New Paper -- Which Social Media Marketing Methods Are Best For You?

I’ve long been intrigued by the notion that complex business decisions can be reduced to relatively simple rules of thumb.   Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, at least when it comes to decisions I might be paid to make as a consultant. But I think I may safely say that simple rules can often provide a default decision that still needs confirmation by an expert. This gives people a clearer picture of the factors that go into making a choice without anyone getting hurt.

The good people at CommuniGator, a UK-based marketing automation system, were kind enough to sponsor a paper along those lines.  It's a do-it-yourself guide to picking social media marketing methods. You can download the actual paper here.  In this post, I’ll just outline the general approach – something I think can be applied to other situations as well.

The approach is built around three factors: the marketing methods available; the marketer's goals; and the marketer’s "situation", an umbrella term that includes resources, technology, and industry. It’s balancing  goals against the situation that's tricky: if resources were not a problem, you’d just use whatever methods fit your goals, and if goals didn’t matter, you’d just pick whatever methods fit your situation. No doubt plenty of companies have made exactly these errors. One virtue of a systematic approach is that it forces marketers to consider both dimensions.

For the social media marketing paper, we defined eight goals: attract attention, build brand reputation, generate qualified traffic, generate qualified leads, nurture relationships with leads, retain and grow existing customers, provide customer support, and gather market intelligence. You’ll notice these map nicely to the usual customer lifecycle stages.

We considered seven social media methods: monitoring social behavior, generating publicity, pushing content, making content sharable, promoting content on social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Reddit, working with influencers, and managing reviews on sites like Yelp! and TrustRadius.

Finally, we have the situation. Resources include ability to generate large volumes of content, ability to generate high quality content, existing social media traffic, available support staff, and budget. Technology includes available execution tools and measurement tools. Industry considers whether customers are highly engaged in the products, how easily they can find product information, and whether the product is a locally-created service such as a restaurant or home repairs.

The actual mechanics of relating these factors are something you’ll best understand by downloading the paper. Suffice it to say that we assigned points to show which goals were more or less suited to each method, which let us identified the most appropriate methods for the marketer's goals.  We then used another set of points to find which resources, technologies, and industry characteristics are most important for each method’s success. This let us judge which of the previously selected methods were most likely to be executed successfully.  And that's what we wanted to know.

I felt the results were pretty reasonable, but then I’m biased. Please take a look and let me know what you think.

How to Get the Most from Social and Behavioral Data: Webinar, March 19

Raab Associates has been gradually relocating from New York to Pennsylvania over the past two weeks. I won’t subject you to a post like “what B2B marketers can learn from moving companies”, which is one of my least favorite ploys for repackaging old advice in a “fun” format. In fact, I only mention it to explain why I haven’t been writing with my usual frequency and why this post is relatively brief.

Still, I did want to let you know that I’ll be giving a Webinar next Tuesday, March 19 at 2 p.m. Eastern on “Making the Most of Social and Behavioral Data for B2B Marketing”. It’s sponsored by Mintigo, a hard-to-classify vendor with technology to scan the Web for prospects and predict their interests. You can register here.

The chaos of moving has slowed down my slide preparations, which are made even harder by the fact that our 100-year-old house has such uneven floors that my chair keeps rolling away frrrrom mmmy desssssk. But I did finish my research before they packed up our computers, so the content itself will be solid. Without giving away all the goodies, some of the more interesting things we’ll cover include:

- where social and behavioral data are used in the marketing process. This actually matters quite a bit: there are some things that social and behavioral sources can provide, and others they can’t. You have to be sure you’re using them correctly and supplementing with other sources where appropriate.

- what to do once you capture the data. Traditional marketing data was pretty easy to manage because there wasn’t that much of it.  With social and behavioral, you’re surfing a flood. We’ll talk about how to keep your head above water.

- how to deal with the ephemeral nature of much social and behavioral data: without belaboring the flood analogy, conditions change rapidly and marketers must react quickly. We'll discuss what this means and how to do it.

- which data elements are available from different sources.  It isn’t news that each social network works differently, but it’s still eye-opening to see just how distinct they are. We'll talk about which network is best for different purposes.

- what all this looks like from a sales person’s viewpoint. Most marketers will try to swim in this data despite the rough surf. Sales people are more likely to leave the water and have a hot dog. We’ll talk about ways to keep them immersed.

I’m more curious than anyone to see my final slides, but have no doubt that the session will be useful and interesting. It’s an important topic: join me if you can.