Now we can generate leads and sales from social networks using native, keyword-targeted ads!
Maybe…
As Forbes pointed out in a recent article, the jury is out as to whether keyword-targeted advertising in social media will deliver search-engine level of performance. There are good reasons to doubt it will. The biggest difference? on Twitter, you are often interrupting conversations with your content, not responding to personal inquiries for help.
While you can definitely sell stuff on Twitter, it’s clear that most of Twitter’s marketing value (impressions) lies in top-of-funnel branding, prospecting and lead nurturing activities, where Twitter’s real-time content-sharing and interest-based relationship-building competencies shine.
Can Twitter Be Used To Generate Leads At Scale?
Absolutely!
Twitter’s real-time content marketing advantages can be leveraged to capture warm leads, build email lists and shorten sales cycles. This is because Twitter is uniquely awesome at getting the right content in front of the right person at the right time – in real-time.
Now, with keyword targeted Promoted Tweets available to everyone, Twitter has made getting your content to people who need it a whole lot easier – because now you can automate your outreach marketing (the most frequent request from our users). Yes!
This post describes a simple process you can use to generate leads and to shorten your sales cycle using Twitter’s new keyword-targeted Promoted Tweets.
Here’s a deck we put together that explains the method in detail, along with a few lessons we learned along the way:
The cool thing about using intent-targeted Promoted Tweets is that it gets your best content in front of your prospects when THEY need it.
It’s like having a dedicated direct marketing team monitoring Twitter for leads, 24/7.
Even better: you don’t have to sit in front of the screen all day to monitor and respond!
Of course, you have to pay Twitter for the privilege of automating your content marketing. But for many marketers, it’s well worth the price.
The Strategy: Target Buyer Needs With Helpful Content
The strategy we recommend is to promote your most helpful content – FAQs, videos, blog posts, infographics, spec sheets, whatever – to carefully-targeted prospects during specific moments of need they discuss on Twitter.
If you don’t yet have high-quality, buyer-issue-focused content online, then go out and get some right now.
Presenting your most helpful content to prospects near their ‘moment of need’ can shorten your sales process in three important ways:
You will knock-down more sales obstacles, faster.
You will build your brand as a helpful provider of solutions and content – not a cold-calling machine.
You will respond to your buyer’s needs in real-time, in a non-threatening manner. Being timely can make a huge impact on engagement, CTR and lead conversion rates.
Tactically, you will be placing solution-focused Promoted Tweets in front of buyers discussing issues. Your Promoted Tweets will contain links to helpful content on your website.
To target your potential buyers, you will use conversational keywords that indicate purchase intent. These keywordsare what they actually say on Twitter during their moments of need.
OK, enough of the strategy – here is the process, starting with campaign planning.
Campaign Planning
Preparing for a sales-focused Promoted Tweets campaign is straightforward and consists of four steps:
Compile a list of the questions and issues that your prospective customers and active leads commonly face.
Gather links to helpful content you have already produced that address your prospects’ key issues.
Create a landing page for each issue in 1.
Post at least one tweet from your account with a link to each landing page in 3.
The first step is to compile a short-list of the most important questions and issues that commonly stand between an uninformed prospect and a sale. The best way to find these issues is to ask your sales force or your direct marketing team, if you have one. If you target multiple types of buyers or personas, then you will need a list of issues for each persona.
The second step is to gather together (or create) links to blog posts, videos and other forms of high-qualitydigitalcontent that addresses each key buyer issue. It is best if the content is yours, but it’s not required: plenty of people will click on your bio and follow you if you share helpful content. The important thing is that the content you share addresses the issue and is helpful.
Next, you will create at least one landing page for each issue or group of similar issues. Place your content behind or on these landing pages and generate a unique web tracking code for each. Each landing page should provide a way to capture lead information like a social login, an email signup form or a full-blown lead capture form.
Finally, you will prepare one or more Promoted Tweets for each issue. This is because on Twitter, your tweet is your native ad. In your posts, be natural, use a 1-to-1 conversation tone and keep it brief (like you normally do on Twitter).
For promoted tweets, we like to combine a short buyer question with a simple CTA, for example:
Trouble With Malware? Learn 3 ways to eliminate it from your life: http://ntag.it/5vbcxr
Now that you have your marketing assets in place, you are ready to launch your first intent-targeted Promoted Tweets Campaign.
