92% of marketers feel social media is important for their business, however, 83% are concerned about how to target customers and prospects on social media, according to a Social Media Examiner report. While marketers understand the benefits of social media, and seek to gain market share from this channel, we are challenged by the best course of action.
There may not be a perfect path to social media marketing euphoria, but you can start building that road with expert advice. Recently, Jeff Soriano, Senior Director of Demand Generation at OfferPop, and Paul Dunay, award-winning B2B marketing expert and author, joined a recent RingLead webinar to discuss this big marketing challenge.
If you missed it, here’s a look at their top tips for gaining market share on social media.
1. Find the right social channel for your brand and own it. Focus your efforts on one or a few social channels, because that’s where your audience spends there time, and it’s where your brand can shine. Market share means sales, and sales on some of these channels, including others such as Pinterest, will be different for each company. You need to pick the one that is right for your company, and then work towards owning it.
2. Use social media for retargeting. Drop Facebook pixels on your website, for example, to incorporate it into lead scoring, segmenting and more. Leverage the necessary data, such as UTM tags, referral source, lead source, etc. Test the process of authenticating web forms with social profiles. These insights help you confirm that you reached this person through social, and through a specific campaign. Then, you can further dissect the social channels to obtain more data about your prospects and customers. All of this will ultimately allow you to better target, nurture, and find more of the right contacts.
3. Tap LinkedIn for targeted efforts. If you’re looking to do very targeted campaigns, such as account based marketing campaigns, LinkedIn is hyper focused on that. Unfortunately, only 33% of B2B marketers choose LinkedIn as their leading social media platform, according to the same Social Media Examiner report. Account based marketing and B2B marketing can play well on LinkedIn, so consider how you can focus there.
4. Follow the 80/20 rule on Twitter. 80% of what you share should be third party content with great news and tips from the industry, and 20% should be about you. You need to become a news organization. Once you have your audience’s attention and trust, you can start to promote your own content 20% of the time. Building that trust is critical. You’ll start to see that you get more people clicking because they’re interested in what you’re saying.
5. Personal emails can be a gold mine. As Jeff Soriano shares, personal email addresses are associated with your prospects’ social profiles, so they are great tools for targeting on social networks. Those addresses give you a key piece of information about how to reach them directly on Facebook or Twitter.
6. Understand the buyer journey and how social media plays a role. Anyone can buy their way into market share and move prospects to customers by giving them offers to get them off the stick, but then it’s a race to the bottom when it comes to pricing. The reality is that you need to understand where buyers are in their journey to determine what content you should be sharing or creating. If you do this well, and create a real relationship, you build trust that more easily allows you to convert that prospect into a customer.
7. Social is not about coupons, promotions, or a free turkey with purchase. The best companies move the needle by creating great content. While engaging in social media, offer your prospects further insightful information with thought leadership content. According to Megan Tonzi, “Don’t forget to use progressive-profiling or smart forms to garner additional information from your leads. With this additional information,you can gain deeper insight into your prospects and help further qualify them.”
8. There is a huge opportunity in Facebook videos. Videos on Facebook are getting over four billion video views a day, and that number was only at one million last year. If you have video content, get it on Facebook. Video is going to see a huge uplift in social, according to Jeff Soriano. It’s an engaging and powerful medium.
9. Set your metrics, goals and expectations upfront. When you’re looking at social media, there’s a big difference between data and insights. While social insights are in the eye of the beholder, you can set goals upfront, and work to meet those expectations. This approach will give you real insights. However, you must set up your social efforts, data and tracking from the start to make sure that you’re able to tell the accurate story. Without all of the pieces, you might be telling the wrong story.
10. Bad data will always impact marketing, including social media efforts. Whether it’s poor targeting, poor segmenting, or poor use of data, bad data ruins the credibility you worked so hard to establish as a marketer. Cleaning your data is not something you do once a year; it’s a constant process. Consider all of your different data points and how they’re connected. Automate your data quality processes with technology. This will ensure data integrity, which is at the core of your marketing. Set a budget for data quality now, and make it an ongoing program.
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This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: 10 Quick Tips to Gaining Market Share on Social Media
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