Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Sep 10, 2010 @ 09:43 AM
With social media, it’s no longer a question of can you measure, but do you. And measurements that merely communicate the number of followers and fans, and how much they post, does little to demonstrate the impact social media is having on your marketing efforts. It’s time to roll up your sleeves and start collecting the data and connecting the dots to find this impact; what I like to call "following the social media breadcrumbs." We advocate a three-phased approach to developing an effective social media dashboard as well as outlining the metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs) and financial measures appropriate to each phase.
Phase One: Required. The first phase of a social media dashboard is typically defined by the web data collection tools and habits that an organization already has place, which in most cases will offer mostly quantitative information along the lines of numbers of follower and the amount of content they (and you) are producing. The value of a dashboard in this phase is to communicate trends in the amount of followers and subscribers, and if there is a correlation with specific social media activities.
Phase Two: Recommended. The next phase of a social media dashboard moves beyond reporting glorified web analytics and begins to show the impact that social media activity is having on driving engagement and awareness. Organizations can start to consider how social media is impacting demand creation efforts in this phase, but don’t expect to be able to report on anything other than a lift in response rates.
Phase Three: Best Practice. The most advanced social media dashboard will provide insights into the ways that prospects use social media throughout their buying process and how customers use it to engage more fully with your organization. At this phase you should be able to determine the impact of social media as part of your marketing tactic mix, as well as the impact it has on sales enablement.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Wed, Aug 11, 2010 @ 10:42 AM
We've seen it happen in the realm of demand creation; marketers have realized that being more analytical about their activities has led to more measurable results. Understanding your marketing data leads to better targeting, segmenting and the more optimized pairing of tactics and offers to drive better results throughout the waterfall. More and more organizations are realizing the importance of the marketing operations role to make this a reality.
Now it's time to see a similar role (and more) that applies the same analytical discipline to the seeding of demand, typically the responsibility of the reputation function in driving engagement and awareness. When it comes to social media specifically, we continue to see a lack of insight and analytics both in the processes companies use to measure and in the capabilities of the technologies that are designed to assist in defining, collecting and analyzing metrics without employing expensive services. You may gain some depth of information regarding your share of voice, sentiment and engagement, but how wide does this knowledge go and what is it telling you about moving the needle for driving business?
Organizations need to take the solution into their own hands. Whether social operations becomes a specific role or a responsibility spread across a number of employees, the key is to take all the data and metrics you can collect to follow the social media breadcrumbs and connect the dots in ways that existing technologies and agencies can't provide beyond traditional brand measurement. Sure, it's useful to understand the demographics, habits and preferences of your networks and communities within Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, but you need the insights that go across these multiple communities (and more) to not only better understand and serve your customers and prospects, but to be able to market to them more effectively as well.
So, who is responsible for social operations within your company and how do you see such a role evolving?
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Jul 09, 2010 @ 09:36 AM
In a previous post, I discussed our B2B buying cycle framework and the roles within it; in this post, I'll cover how these buying cycle phases should influence your B2B social media efforts. Given the importance of buying cycles, better alignment of key social media activities with these cycles will result in more targeted, measurable results. Let's look at it via the three macros buying cycle phases.
Education. Most organizations don't have a lack of content; rather too much content is locked into specific pieces of collateral and never reused. Go through a whitepaper and highlight content that can be leveraged as tweets or posts within your Facebook and LinkedIn groups to drive more awareness about who you are and what you do. Also, the work that goes into securing quotes and data points for press releases and testimonials can be used to reinforce the connection between a specific offering and core business issues within a vertical (or sub-vertical) market.
Active Buying. The active buying stage finds buyers looking for solutions to problems they have decided are a priority, matching solution types to their specific needs and uncovering vendors that offer their solution of choice. Your social efforts should drive focused awareness and engagement not around your brand, but around specific decisions made by current customers that drove them to choose the solution you offer and, subsequently, your organization in particular. In addition to leveraging subject matter expertise for posts, content that was created to make key influencers aware of emerging issues can be recast to drive home the importance of problem solving at the beginning of buying cycles.
Closing. The closing phase includes activities such as negotiations and terms/conditions creation required to seal a deal. While there may be less social media potential here because prospects have much of the information they need, late-stage buyers often turn to their online social networks for validation, and the social reputation (or lack of) you've built through engagement will have a huge impact. Tracking and addressing any issues that a prospect may have about your organization could help tip a decision in your favor. Facilitating connections to stakeholders and influencers within your online network will help as well.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Jul 02, 2010 @ 09:02 AM
I've created a four component framework for developing and executing a robust B2B social media strategy that has resonated well with our clients, whether they're just starting out in social media or are looking to optimize their continuing efforts. The four components are: Monitor, Engagement, Awareness and Demand Creation. I've presented this model in-depth to our clients through a number of presentations and webcasts but would like to share a little more about the first component, monitoring, with a wider audience.
