Socialising Customer Relationships

Why is it that social marketing campaigns and marketing automation are completely disjointed yet have the same objectives? We’re all trying to reach the same goal –engage with prospects and influence, and ideally accelerate the buying process.  Historically, social marketing and marketing automation have been treated as completely separate disciplines operating like the proverbial two ships passing in the night, with most social marketing tools sitting in silos disconnected from mainstream marketing processes. This needs to change.

In my experience, B2B organisations want (and need) the ability to use integrated social campaigns to boost the reach and impact of every marketing initiative they undertake – at every step in the customer lifecycle. It’s time for companies to become actively alive by managing social channels, in a new way – in a way that can put that behaviour into context, determine the buyer’s intent and match that action to drive revenue.

Social campaign management platforms help marketers accelerate social and word-of-mouth marketing, grow their marketing databases with unique social profiles and attract new customers. This allows marketers to add social applications and messages quickly to every channel – Facebook Pages, Twitter and LinkedIn feeds, landing pages, websites, banner ads and emails. These applications encourage social sharing, supercharging the results of every multi-channel marketing campaign.

The more robust platforms also automatically track the reach and impact of this social sharing, providing direct feedback on the return on investment (ROI) of social marketing. But it’s madness that this powerful capability has not been widely integrated into marketing automation platforms. It’s time to break social marketing from its usual silo, making it an integrated and integral part of every online marketing initiative.

The reality is that the boundaries are blurring between social media efforts on Facebook and Twitter and the more traditional marketing campaigns. So we need to apply smarter ways of joining the dots between the two.

By unifying the strengths of marketing automation and analytical reporting with a social marketing platform, companies can transform their campaigns to drive real business results. For example, a company could rapidly create and deploy social campaigns around customer referrals or contests. B2B marketers can get smarter and slicker in the way the go about socialising their customer relationships. Social marketing is, after all, a mandate for every company regardless of size.

Fergus Gloster