Brain Vibe

marketing muses to stay engaged

December 22, 2011 • 3:35 pm 0

Social Media Insight to Optimize Paid Search and Display

What if you could target your search engine marketing (SEM) efforts in paid search and display the way you target your direct marketing efforts?  Analysis of your b2b social media networks may give you that edge.

In my quest to get more out of social media than just followers and a soapbox platform, I am looking at what content my network follows, reads, and shares more closely.  In my last post I talked about the analysis of hashtags in tweets, and how that could help me better understand the personas of my network.

Now I am looking at what else I can gather and what I could do with this.  In particular, I am interested in the content being shared: blogs, web pages, video, etc.  The titles tags, description meta tags, and urls all have keywords that tell a lot about interest areas and build a richer persona.  This step got me thinking, could I tighten alignment to my network by optimizing…?

  • My paid search to reflect keyword tendencies in shared content
  • My display placement based on sites aligned to my market offers
  • The SEO on my own website

Right now, SEM allows anonymity which creates challenges when you want to focus digital marketing efforts on existing customers or known prospects.  My paid search and media plans look at broad behavior, demographics, and firmographics but specifics on their web patters at the individual level is sketchy.  However, if I align my followers to my customer list and profile their specific personas compared to the broader market, I get much closer to a targeted campaign.  This makes my digital efforts more closely resemble my direct marketing efforts – smaller targets, highly relevant content shared, higher conversion.

Another reason to think about  b2b social media beyond influence marketing and make it work to drive revenue and customer relationships.

Filed under: b2b, blogging, customer relationship, social media marketing, Web Analytics, , , ,

December 15, 2011 • 12:03 pm 1

More to Social Media than Influence?

How much conversation is really happening in B2B social media?  Almost every company is using it as a direct marketing vehicle to push white papers, events, and opinion.  There is evidence of readership in the tracking of views and clicks.  However, retweets, comments, or forwarding is another story.  There seems to be a select few that engage in this manner.  I have to wonder if social media and the measurement of influence really makes sense for B2B.  Or, is it just that B2B uses it wrong?

For the sake of argument, I am not including a company’s internal customer portal that is like a private social network and really just an updated user forum.  I am talking about Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.  These are the properties that are measurable for an overall perspective of market impact and not just customer experience.  Take Klout, Social Mention, Radian6, and the various Twitter tools, and it is all about who influences who and the sentiment buzz.  Great for PR, not so great when you have to measure social media to revenue.

I did an analysis of my immediate Twitter network with the help of my engineering husband.  I wanted to see engagement level and topics of interest and determine the influence factor of my friends.

First, my network is divided between marketers interested in B2B social media (no surprise there) and those that are focused on data management (where I spend my marketing time).  I have a rarely even spit between these groups.

  • Between the two groups, my data management connections are most prolific in posting, by 8:1.5.  Makes sense since this group consists of consultants, companies, and industry analysts/media.
  • The marketing connections appear to retweet more frequently by profile.  Although retweets in general are low and infrequent.
  • Hashtag analysis showed a higher tweet count related to events in data management, where marketing was more interested in general marketing terms such as social media and marketing.
  • Replies account for about 1/3 of my network activity and mostly in my data management group.

So what?  Well, as a marketer, I already knew who my influencers were without having to go do Twitter analysis or run a social media report. I also had a pretty good idea without the report that they gravitate and communicate highly at events – that is where they spend most of their time.

The interesting thing was for the marketing group this was more organically grown and appears to be made up of those that lurk over engage.  However, this doesn’t bother me and probably wouldn’t if I was marketing to this group.  What I do know about them is what topics interest them based on their hashtag use.  I also can watch the growth of my following to see if what I say socially matters to the market.  I don’t expect advocacy as they aren’t inclined to do that anyway.  So, for a circle in my social media world that is made up of “groupies”, influence matters little to me.