Campaign Execution
Setting up a campaign on Twitter is easy.
You will want to create one Promoted Tweets Campaign per buyer issue addressed. This way, you can see how well you are addressing specific pain points and how good each type of issue is at delivering sales-qualified leads.
Setting up a keyword-targeted Promoted Tweets campaign to address a specific issue in your buyer’s journey is easy to do – if you know what keywords to use. More about that in a second.
You’ll enter your keywords into the campaign panel below. You can choose from Broad Match, Phrase Match or Negative Keyword match for each keyword entered. There is a practical user interface limit of about 300 keywords, although the system can actually handle more.
twitter keyword targeting
So… how do you identify the right conversational keywords for an issue-focused campaign?
Selecting the Right Keywords: Not The Same As Search
To come up with the right keywords for your campaign, the first thing you should do is take a few minutes to listen to what your prospective buyers actually say on Twitter.
Use Twitter Advanced Search or a specialized tool like NeedTagger to filter Twitter for people discussing the issues on your list. Take note of the verb phrases (intent markers),topics and hashtags that are commonly mentioned.
For example, this guy has an issue with malware and might need some anti-virus software:
Verb (intent) markers include: “ruins your day” and “fml”.
Topics include “malware” and “browsers”.
As you can see from the example above, the words people use to express intent on Twitter (conversational keywords) are often different than the keywords they might enter into Google to find a solution (search keywords).
To illustrate just how different, what sort of solutions do you think Clinton might find on Google if he entered the keyword, “ruins your day malware fml”?
Just for giggles, we tried it – here’s what we got:
Where’s Norton AntiVirus when you need them?
Selecting the right conversational keywords to target is a potential stumbling block for anyone who wants to augment their Google AdWords PPC campaigns with keyword-targeted social media campaigns. Especially if they are performance-marketing oriented, which means they want to target purchase intent (mostly).
To help bridge this gap, we’ve been working on an automated way to identify the right conversational keywords to target, for NeedTagger customers.
Currently in private beta, NeedTagger can now automatically generate a list of the top-performing conversational keywords for your intent-filtered stream. (ask us about the beta if you’re interested).
Here’s how that works:
An alternative way to generate conversational keywords is to use a keyword combination tool (Google AdWords has a free one) and combine verb phrases and topics together, as follows:
Measuring Results
Twitter provides a great set of analytics that help you understand how effective your ad campaigns are and in how people are engaging with your Promoted Tweets.
Twitter does not, however, provide a way for you to A/B test your landing pages and messages against a target audience prior to launching a paid campaign. Using a tool like NeedTagger is a great way to test your messaging in real-time with real prospects to see how well they work – before you start paying to promote them.
In our Insights tab, NeedTagger also provides the actual number of needs we find each day for your intent-filtered stream of conversations. We cannot guarantee 100% alignment with what Twitter targets for your keywords (we use different algorithms), but Insights can give you a pretty good indication of how much opportunity there is inside of Twitter for your campaign, before you start paying.
We also generate daily email alerts that will keep you on top of your market.
Optimizing Your Campaign
Twitter offers several cool features and media types that can help you maximize results. We won’t go into depth on them here.
One does deserve a mention for lead generators, however:
Twitter has been testing a new Lead Generation Card that simplifies content sharing and lead capture from prospects who like your helpful content. The way it works is really simple (see screenshot below).
Twitter Lead Generation Card
Lead Gen Cards are great for building email lists!
Just understand that this is all you will get – an email address. To mine those leads, you will need a decent marketing automation platform.
In summary, Twitter’s new keyword-targeted Promoted Tweets product is a powerful new tool in a performance marketer’s kit. But you’ll need high quality helpful content and know how to identify the right conversational keywords to make it work for you.
To learn about more ways to leverage social media for lead generation, check out this excellent presentation prepared by Marketo:
NeedTagger Releases Intent-Mining API for Social Media
New API mines social media data for over 70 types of commercially important posts. Self-service app lets developers to customize intent filters for any requirement.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PRLog (Press Release) – Jul. 10, 2013 – PENSACOLA, Fla. — Today, NeedTagger announced immediate availability of the Social Signals API, a unique self-service data-mining platform that identifies buying signals, questions and other expressions of commercial intent in social media.The API provides application developers with programmatic access to NeedTagger’s intent-mining platform, used by thousands of social marketing & sales professionals to connect with sales prospects, market their content and manage their reputation on Twitter.
