3 Ways to Employ Social to Drive Your Go To Market

Social marketing is a key tool in the B2B marketer’s toolbox to implement your go to market strategy. But it’s a tactic and not a strategy. Here are 3 ways to use social media to drive your marketing and business objectives.

Employee AdvocacyOne tactic is to partner with your employees to drive social engagement and brand messaging. The key for successful employee advocacy programs at scale is to have multiple messaging frameworks for each of your company’s key constituencies that are aligned to your overall company messaging and positioning. Planning and documenting this is important to ensure you have your employees telling the right story to the right audiences.

Additionally, all too often with employee advocacy programs there is not enough thought put into how to implement the program. This leads to missed results and desired outcomes. While technology solutions may help facilitate and monitor engagement, they are not connected to your company’s culture. It’s up to you as the social or marketing leader to determine which features are most valuable to your employees to ensure high adoption and ultimately, high advocacy for your brand..

Social SellingMany sales organizations stumble too with social selling. It’s not just using social platforms to prospect for new customers. But to sell effectively using social, companies must plan out how social will fit into their demand generation and selling processes. And select social selling tools that align with these strategies. And from a content perspective, all social selling activities should map to your overall demand generation programs. Aligning these two efforts is a game changer for effective social selling.

Also, the implementation of Social Selling is tricky. One rule of thumb is to ensure your sales team’s social efforts are tabulated properly in your CRM and / or Sales Tools. Across 100s of firms I’ve seen in the past five years – where social selling is the norm – the gap is that those interactions with customers, prospects and other stakeholders are not recorded in your sales tools. This leads to communications and customer experience gaps.

Social AdvertisingA key way to grow your brand and product awareness is to buy advertising on social platforms. But this effort must be in alignment with your overall marketing strategy, account based marketing programs and your other advertising efforts to ensure social advertising is supporting your existing investments.

Additionally, you need to measure these programs in context of other paid advertising programs (SEM, CTV, etc.) to ensure that you’re getting the best return on ad spend. This requires either an attribution model or media mix model to measure the return on each dollar investment. Social plays an important role to reach your target constituencies and you want to make sure that your overall ad spend is efficient, as well as effective.

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