Learn about driving engagement with social marketing

Transcript

How many times a day should your company post to social media? How many different platforms should your company utilize? How should you segment audiences for more personalized posts? Social media marketing teams everywhere are working to answer these questions and others in order to engage efficiently with an ever-growing population of social media users. Using Marketo to apply social marketing best practices can help elevate brand awareness and engagement, and helps you gain insights about your audience that you can use to convert more social media users into clients or customers.

Social marketing is the use of networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others to communicate and engage with new and existing customers. It offers marketers a vast opportunity for engaging with buyers across the entire customer life cycle on the platforms they go to for information. It’s critical that you know how to leverage social marketing to build your brand, drive demand, and engage your buyers. Organic social media is using the free tools that social networks offer to publish posts, share posts, and interact in conversations and comments. All of this engagement happens naturally without you having to pay for users to see your content. By contrast, paid social media is when these networks collect fees to boost the reach of your posts, display ads, and videos, or to sponsor messaging based on certain user profiles that you define. This is usually charged on a cost-per-click or cost-per-thousand basis and results in more of your target audience seeing your content.

Social media is one of the most powerful and cost-effective channels for connecting with your audience. It’s almost universally used by consumers. While new social platforms are popular, users typically adopt these in addition to their current platforms rather than as a replacement. So the opportunities to connect with users is ever expanding. You can nurture brand engagement due to the two-way interaction social media provides. Everyone who likes or follows your page is engaged or influenced in some way by your product or service. You can connect one-on-one with your followers, reach large groups, and get deeper insights into your audience. Plus it allows users to see how others are engaging with your brand, resulting in even deeper impressions. For example, some buyers believe what a brand says about itself, but most people believe what their peers have to say about a brand. Social media marketing lets you engage your audience across the entire customer life cycle, from creating and maintaining relationships, to driving revenue growth, increasing customer loyalty, and eventually, building advocacy.

There are a number of ways you can use Marketo to get your content out to your social media audience. Most organizations use a combination of content, depending on their specific products and services, buyer personas, and the typical customer journey. Here are some types of content to consider incorporating into your social marketing strategy. Big content pieces, like white papers and eBooks, tip sheets and checklists, blog posts, infographics, fun visual content, like memes and cartoons, slideshows, podcasts, and photos and videos. Once you have this content created, you’ll want to share it on the most popular social platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube. Each of these platforms has different strengths, and sometimes different audiences. So do some research so that you can put the right content on the right platform and reach the right audience.

Here are several ways in which organizations typically use social marketing. Driving brand awareness and preference. Traditionally, one way that buyers find you is through influencers. These are trusted individuals who heavily engage with and promote your brand or product. Social media allows influencers to easily connect your brand to their followers. Increasing demand. Social marketing with Marketo lets you add new contacts to your database, nurture them across all channels, and eventually, convert them to customers. You can develop offers, promotions, contests, and content that engage your audience throughout their unique buyer journey. Social selling. You can use social media to reach out to potential customers on a one-to-one level and offer them personal and relevant content, messages, and offers to accelerate them towards a purchase.

Integrating social media. The best brands are those that weave themselves into their customer’s lives to become a part of their identity. They are successful because they listen and respond to each customer’s needs and wants in order to provide a seamless customer experience, regardless of channel or device.

As with any marketing strategy, it’s important to start by defining how you will measure success. To do this, you should identify your social media marketing goals for each stage of the customer life cycle. This helps you create a roadmap, laying out the platforms, messages, and offers that make the most sense for your buyer. Determine the frequency you’ll use when engaging through social media and create a social marketing calendar. For example, you may want to post to Twitter once per hour, LinkedIn once or twice per day, and to Instagram three times per day. Keep in mind that your communications for each channel should reinforce, but not repeat. This allows the Marketo audience hub to listen and respond appropriately, using demographic and behavioral data gathered across all of your channels. To build your social presence, it’s critical to make your social profiles visible on all of your channels. Make sure your email templates include social media icons, links, buttons, and sharing options at the bottom. With your social goals and strategy defined, you’ll need to create a social channel to track success of your social marketing engagement. Then you’ll create social marketing programs, like listening programs, referral tracking, form fills, publishing Facebook landing pages, and so forth. Also, you can use Marketo to connect to different social platforms, leverage lead or engagement scores, and use retargeting to reach your leads on social channels. For more information, check out our module on digital advertising.

To prove how social media marketing contributes to the goals of your organization, you need to know how to connect the right data points. Here are some important tools that can help you measure the impact of your social marketing activities. Search engine optimization, or SEO. Having great social media content can help boost your page ranking in the various search engines. The links from your social media shares can impact your bounce rate and time-on-site engagement. And if your content is good and people stick around to consume it, those engagement metrics communicate value to search engines.

Attribution models. With Marketo, you can not only listen and respond to your audience across channels, but you can also track the revenue associated with your social media marketing activities. This provides you with valuable insights into their impact. ROI. Here are a few metrics that will help you determine the return on investment from your social marketing efforts. You’ll want to look at the number of followers, level of engagement, the extent of your social media reach, the number of new names in your database, and your cost per lead. You should also look at the number of marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, new opportunities created, amount of pipeline, opportunities won and revenue won. Later, you can use this data to review the level of customer lifetime value.

Social advertising. As marketers increasingly spend more time on social platforms, it’s more important than ever to have the right strategy in place, so you can track all of your paid social campaigns and gain insights into what’s effective. This helps you determine the return on investment from your paid social advertising. In Marketo, a good campaign structure will help you accurately measure and report on all of your marketing initiatives. You can build separate campaigns for the products and services you want to measure and report on. This helps you identify the audience most likely to respond to a certain message, so that you can engage with individuals in the way that most resonates with them. Now that you know more about setting social marketing goals and strategies, some best practice guidelines, for using social marketing, and how to measure its effectiveness, we’ll demonstrate how to set up a few different types of social marketing activities in Marketo. -