Machine Classification of Commercial Intent
For many companies, identifying the people and posts in social media that truly matter to their business is an expensive, slow and error-prone task. To date, manual monitoring and classification of social posts has been the only reliable way to accomplish this.
As NeedTagger’s CEO, Vernon Niven, explains,
Mining social networks for meaningful opportunities to engage with customers and prospects is a huge challenge for many companies. The volume of social data available online is almost doubling every year, but in our experience only 3-5% of it is commercially relevant. While no machine can detect business opportunities better than a skilled professional, automated intent-mining services like ours reduce labor requirements, improve an organization’s responsiveness and open the door for entirely new types of applications.
By automating the discovery of commercially important posts, businesses can:
respond quickly to customers asking questions, complaining and requesting help
identify new sales prospects and potential leads during critical moments of need
market content directly to people expressing a need for it
better understand the behaviors and intentions of an audience
build new social applications to address very specific needs.
For Real Time Social Applications
Social Signals is a modern, cloud-based RESTful API that is highly scalable and suitable for use in real-time applications. It is designed for marketers who want to take their social media programs to the next level.
Potential customers for the new API include a wide range of organizations that consider social media a strategic channel, for example:
social media monitoring teams
agencies and social ad platforms who want to target social ad campaigns by intent
third party social data providers, to leverage social intent data in their offerings
marketing automation providers, to use social data to trigger emails and score leads
app developers building marketing, customer support and content apps
market research firms seeking deeper behavioral insights from social media
equity and options trading desks, to mine social media for market demand
direct marketing firms seeking to upgrade social media listening capabilities
Self-Service Text Analytics
NeedTagger’s API is a unique offering in the fast-growing social text analytics industry that includes pioneers NetBase, Clarabridge, OpenAmplify, Attensity and Lexalytics.
Vernon Niven explains how Social Signals API is different:
“Our goal is to provide natural language processing that anyone can use and benefit from. Not only is our API easy to understand and use, it’s also easy to customize for any application using our self-service app. I’m excited to see what developers will do with it! ”
Social Signals API – sample output
Social Signals offers several advantages over other text analytics services, including:
100% self-service, cloud-hosted platform
High-speed, rules-based classification suitable for real-time applications
Build, test & tweak filters against Twitter in real time
Easy-to-understand classification tags
No ontology work, machine training or post-processing required
Classifies Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other short-form social posts
Optimized for Twitter
Excellent precision and recall
Out of the box, the service detects 14 basic types of intent, 8 life events and buying signals for 60 common products and services in any short-form social media data (supplied by the user). Custom filters can also be created using NeedTagger’s self-service Twitter apps. The NeedTagger team is available to engineer custom filters for any need.
Pricing
Pricing is tiered according to daily API call volumes and starts at $1,000 per month. A Free 30-day trial is available that processes up to 1,000 social posts per day.
For many months, I’ve been stewing about the obvious lack of integration between social media monitoring software (SMMS) and marketing automation platforms (MAP).
I’ve been thinking about it because NeedTagger’s users are evenly split between marketing and sales professionals. Both use our tool to connect with customers and prospects on Twitter (for different purposes).
Every day, I see how disconnected social selling pros are from inbound marketing and lead generation teams. At times, it’s like they live in two different worlds.
That’s unfortunate, because both teams are trying to communicate with the same people for basically the same reason. It’s also unfortunate for the prospect or contact being targeted, because the messages they receive can be redundant, conflicting or downright confusing.
As a social selling professional, I need to know what our marketing team knows about the person I’m talking to right now, for example:
what were the last few marketing emails we sent to them?
what marketing content is available to share with this person?
what content are we sharing today from our key social media accounts?
Likewise, marketing automation platforms send emails to contacts all the time without considering important information available in social media, such as:
what is our history of social interactions with this person?
what recent signals of purchase intent – positive or negative – has this person demonstrated in social meda?
are there any outstanding questions or complaints posted by this person on Twitter?