Monitoring forms the foundation of any B2B social media strategy, and is not only effective for knowing where you should be now; it’s extremely useful to identify where your organization may need to go in the future. It is critical to break down your monitoring strategy into six categories, including:
- Customers. Leverage monitoring to determine reach and sentiment; track both over time and then correlate changing data to internal (e.g. new product launches or other major announcements) and external (e.g. economic) factors.
- Prospects. Discover where and how prospect segments use social media, which is helpful for improving social media marketing efforts. Identify the types of content that prospects prefer to help prioritize your content development efforts.
- Influencers. Determine how much impact new influencers are having on buying decisions and how the role they play is different from traditional analysts. Large numbers of followers/fans doesn't always translate into true influence.
- Competitors. Track how established competitors are using social media in their core markets as well as new markets they enter, and put together a watch list of emerging competitors to be tracked as well.
- Future Markets. Monitoring trends and issues within industries and target markets that your organization doesn’t currently serve can help yield critical intelligence.
- Employees. While the thought of monitoring employees’ online behavior may prompt big brother and privacy concerns, doing so enables companies to feel more comfortable encouraging broad social media participation.
Whether you leverage a technology vendor or an agency, ensure they can provide you more than just a brand monitoring solution. While share of voice and sentiment trends are useful, B2B organizations need more insight into how social media is used across a long buying cycle.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Jun 11, 2010 @ 08:58 AM
While methodologies and approaches abound for understanding where customers or prospects are in the social channel and how they use it, we've found no better guide than our buying cycle. I'll use this post to cover our buying cycle concept and the roles within it, while a future post will discuss how these notions should play a key role in your social strategy and execution.
If an organization doesn't understand — even at a basic level — the way prospects buy what it sells, it will never be able to use social media outlets and marketing to facilitate these decisions. This is due to the fact that as prospects move toward a purchase, the tone, message, offer and even communicator for a specific marketing effort should be altered.
Buyers don’t go through a straight-line process of getting information through the Web or social outlets, weighing one solution against another and finally making a decision. Instead, a typical B2B buying process comprises a series of smaller decisions involving a variety of audiences that move into and out of the buying process.
SiriusDecisions has created a model that describes six macro stages that B2B organizations typically go through (see diagram, below). These six stages can be rolled up into three higher-level phases: education, active buying and closing.
As you are identifying the distinct activity phases within a buying cycle, you should also be uncovering who the key “actors” are in each phase and the specific roles they play. Typical actors include champions, CXOs, influencers (can be external or internal to the company), users and ratifiers (usually purchasing, procurement or negotiations). It is common for groups to enter and leave regularly, and to play multiple — and very different — roles depending on the type of product or service being sold. While a CTO might play a significant role during the Exploring Possible Solutions stage in one case, he or she will wait for the Justifying the Decision stage in another. Users may be brought in early or late, while other executive groups play no role whatsoever.
An understanding of actors and roles by stage is a tremendous advantage to your sales and marketing teams; not only will they know whom to target (and who to ignore) and what channels (social or otherwise) to use, but messaging, programs and specific content can be developed and delivered at the right time. You also will avoid common mistakes such as targeting the CXO level with Loosening of the Status Quo and Committing to Change messages and demand creation efforts when these executives do not play any role at the beginning of the buying process.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Apr 09, 2010 @ 09:18 AM
This is a post that should lead to a series of questions; questions you should be asking yourself if you have any responsibility for the social media strategy within your company. Whether you're executing on that strategy yourself, have staff to do it, or have outsourced to an agency, there is certainly no lack of social data you're receiving. The problem is that it's mostly quantitative about activity and gives you very little insight. Having thousands of followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook may make us feel good, but it's fairly meaningless if we don't know what the impact of these numbers are on the business.
While we've thankfully evolved away from the notions that social media in not measurable, the pendulum is in danger of swinging too far in the other direction. In other words, too many B2B marketers are being asked to show the direct impact that social media efforts are having on revenue. We continue to advocate that focusing too much on this direct impact goal is misguided; better to focus on the impact that social media is having on the seeding and creation of demand. Many organizations are doing this by tracking the change in response rates when social media is part of the tactic mix, but it's key to discover how it can raise conversion rates at other points in the demand creation waterfall.
And this leads to the questions. Are you using social media for activities beyond the top of the funnel, such as pipeline acceleration or sales enablement? Even if you're not applying social media to these initiatives, are you even tracking these types of activities regardless? Do you know your optimal tactical mix throughout the waterfall? Do you even have any impact beyond the handoff to sales? Without insight into what you do currently (as well as historically), it won't be possible to gauge the impact that social media marketing has on activities beyond the top (or even before the top) of the funnel.
If you're already asking these questions, you're on the path to gain the most insightful measurements of your social media marketing activities. And bonus points if you got the Pink Floyd reference in this post's title.