Did you know that B2B marketers who use Twitter generate twice as many leads as those that do not? (Source: InsideView) Or that 55% of B2B survey respondents search for information on social media (Source: Mediabistro)? Your customers are tweeting their frustrations, liking pages of brands they would like to be associated with on Facebook, viewing videos of similar solutions on YouTube, posting queries on forums to make decisions. Not monitoring and indulging in these discussions means losing out on crucial information about valuable prospects and alienating your potential customers.
Here is where social marketing automation steps in. To simplify it for you, social marketing automation infuses the practices of marketing automation and social networking for acquiring and engaging with potential customers on social networks. It involves acquiring, segmenting and nurturing leads basis their social network activity.
Sounds simple enough but how do you implement or utilize social marketing automation for your business?
Here is a simple four step approach that you can follow to implement social marketing automation:
Step-1 Identify Leads Based on Social Prospecting
The first step is to identify the ones who are talking about your brand, your competitors and even other pertinent topics to your industry. These people are either in the “already or almost interested” category and are most likely to convert, provided they are nurtured well. These prospects’ social profile data (such as number of followers, following, pages likes, comments, groups etc.) is captured from across the social web based on custom criteria, using either free tools such as Google Alerts or paid tools such as Radian 6, Sysomos etc.
Step 2: Segment Leads Based on Social Scores
The second step is to score the captured leads depending on their social media activity. For instance, if a prospect follows your Twitter profile, you award him five points, he/she retweets your tweet about a product update, award him an additional five points. He/she then goes on to subscribe for a trial of your updated product, you award him 10 points and so on. The higher the score, the greater is the level of interest or degree of involvement with the brand.
Step 3: Nurture Leads Through Targeted Messaging
The next step is to nurture these leads acquired from the social web using the principles of marketing automation. The scored leads are presented with highly targeted information specific to their stage in the buying cycle and help advance them further along.
Step 4: Review and Repeat
f you are using a marketing automation tools such as Marketo or Hubspot, you will receive detailed analytics on your campaign performance. It is crucial to review this information on a timely basis and make changes (if needed). It might happen that your scoring criteria might be missing the mark or that you are targeting the wrong segment on social networks; whatever be the issue, it can only come to the forefront if you monitor the campaigns’ performance carefully.