Perhaps this disconnect persists because social media is so new that marketing automation platforms haven’t caught up. Or maybe it’s because social prospecting and selling tend to be more of a “grass-roots” initiative by sales reps, whereas marketing automation tends to be a top-down budgeted program.
Whatever the reasons, real-time, cross-channel engagement with individuals is a bit of a messfrom the customer’s point of view – so we’d better clean things up!
Of course, our company sells a social media monitoring/prospecting tool, which means we own 1/2 of this problem.
During the past couple of months, I’ve reached out to leading marketing automation consultants and platform providers to discuss the gaps between our types of solutions and to identify ways we might integrate our apps and data with their platforms. This post is based on those conversations.
This is a long read because we address a number of related topics:
why seamless integration between social media and marketing automation technology is a must, moving forward.
how social media and marketing automation solutions are evolving to adapt to the new world of the real time customer
what gaps must be closed between social media and marketing automation platforms
where the software industry stands today re. closing these gaps.
Marketing’s Future: Real Time, Personal & Data-Driven
Marketing professionals are under increasing pressure to master the art of real-time, data-driven personalized marketing in all channels.
As a member of a real time marketing team, you are – or soon will be – charged with listening to your market and engaging with prospects and customers “in the moment”. Your responsibilities may include:
monitoring social media and the real-time web for engagement opportunities
engaging directly with prospects & customers in real time
activating influencers
recruiting & rewarding brand advocates, and,
creating, curating and publishing reams of fresh content to take advantage of trends.
In his recent response to Salesforce’s acquisition of ExactTarget, Phil Fernandez, CEO of Marketo, explained where the pressure is coming from:
Phil Fernandez
We believe that marketing is undergoing a deep transformation driven by large-scale trends such as the rise of self-directed consumers and broad and instant availability of information online. This means marketers must fundamentally change how they engage with prospects and customers.
And this in turn requires a new kind of technology solution – one that helps them to create relationship-building dialogs across fragmented channels, one that helps them think holistically about the entire range of responsibilities of the modern marketing professional, and one that is powered by deep insight and analytics.
For those who step up to the data-driven marketing challenge, the good news is that there is no shortage of real-time data to mine for opportunity. Especially in social media, the world’s largest real-time customer database.
But mining data is only half the story. Marketing in a social world also requires getting personal. The importance of real-time, personal engagement was highlighted when HubSpot CEO, Brian Halligan, discussed why they released their new 1-to-1 social media monitoring and engagement panel, Social Inbox:
Brian Halligan
Over the last five years, social media marketing has been far from lovable; in fact, brands were typically using social media to push out contests, sweepstakes, and promotional content—tactics that are impersonal for customers and ineffective for marketers. HubSpot Social Inbox allows marketers to create, share, promote, monitor, respond, and integrate social media into their overall marketing approach. Social Inbox is a powerful vehicle for marketers that results in a singular narrative for customers.
Not many organizations are experts at turning real-time social data into personalized marketing and selling actions.
But that’s starting to change.
Social Listening Moves From Analytics to Action
First-generation social media monitoring platforms like Marketwired (Sysomos) and Salesforce (Radian6) led the social data mining charge by helping marketers convert social data into useful insights. Social media monitoring and analytics are still powerful ways to monitor and learn about your market.
The problem is that in most companies today, social data is not being mined in a systemic way to generate sales, leads and customer satisfaction. Instead, most of it is still stuck in analytics for market research, branding, PR and advertising.
When it is leveraged for action, social data is recirculated within social media marketing silos – we see an opportunity on Twitter, so we respond on Twitter – as though our customers only live on Twitter! Very little social data is being leveraged to drive actions in the channels that we know work best – be that email, direct mail or a telephone call.
Radian6 Dashboard
But times are changing. Social data mining is moving past its role as an analytics tool into driving results in real time.
New targeted ad products from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are examples of how social data mining can drive bottom-line performance. For example, Twitter just launched a new lead generation card.
Twitter’s New Lead Generation Card
In addition, new data mining and social selling tools have arrived that makes it easier to spot business opportunities & to engage with prospects in social media, in real time.
