The first goal of internet marketing is getting people’s attention. But there’s too much noise today. And it’s only getting worse. Your potential customers have thousands of things to pay attention to. And their Twitter Stream or Facebook News Feed is already full of other alternatives to your product or service. The problem is that companies want to rush in to the tools and tactics of social media, without giving much thought to their overall strategy.
Source: Social Media Today – The world’s best thinkers on social media
Media
Facebook added a number of interesting new job listings to its recently redesigned careers page this week, including a natural language processing engineer and a privacy program manager, among others.
The natural language processing engineer job calls for a candidate to help the social network build products that support idiomatic user input and expression in more than 70 languages, for products such as Open Graph, News Feed and search.
The privacy program manager listing says the candidate will work with product managers and privacy stakeholders to consider the appropriate privacy decisions for each product.
Posts added this week on Facebook’s Careers Page:
- Natural Language Processing Engineer (Menlo Park)
- Privacy Program Manager (Menlo Park)
- Global Fixed Assets Manager (Menlo Park)
- Product Specialist, User Operations (Palo Alto – Menlo Park)
- Human Resources Operations Specialist – Contract (Hyderabad)
- Quantitative UEX Researcher (Menlo Park)
- Marketing Manager (Hamburg)
- SMB Analyst, French (Dublin)
- Manager, Account Management, Mobile/Finance (New York)
- Media Solutions (Austin) (Austin)
- Media Solutions (Menlo Park) (Menlo Park)
- Media Solutions, Swedish (Dublin) (Dublin)
- Client Partner, Entertainment (Los Angeles) (Los Angeles)
Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.
Source: Inside Facebook
Earlier this year B2B company SAP launched their “Run Like Never Before” campaign with television, print, digital and mobile ads in the U.S., Brazil and Germany, according to this press release. There is no lesson in the fact that the enterprise software company launched an ad campaign, but it is instructive to look at how they supported it with social media.
Social media profiles of B2B companies frequently use default backgrounds or designs, and this campaign shows how SAP leveraged all the options available to further promote their campaign message through its graphic look. Another thing that B2B companies don’t often do is dedicate resources to building and promoting their brand image. It is usually their products, services and generally company culture and attitude that creates a sense of brand for their customers and prospects. Using some of these ideas below, with the necessary resources of course, you can start to build some of that brand image.
YouTube
SAP produced a television commercial as a core part of the campaign and shared it on YouTube. There’s nothing new or magical here, but B2B companies produce videos all the time, and forget to share them on their YouTube profiles. It’s a way to get an additional audience for videos that you are making anyway. In SAP’s case both the video and the video description have links to drive traffic to the campaign landing page.
SAP updated their Twitter background with images from the campaign. If your B2B company has the resources to develop a compelling look and feel for your company, make sure to extend that to your Twitter background. SAP was also able to leverage Twitter’s enhanced profile pages. This is currently only available to select Twitter accounts (advertisers), but if it rolls out broadly, your should take advantage of it for your B2B company. SAP added an extra banner (835 x 90 pixels) at the top of their Twitter stream and pin a single tweet at the top as part of their enhanced profile. They wisely choose a tweet that contains the Run campaign video. This promoted tweet is always shown in the expanded mode, so the embedded media (photo or video) is always visible.
SAP updated their Facebook Timeline cover photo with a graphic image from the campaign. This makes a big statement about what message they want to convey to visitors. B2B companies should think of the cover photo as their first impression on Facebook. Most people will come to your Facebook Page one time, and if they like what they see, they will like the Page. Future updates are seen in their newsfeed. And that is more likely if you can get some engagement with them, as Facebook’s algorithm determines what shows in fans’ newsfeed.
When you update your cover photo, it shows as an activity in your Timeline. You will notice that SAP added some descriptive text and a link to the landing page with this photo. This also means that whenever anyone clicks on the photo they will see this description and link. This update can be pinned to the top, which SAP did not do, so that visitors to the page can learn more about the campaign and have the opportunity to click the link.
SAP also extended the look of the campaign to their LinkedIn product page, which lets you create free banners (640 x 220 pixels) that can link to a landing page. This follows the theme of all these profiles we’ve been looking at. Create a compelling graphical look, brand your social profiles with that look and send people to a landing page for more information.
Google+
By adding a cover photo to their Google+ page, SAP tied this additional social network to their campaign. Thanks for the heads-up on this one Bill.
Slideshare
Customize Slideshare when you pay for the pro edition. It also includes private uploads, lead capture and video uploads. SAP made it look like their other social profiles, so when people download their presentations, they saw the message again. Kevin added this one below, so I moved it into the post.
Landing Page
And that brings us to the landing page, which SAP has made consistent with the rest of the campaign. The most important thing they did was embed a tag in all the links that drove here from their social profiles that identified that traffic as coming from social. This lets them track the success of their social activity against other activities. If you want a little more background on the SAP Run Like Never Before campaign, here’s a post by SAP marketer Michael Brenner.
This example was meant to inspire you to raise the level of your social media marketing and learn some simple things to do to create a larger branding impression, even if you are not supporting a global marketing campaign. Let us know you thoughts, inspirations, other examples and how you have implemented any of these ideas in a campaign oriented manner.
Source: Social Media B2B
Virtual bagels aside, metrics do matter. And Facebook 'likes' don't necessarily mean your Facebook marketing is going over bigtime.
Source: Social Media Today – The world’s best thinkers on social media
Having spent a number of years marketing B2B products in the financial services space, the concept of marketing mix modeling has been beaten into me. For those who aren’t familiar, marketing mix modeling or MMM is the process of assigning meaning to changes in incremental sales volume based upon specific tactics used within the marketing mix, and is done by looking at historical data over a period of time. I won’t bore you with linear, non-linear and multivariate regression, but in a nutshell, it’s cause and effect analysis.
