Social and Marketing Are Made for Each Other
What exactly goes on at the intersection between marketing and social? And why has it become so important to B2B companies?
The answer has to do with capturing and using valuable social data to a gain competitive advantage.
Let’s set the stage first. Some of you may or may not remember that about a decade ago, marketers had very limited information about their customers and potential buyers: company name, title, perhaps industry, along with other basic demographics that could be appended to a prospect file. A few years later, marketers began leveraging the web to capture valuable behavior and interest level information. The ability to instantly target the right customer at the right time was getting closer.
Fast forward a bit more, and the first generation of marketing automation tools appeared on the market. Early versions of marketing automation managed e-mail campaigns, automatically sending e-mails to prospects based on their lead score and behavior, which mostly consisted of their tracked activity on a web site: what they clicked on, downloaded, etc.
Today, marketers have a much greater data set available on customers and prospects coming from social platforms. Today, we can understand customers, and our own companies, on a much deeper social level. What brands are trusted? What products are favored? Where do customers turn to for advice? How does influence travel?
Marketing is rapidly evolving to embrace this era of social intelligence. Today, marketing automation, in addition to leveraging traditional prospect data, can take advantage of this enormous amount of data produced by customers and prospects on social platforms. And here’s where the intersection comes in.
Companies are now listening closely—often in real time—to what their audiences are saying on social media. They track a prospect’s actions on social platforms, such as likes, mentions, re-tweets, comments, and more. This data is appended to prospect records to create more sophisticated and segmented customer profiles, more accurately score leads, and identify where customers are in their buy cycle. The data also helps drive content creation, delivery, and timing for nurturing campaigns.
In many ways, social and marketing are made for each other. Now that customers rely so heavily on social technologies in their buying processes—trusting the opinions and recommendations of their peers more than marketing messages from companies—businesses have a mandate to incorporate social data into their analytics and marketing processes. For marketing to fire on all cylinders, it needs the premium fuel of valuable social data.
Whether or not your organization currently deploys marketing automation software, you can take steps to embrace social and discover how to use social data for business advantage. The first task is to engage with social in a smart, rather than scattershot way.