Using NeedTagger to Mine for Customers in HootSuite (live demo)
New social data mining APIs (like our new Social Signals API) are making it easier for marketers to listen for buying signals in social media and take action in other channels – in a fully automated way.
Yet another example of data mining for action is the new crop of predictive sales intelligence applications like LatticeEngines that analyze your customer data, then scan social media and the web to identify high-probability prospects for your business.
Clearly, social data mining has moved into the “action zone”.
But is it producing results?
Social Media’s ROI Problem
Many smart people claim that social media marketing will never pay like we think it will. That it may never generate sales and leads. That it’s all about “top of the funnel”.
Their claims ignore a large & growing body of evidence that social media marketing actually does generate sales, improves the performance of inbound marketing and can reduce lead costs by more than half. Those of us who serve customer-facing professionals with social media technology know the ROI is there.
But to be fair, the skeptics are correct that it has been really difficult to impossible to prove social media marketing impacts sales and lowers costs in a consistent, reliable way.
Why is this so? We think for three reasons:
Harvesting social media for leads and sales is mostly a manual process today: finding business opportunities in noisy social networks is an expensive, error-prone task. Record keeping is abysmal. Better advertising options are coming along, but they are siloed within each social network.
Social media marketing systems remain mostly disconnected from other marketing and CRM systems. So, the full range of social interactions with a given person isn’t being tracked.
Sales attribution is a mess across all digital channels, anyway. Before social media it was really hard to know what specific actions drove each sale. Now, it’s harder. Let’s face it: “last-click” attribution is not an accurate way to measure social media’s impact on sales.
In other words, a lot of Social Media’s ROI problem is due to a lack of integration with other customer systems of record.
Obviously, we need to clear up this confusion. But how?
Marketing Automation’s Future: Real Time Demand Generation
Like other CEOs of marketing and sales technology companies, I believe that the real-time and pervasive nature of social media is forcing enterprise marketers to integrate the best features from their social media listening platforms, CRM and marketing automation platforms into a real-time demand generation platform. By hook or by crook, we’ll all have to get there.
The real time demand generation platform of the future will serve as a company’s system of engagement with a wide variety of external stakeholders – not just email contacts and social media followers. More specifically, it will do at least six things well:
listen and respond to individuals on a 1-to-1 basis, in real time (in any channel): to do this, we have to manage and track every type of communication, marketing action and selling interaction we have with each person, in real time. This is not a recommendation that we should respond to every signal in real time, nor that every engagement needs to be personalized – that’s not scalable. But we do need to keep tabs on people in real time and be ready to respond in a personal way & in the most appropriate channel, when needed.
listen to every person that matters in our market (not just our contacts & followers): maintain real-time intelligence on every person that matters to our business: prospects, customers, contacts, influencers, advocates and partners. Social media’s strength lies in its ability to not only listen to everyone that matters, but to leverage social relationships where possible to spread the word. In contrast, most marketing automation platforms restrict our market reach to email contacts & followers.
completely inform every engagement and action we take with every person: capture a complete & accurate view of each person’s behavior, profile and history of our interactions (manual or automated) throughout the lifecycle of our relationship with them. Then, make this profile available to every automated system and to every employee that might interact with that person.
select the right channel for every engagement and automated action: marketers should be able to leverage all of the intelligence we have on a person to take action in the channel(s) that make the most sense for each interaction. We should be able to listen in one channel and act in another – seamlessly.
automate as much work as possible, reserving the hardest problems & most sensitive interactions for our most valuable resource (our employees): using a blend of predictive analytics, natural language processing and human expertise, we should automate as much predictable work as we can, so we can spend our scarcest resource – skilled labor – on the most important people, events and exceptions.
provide analytics suitable for A/B testing cross-channel, real time engagement with individuals: support agile, data-based decision making regarding the owned, earned and paid media investments we make, down to the individual person or persona where needed. Content, contacts and market segments will be shared across multiple channels and across owned, earned and paid media. We need analytics that can deal with this complexity.
Note: some MAP vendors call their vision, “Revenue Generation” – but unless their system is closing the deal and taking the order, I think that’s stretching it a bit.
Putting aside the jargon, I think it’s easy to understand why we’ll need marketing technology like this in the future.
