– Among Top 15 B2B CMOs (FierceCMO)
His Twitter handle says he is “Killing traditional marketing with pleasure”. Steve Mann says the phase of “taming the wild, wild west of social media” is over; “the west has been won and it is now time for evangelism of social media. Marketers must become the experts who know how to define their organization’s social media goals and align them with the overall marketing and business strategy.” With his background in psychology and neuroscience, I can certainly see why Steve is so intrigued by the power of social media.
Steve makes an interesting point that while brands are struggling to find the right formula that will create memorable customer experiences online they tend to ignore customization of those experiences. That is a critical element, because every customer has a different intent and the generational influence on that intent is a hugely significant factor. You can’t use a one size fits all approach. Your engagement strategy must take into account customer intent and generational influences in order to create optimal opportunity for continued and high quality engagement. To do that, you must have a tried and tested process for developing your target personas.
Refresher: 8 Questions to Ask When Developing Your Target Personas
- What is their demographic information?
- What is their job and level of seniority? Are they the economic buyer?
- What does a day in their life look like?
- What are their paint points? What do you help them solve?
- What do they value most? What are their goals?
- Where do they go for information?
- What experience are they looking for when seeking out your products and services?
- What are their most common objections to your products and services?
Social Lead Management Requires External Analytics and Internal Competencies Working Together Seamlessly
We know that there are many tools and analytics platforms out there, with new ones being developed every day. A few good ones are incorporating social data into their predictive analytics. Mann says these companies now need to focus on analyzing peer-to-peer and peer-to-brand social communications in real time. The need of the hour is to study how social communications are taking place and you can do this through keyword analysis and predictive algorithms. Why do you need this? Because it is the only way to identify which of your engaged followers are more or less likely to buy.
Companies that have seen a good measure of success with creating continued engagement are still not quite there when it comes to conversion. What’s lacking, Steve points out, is the internal social marketing competencies. Organizations do not have the skills to manage, nurture and convert the leads gained through social media. The big question at hand then is, “We have engaged followers—now what do we do with them?” Experts say you should not sell directly to your social followers because it will turn them away. I agree with that. However, you have to find that next logical step in the process to take an engaged follower from “engagement” to “conversion” to “repeat purchase”, “loyalty” and “references”. You don’t have to do it all on social channels. In fact, that’s exactly why you need an integrated marketing approach with a sensible mix of tools and technologies that help you follow the buyer all the way through the buyer’s journey to conversion and beyond.
Content Marketing Can Make Buyers Love or Hate You!
Content marketing is another important area that Steve says is riddled with mindless, high volume activity. Everyone is doing it (there’s no option, really); but buyers are tired of the noise. The question your buyers are asking is, “Why can’t you deliver content that is useful, relevant and timely?” A majority of content marketers are simply riding on the bandwagon and doing what is convenient for their organization—i.e. content that can be created quickly, inexpensively and distributed across a wide variety of social and digital media channels in a single click. Then you hear the common lament of “content marketing is not working for us; where is the ROI?” Well, there’s not likely to be any ROI, because there is no strategy to work towards defined goals! Quoting Steve Mann on this, “Customers deserve continuity; they deserve consistency in relationships with the brands they love. Most of all, they deserve an ongoing, consistent and value-based conversation with those brands. A content marketing strategy with a fully fleshed out editorial agenda coupled with a fully fleshed out conversational agenda is the only way to achieve this.” Great advice!
What steps is your organization taking to develop internal social marketing competencies? Do you have a content strategy and editorial calendar rooted in your target personas’ content preferences?
