000 per e-mail sent in violation. Furthermore, these laws apply not just to Canadians, but to any communication being sent into Canada.
Therefore, keep that in mind when adopting an e-mail marketing platform. The right platform will not only help you manage a variety of different e-mail lists effectively and in accordance with the law, but also allow you to create informative, eye-catching e-mails to send to them, and schedule them to go out at a specific day and time. Then, it will monitor how many people opened those e-mails vs. how many were deleted unread, and how many actually clicked through to get to your website, and which links they ultimately clicked.
Content Management
Similar to your e-mail platform, except this one will allow you to manage blogs, videos, and other types of content. It can help you determine keywords, build content around it, set tags that help its search visibility, and more. You may want a tool that also hosts your blog for you, or you may decide on something separate, depending on your needs.
Marketing Automation
This will help you generate leads and nurture them into sales. It keeps track of how users are interacting with your content and gives them each a score based on those interactions. Someone read your latest blog? That’s one point. They clicked through on an e-mail? That’s another point. The program then tracks these points and uses them to determine when a lead is ready to be converted to a sale. Each time they pass a threshold, it bumps them to the next level of the funnel, and can also trigger specific content to be sent to them automatically, based on what they’re showing interest in. As mentioned before, you can also choose a CRM platform, if that’s better suited to your needs.
This is how you keep track of how successful your marketing strategy is. Many of the aforementioned tools may have their own analytics built in, but it’s also helpful to get a single, all-encompassing analytics program, to keep track of everything. It allows you to monitor how many people are reacting to various pieces of content and aspects of your marketing strategy, so that you can see what’s working and what isn’t, and tailor your future actions accordingly.Once you have the basics in place, you can look at smaller, more specialized marketing tools and programs, which do small tasks that you may need or want in your company. But get the big things out of the way first. They’re the foundation, and everything else is just furniture.
You may find that your marketing technology needs change as you go along. One piece of software may become obsolete, a new trend may require a new trend to address it… Or your company’s goals and direction may simply change, to the point where CRM is more suited to your needs than Marketing Automation now.
Don’t just switch a major tool in your Martech stack at the drop of a hat, but be aware of your own evolving needs, just as you’re aware of the needs of your audience and customers, and know how to take care of both quickly and efficiently.
The right Martech stack will make marketing both easier and more effective, and help you raise revenues and drive sales. And while individual tools may change, the stack should last you for years to come.
gnooko Digital Marketing
Robert (Rob) Burns is the Managing Partner of gnooko Digital Marketing. Rob is a recognized specialist in digital business development strategy and its implementation. Rob has over 20 years’ experience advising companies of all sizes in various business development, sales, and marketing roles. In addition to global conglomerates, Rob has also assisted small and medium sized companies with digital marketing strategy, solutions, tactics and implementation.
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