It’s because our customers are pressuring us to get our digital act together – and real-time, personalized engagement is what they increasingly expect. Social media makes it too darn easy for people to share bad experiences, so you must respond to people and address those issues in real time if you want to compete in the public marketplace of the future.
I am a customer of many brands myself, and I would love it if the brands I do business with would behave in such an informed & responsive manner. Wouldn’t you?
Of course, I am not the first to point out what we need. Lots of visionary technology leaders led the way. Some of them are putting their words in to product.
Bill Nussey, CEO of Silverpop, describes their company as a enabler of Behavioral Marketing, which is:
Bill Nussey
…real-time, cross-channel, insanely relevant campaigns to one person at a time automatically driven by analytics of their actions, preferences and profiles.
Silverpop’s Director of Product Strategy, Bryan Brown, further explains how real time behaviors can, and should, drive better performance:
Marc, Phil, Brian, Bryan and Bill all seem to agree that marketing is going to be real time, personal, social and data-driven. They also understand that more social media marketing features must be integrated within their platforms (see update below).
Of course, implementing this real-time demand-gen nirvana will take time and effort. There are challenges we have to overcome – starting with where we will store all of our real-time data about people.
What’s Missing: A Complete System of Record for 1-to-1 Engagement
One thing I’m sure we need (soon) is a single system of record (SOR) to house all of the data about the people that make up our market – especially social data, which is the largest data resource available about people.
Some of my colleagues in the software industry might argue that we already have this system of record – theirs – but I disagree. We’re not there yet.
So what type of enterprise platform should house it? In the enterprise software world, there seem to be four candidates:
a social media monitoring/management system (SMMS): HootSuite, Sprinklr, et al
a customer relationship management (CRM) system: Salesforce, SugarCRM, NimbleCRM, et al
a marketing automation platform (MAP): Marketo, Eloqua, ExactTarget, Hubspot, Responsys, et al
a new type of real-time marketing/customer experience platform (RTM/CEX?): lots of startups chasing this right now
I don’t think there are any social media monitoring systems out there that are capable of serving as a single system of record for multi-channel digital marketing and engagement, so I’m not going to analyze the pros/cons of doing that.
Some think the best system of record for real-time 1-to-1 engagement is a CRMsystem like Salesforce.com. There are good arguments for doing this. And, there are new “Social CRM” platforms like Nimble CRM (which we use) that provide much better 360-degree views of your interactions with a person online.
Today’s SocialCRM platforms work well for on-the-ground social selling and relationship management, but there’s still that nagging issue that each person’s marketing context is missing. For example, we don’t know what emails our marketing team sent to that lead. And, we don’t know what sort of content they’ve clicked on in Twitter. It’s easy to ruin a good sales opportunity when you work like this.
While it’s theoretically possible that some of the new crop of startups focused on real time advertising and marketing in social media will take the lead, I won’t address that group here because I think it’s too early to know.
Besides, this post is long enough! There are many new companies focused on parts of this problem – just in social media (chart courtesy LUMA Partners):
Social LUMAscape
Another potential system of record for 1-to-1 engagement is a marketing automation platform (MAP).
Using a MAP as the system of record for real-time demand generation makes a lot of sense to me for several reasons:
we maintain our marketing contacts there
we measure cross-channel digital marketing performance there
we analyze and score our leads there
most social media engagement and marketing activity is top- (or middle-)of-the-funnel
most MAPs are already integrated with that other important system of record, CRM.
If you use a MAP & a CRM platform today, then using your MAP as your marketing system of record is a “duh” conclusion.
But half of businesses haven’t made that leap yet. For them, here is a quick overview of what a marketing automation platform does:
WHAT IS A MARKETING AUTOMATION PLATFORM (MAP)?
Marketing automation platforms reduce the cost of acquiring customers by automating and integrating digital marketing tasks that companies traditionally perform in a solo’d fashion, including:
Marketing Automation features (by Marketo)
Marketing automation is also referred to as inbound marketing (Hubspot), behavioral marketing (Silverpop) revenue performance management (Marketo and Eloqua) and revenue marketing (The Pedowitz Group).
An important side-effect of integrating so many marketing activities around a single contact data base is that you get much better insight (and hard data) regarding how well your marketing investments are paying off in terms of leads, sales and satisfied customers. As long as all channels are integrated with your MAP, that is.