What do I care about?  Who else do marketers listen to and what is being said.  I can make some guesses at a high level – there are the key social media gurus out there that we all listen to.  There are also ways to understand my followers’ network and analyze this.

In the end, as a B2B marketer wanting to connect to my customers, what my followers follow and potentially share, tells me more about how to engage with them than the influence and sentiment analysis.

Filed under: b2b, social media, social media marketing, , ,

December 3, 2011 • 10:48 pm 0

Understanding the Real Social Media Persona in B2B

Buyer Persona and ProcessWhat do you really know about your social media followers, friends, and network?

Interestingly, most marketers only have a high level understanding of the real persona those connected to them through social media.  Relegated to a PR mesurement, anonymity is the norm; influence (Klout) and perception are the KPIs.  And, to be honest, I wonder if a high level understanding of the social media persona is really understood – let alone connected to a B2B marketers prime target audience.

If you are like many, the most you get to show for your social media effort is a warm and fuzzy around your brand.  To be honest, the B2B CEO doesn’t care about overall brand perception in the market, he or she cares about the targeted set of buyers that connect with your value proposition.  If that is 10% of the market, then you better have 8% – 10% market share, 80% footprint with the customer, and a net promotor score of highly likely with over 60% of your customer base.  That is the goal in the mind of the B2B CEO, realistic or not.  At a minimum, it is what resonates and is understandable in the corner office.

For B2B marketing, brand awareness and perception just isn’t good enough.  On top of that, those metrics you track in social media don’t connect to the demand creation activities.  Corporate communications and demand creation remain silos within the marketing organization as they always have.  ROI of corporate communications remains a perceived high cost factor in the marketing budget with little connection to revenue generation, except anecdotally.

The reality is that the majority of your followers, friends, and network overall are silent.  Any social media measurement means nothing when assessing your influence on your marketing buying processes.  Structured around influence and reach, the only thing today’s current measurements really tell you are who can you leverage to SHOUT OUT your message?  The only ones that care about this are your PR agency as this is what they are paid to do.  Your marketing department is responsible for generating revenue directly and indirectly.

It is time we get better at understanding of the Social Media Buyer Persona of our customers, not the Shouters.  The reality is that many times in B2B the social media influencers are the vendors and consultants, not the buyers.  If we really want to know our buyers we need to understand what they read, what they share, and what they do to step into engagement.  It is more than the tag on the link to the blog or marketing campaign landing page.  We need to extend beyond our controlled digital environment and link to the digital environment that our customers interact with to understand.  We aren’t there yet.

The buying process is currently beyond what we track today.  It is time to think about how to connect the anonymous social media and digital environment to our B2B marketing waterfall.

Filed under: b2b, crm, customer relationship, Decision Cycle, social media, social media marketing, Web Analytics, , , ,

July 29, 2011 • 3:46 pm 0

Does Data Quality Matter in Social Media?

Data driven marketing is reliant on high quality data, but with the introduction of social media and its pervasiveness in the marketing tool kit, it is easier to engage with your market without having to have correct emails, addresses, or profiles. It begs the question, does data quality matter anymore for marketing in a Web 2.0 world?

I think the answer is, “Yes, but…”

Direct marketing and bottom of the funnel mindset is what most B2B marketers work in as they have been more closely ties to sales goals.  Where sales won’t accept a lead without knowing who it is and the appropriate contact information at a minimum, it has to be collected at every opportunity.  Without this information, marketing also doesn’t have an adequate single view of the customer to profile and segment reliably.  In this context, data quality is critical as it determines if a lead is passed, how to pass the lead, and align the lead to existing opportunities or account profiles.  Name, company, location, phone, and email are the cornerstone to this.

Social media is not outreach, it is in-reach.  It isn’t lead generation, it is relationship generation.  You don’t collect details on your connections and contacts.  You cultivate engagement and conversation.  Without the need to maintain a list of connections in your CRM and the ability to leverage social media organizers like HootSuite to communicate to your community, contact information is somewhat irrelevant.