If you are a marketer, you’re always testing, and testing yields insight into how the marketing mix performs. The process should tell you how the control acts vs. the test with respect to several KPIs including response rate, conversion rate, cost to acquire, customer lifetime value, return on investment, and perhaps others.
B2B marketers often ask me how to apply traditional marketing mix modeling concepts to their social media efforts. Although the answer I give is not scientific in nature, my goal is to show them how analyzing data can lead to data-driven decisions for the marketing mix, which then can be measured in terms of KPIs. Here they are:
1. Learn to Think (and Speak) Like the Customer
What impact does copy selection have on your social media campaign? This means listening intently to what your customers and prospects are talking about within social, how they’re talking and ways you can meet them on their terms. You can leverage word cloud technology to see common keywords associated with specific social media audiences which can lead to testing calls to action within social media.
2. Correctly Interpret the Data
One of the most frequent problems with analyzing social media data is misinterpretation. A data set yields valuable insights only if it’s read correctly. One piece of criteria I use when looking at B2B audiences online is number of conversations by channel over the course of about 2 years. For instance, if I want to use the data to guide a decision about where to focus my social media marketing efforts, I will build a data set using monitoring software that shows mentions of a B2B brand, industry term or product beginning two years back, then comparing the same query with data from a year back assuming all else being constant. This helps me validate the selection of social media channels to focus the message.
3. Segment Your Target Audience
Part of being successful in B2B social media marketing is to really understand who the target audience is. Who specifically is the decision maker you traditionally market to by use of other marketing channels? Is it a C-level executive or someone else in the organization? In the past, one of the B2B companies I worked for targeted a person with the title of “Fleet Manager” because it was proven that this person had the most leverage in making a purchase decision. When building your social media campaign, make sure to take this into account when you go to market. Focusing on the decision maker can have a profound impact on how the message resonates and ultimately, how the campaign performs.
What other attributes do you look at optimize your B2B social media marketing mix?
Source: Social Media B2B
There’s been a lot of debate on the value of social media. After all, it’s easy to argue about the potential of social media as a powerful sales channel. The ability to communicate with so many people instantly is like catnip to marketers and business owners alike—driving a gold rush that has spawned innumerable “social media experts.”
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| Source: Stig Nygaard (Flickr) |
Despite this excitement, there remains much controversy about the proper way to sell within the social landscape. Even the gatekeepers themselves (the major social networks), struggle to properly monetize their communities. So the debate of social media’s efficacy wages on.
Initial excitement is often followed by frustrated divestment, leading to false conclusions about the potential for marketing in the social sphere. These initial assessments are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of social audiences. False conclusions about the value of social media are not telling of social media’s true potential, but illustrate instead how ineffective it can be to apply traditional marketing initiatives within non-traditional environments.
Put simply, the social landscape is not typically an effective direct sales channel. It’s an opportunity to engage with potential customers. In order to be successful within social media, a paradigm shift is required— a deliberate change in mindset to understand one very simple fact: People buy from those they know and trust.
By teaching your audience, entertaining them, or providing a resource to share with their friends, you create value. Even more powerfully, through consistency, you build trust.
Content then becomes your most powerful tool for forging relationships and building a loyal following. The most basic goal of marketing with content is to nourish visitors — to give them what your competitors can’t or won’t, to educate them, inspire them, excite them. Creating content gives audiences an opportunity to engage with your business, to interact with it, and give feedback. It’s the impetus for the conversations and dialogues that can build trust in a brand over the long term.
Instead of seeing social media users as a faceless mass for you to hawk your wares, they instead become potential fans of your brand, people you can give to, and learn from. Finding ways to become valuable to these audiences becomes the focus. When this becomes the crux of each marketing initiative, you begin to innovate in ways that are helpful and valuable.
By shifting your point of view, it’s easy to see social media as a place rife with opportunity once again. It’s an incredibly deep space from which savvy businesses can mine their perfect audience. Over time, social media marketing can only be successful if audiences can be created and sustained that exist outside of the social networks. Great content has the power to bring social audiences to your website—but this traffic becomes meaningless if user engagement ends here. Long-term success happens if, and only if, you are able to entice visitors into future interactions with your business.
As Director of Marketing at a digital agency, I see first hand the impact of internal marketing strategies that revolve around content creation. In order to achieve results, we’re committed to the consistent production of remarkable content and spend a great deal of our time finding ways to bring new audiences closer to our brand. In particular, we focus specifically on:
- Social Audience Growth (Twitter followers and Facebook fans)
- Encouraging On-site Interaction with Content (commenting and sharing)
- Newsletter Subscriber Growth (email subscribers)
We rely on social media as a primary point of interaction, and count on social users to help spread our message and the content we create. We’ve built our business on these inbound strategies, which are currently responsible for 90% of our lead flow.
Most businesses put the cart before the horse. They see a huge market and assume that market is eager to buy. This is the wrong approach for most businesses in most situations. To find long-term, sustainable success online, build an engaged and loyal audience first. Refine and build this audience through social media. Use content to entice them, engage with them, and build their trust. Continue to cultivate this audience and cater to this audience, and you’ll create an asset with enormous long-term value.
This was a guest post by Daniel Tynski, Director of Marketing of BlueGlass, a content marketing agency based in Florida, specializing on the creation and promotion of impactful content marketing campaigns for businesses of all sizes.
Source: The Social Media Marketing Blog