More than 20 vendors offer full-featured platforms for various industries and company sizes. Most marketing automation platforms were designed in the early- or mid-2000s, before social media came on the scene. They were designed to optimize web content management, SEO and email marketing activities. So, naturally, that’s where most of their capabilities lie.
And business is good – demand for MAP technology increased by more than 50% in 2012.
Enter the new kid on the block, social media marketing.
In just a few years, social media marketing has grown from an experiment into a legitimate digital marketing channel that competes for billions in budget with search engines, display and email.
Closing the Gaps
For most digital marketers today, it is obvious that their social media data and applications must be integrated with other digital marketing efforts (eventually). Otherwise, we’re just marketing with one eye closed.
Likewise, most of the marketing automation industry executives I’ve talked with readily admit their platforms will need to integrate with many social media marketing activities. Many are working to accomplish this right now.
But how, exactly, should these two worlds come together? what are the specific gaps that need to be closed?
Integration gaps exist on both sides of the divide: within social media monitoring and marketing platforms; and, within marketing automation platforms.
In social media platforms, for example, users do not have access to critical information about customers and prospects stored in CRM and MAP platforms. As a result, many social media teams lack a complete view of the company’s relationship with a person during an engagement. This is not a good thing.
On the marketing automation side of the house, there are at least four integration gaps with social media platforms that need to be addressed:
most MAPs treat social media as a content publishing (broadcast) channel, rather than as a place to engage with people directly (which is what it is). For example, most MAPs lack social media prospecting tools, social customer segmentation, social lead scoring and real-time 1-to-1 engagement panels. Hubspot’s new Social InBox product stands out as an exception.
most MAPs limit your social marketing reach to existing contacts (email contacts and followers). This flies in the face of the reality that very few brands are directly connected to more than 10% of their socially-active prospects on any social network. If you limit your reach to fans and followers, then you’re ignoring 90% of your prospects! Act-On’s Twitter Prospector tool, LoopFuse’s Nearstream tool and Vocus’ Buying Signals offering are recent attempts by marketing automation providers to close this gap.
MAPs rely on keywords to identify social media posts that matter. Analyzing people and posts for commercial intent is extremely important in social media marketing because that’s how we identify actionable events, prioritize our work & save time monitoring. Unfortunately, due to the conversational language of social networks, searching posts for keywords is not a reliable way to surface commercial intent in social media. Leading social media monitoring platforms offer natural language processing options for this reason. To get a feel for the difference, watch this video in which we demo keyword-filtered streams next to intent-filtered streams inside HootSuite.
MAPs don’t incorporate enough social data in their analytics. Hubspot’s Megan Kearney recently wrote an excellent piece about the gaps between SMMS and MAP platforms, in which she commented on the social analytics gap:
By integrating social media into full marketing analytics that pull data from all channels, more and more marketers are starting to be able to understand how many leads, customers, and dollars their social media efforts are generating and what type of content generates the highest quality lead.
The Race To Integrate Is Underway
Oracle’s recent acquisitions of Eloqua & Collective Intellect and Salesforce.com’s acquisitions of Radian6 and ExactTarget/Pardot are clear signals that more MAP-social integration is in the cards.
It will take time for these products to be integrated, but it’s pretty clear that real-time demand generation platforms are on the way.
Another sign: leading marketing automation providers are now adding native social media marketing features to their offerings, for example:
In May, 2013, Hubspot announced their Social Inbox, which lets marketers monitor and engage with prospects and customers on a 1-to-1 basis. It is limited to existing contacts (not a prospecting tool). But they clearly get the issue and are working hard to close the gap.
In June, 2013, Marketo announced their Customer Experience Management (CEM) feature, which attempts to leverage all of the information you have on a contact (including from social media) to predict the next marketing action that will pay the best. Sort of like LatticeEngines – for marketers.
Nice progress, but a lot of integration remains.
Which begs the question: what can a marketer do today to bridge the social-MAP gap?
NOTE: If you had the patience to get this far, then I’ll let you in on a secret: this is the first of a series of three articles. In our next two posts, we’ll explain how you can tap into the massive amount of social data created every day to improve the performance of your marketing automation systems – even if your organization doesn’t use social media that much.