So, where is data quality necessary?  Having a single customer view that is inclusive of social media profiles and engagement. At some point, us B2B marketers do need to move relationships out of the 2.0 world and into face to face engagements, particularly for complex sales.  At this transition point, the social media profile becomes an invaluable part of the customer view.  Just as CRM captures order transactions, direct marketing interactions, and sale interactions, it also needs to show social media interactions.  Why? The social media interaction is probably more telling of your relationship with your customers than traditional interactions.

The catch? Linking a limited profile from LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook to a standard contact profile in CRM can be problematic.  Your CRM system may not have the ability or capability enabled to link the 2.0 world with your customer data. You may not have a social media platform that is capturing what is needed to integrate your customer data between online and CRM.  Or, it does, but integration needs to be established.  Those are just a few examples.

Ultimately, data quality will matter for social media as B2B marketers mature in their use and linkage of 2.0 activities to best practices for lead creation, nurture, and pipeline generation.  We live for now in customer relationship silos, but the real advantage and benefit of social media to show ROI for marketing will be improved integration and profile management across the entire relationship.  As soon as integration is introduced, just as in the past, data quality plays a critical role.

Filed under: b2b, CMO seat, crm, data quality, marketing technology, social media, , ,

June 5, 2010 • 3:14 pm 0

Social Media, Program or Vehicle for B2B?

Social media is only one way to connect to customer and should be treated as a vehicle, not a program.  There, I said it.  I know it is heresy, but it is the truth.

I was talking with a lot of colleagues and friends in the 30 something range and found that social media for them was more effort than it produced.  They were too busy to tweet.  They didn’t get much value from Facebook other than keeping up with a small group of friends they couldn’t see all the time.  The rest of the time Facebook was annoying and they didn’t frequent it, and now the privacy issues made it even less desireable.  LinkedIn was mostly a way to maintain a contact database with professional colleagues.  YouTube was entertainment.  What they did use religiously was email and texting.  Two things I got out of this were:

1) These 30 somethings were successful professionals with decision make authority and spending capacity both personally and professionally.  Social media has only limited value to them.

2) Social media was hype and comprised only a portion of their communication and social time.  It did not fundamentally change the way they were communicating with friends and colleagues.

One of the things I see companies and marketers do when they get the social media bug is to approach social media as a separate program.  This really misses the point.  Marketers have a multitude of communication vehicles available and instead of thinking about the best way to converse with customers, they think about what is the best new shiny method they can use and focus all their energy there.  Teams are even split by vehicle (social media, email, search, web, online display, etc) making marketers experts in a narrow band of communication.  What’s the point in that?  I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be thought of as a great marketer building relationships and business.  I don’t want to be known only for my ability to communicate in 140 characters.

We all know the social media avenues available to us so why over analyze at this point.  Most of us have used them personally and its either become our sole means of touching the world or, on the other hand, we are burnt out or driven out by the social media outlets and the ‘why did I friend this person?’.  In many ways, social media just is and we don’t think about it much anymore.  This is where marketing needs to be.  We shouldn’t think about social media anymore, we should just use it.

Ask yourself these questions:

  • Who are my customers?
  • How do my customers learn about what I provide?
  • Where do my customers go to learn about what I provide?
  • What vehicle provides the best venue to show my value?
  • What level of trust do my customers have with my product and brand?

Notice that there is not one mention of social media or any other marketing vehicle.  It is all about how to market your company and product the best way to get people interested and to purchase.  Social media may just be that venue either as a leading component, an aspect, or not at all.  It may also depend on the research and decision cycle of the customer for your product.  The key is how you position.

The way to make social media work is through discipline and integration with our existing communication vehicles.  Treating it as its own separate effort will not get you the biggest benefits and return on investment and effort you could.  You need a varied tool kit for marketing that includes social media in it.  It provides lift, it doesn’t provide all.

Filed under: b2b, marketing/advertising, social media, social media marketing, , , ,

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