0:00
Jennifer Gutman
Hi everybody, my name is Jennifer Gutman. I am the director of Social Strategy here at Oktopost and I emcee our radically transparent webinar series. Today we have a pretty exciting guest and a really interesting topic that we're going to be diving into. So we're going to be talking about The State of B2B Social media marketing and it's all geared and based off of a B2B CMO survey report that we've been getting all of our our data and information and running the past few months. So we're excited to explore that with you. I do want to remind everybody that you're currently on mute. So if you have any questions or if you want to go ahead and interact with us anytime throughout the webinar, feel free to go ahead and drop those questions in the Q and A section of your zoom or in the chat. We'll keep an eye on that and we'll certainly get to them at the end. So without further ado, I'd like to go ahead and get started. So what I want to share right in 2021 we really saw social media taking a big role in B2B marketing and what many organizations were using solely as a brand awareness platform, right social suddenly turned into a channel that would heavily rely to connect with the right people at the right time. And so here to talk about it all, I want to go ahead and introduce you. I guess my arrow key needs some help there, so I'll hit the spacebar. I want to introduce you to our VP Marketing, Natalie Bins, who's joining me on this webinar to speak all about the incredible survey that we've run, the findings that we found, and some interesting insights into the Future of where B2B social media marketing stands. So now if you want to say hello.
1:42
Natalie Binns
Thanks Jen. I'm excited to be here. I think this is a great topic and obviously Jen is my glamorous assistant today and she's kind of hosting this event. So bear with us as we do some winks as she skips the slides and things. For me, it's not that I've got an eye problem. We'll kind of see how that goes. Jen. So if we just go to the first slide, you know this the state of B2B social media marketing. What this is all about is a survey and the results that we gathered as part of some in depth research. It's not a big surprise that we've had a lot of change in the last couple of years with marketing. That's Nothing new. We're constantly changing, we're constantly evolving, but we've obviously seen some significant changes in B2B marketing. I hate to say it, I'm going to try and avoid the usual cliche, Covid new normal, all those kind of annoying phrases that we're so sick of hearing, but we saw a lot of change as we move forward and things are starting to get back to some kind of normality when it comes to events are picking up. We actually had our own first roundtable in London yesterday which was really exciting to kind of see people face to face, staff and customers and prospects alike. But as we do start to kind of get back to some kind of business as usual, if you like, we wanted to understand what the impact had been from the pandemic in terms of B2B marketing and also really what that means for social media and CMOs from this year onwards, really. And so as part of the research, we interviewed a bunch of people. We did a survey that went out to a volume of individuals across the globe, you know, particularly the US and also uk. Most of the people that we met with and spoke to were C level within B2B organizations. They were typically mid to enterprise sizes. And it was really important that we gathered as much information as possible. We've also done further research by speaking with our customers, you know, on a more qualitative basis to understand, you know, kind of what the real thoughts are and what's really going on in their minds. And I think it's really been an interesting journey that we've been on. And for those of you that have already seen the recent Gartner CMO survey, a lot of the information we gathered really, you know, kind of was validated by that initial survey that Gartner had done. So there's a lot of kind of similar themes going across generic B2B marketing as there are to specifics to social media marketing. What I'm going to cover in this session is, you know, a bunch of questions that we, you know, really went in deep on and hopefully give you some insights to your peers in terms of the, the areas that are key to them, you know, what's growing for them in terms of channels, where they're investing, their budgets. Let's talk about that scary subject of budgets. And in terms of the worst case scenario of what we've seen happened in the past and hopefully we're getting out of that, but also what the value of social media is today and what it's driving, as well as giving you some insights on what the best performing initiatives are. So you did get a little bit ahead of me there. Jenna saw, but I'll let you skip ahead now. She's excited. She can't wait to see what we're going to talk about.
5:49
Jennifer Gutman
I am excited. Listen, I have to say I did read the report and everybody who is attending the webinar, you will get an email with the report so you can dive into the results yourself. And I'm excited to get to a lot of these topics. So I think one of the first questions that popped into mind kind of as reading the survey and I have Natalie at my beck and call, but it's always top of mind. I as a social strategist. Right. What are the top growing marketing channels in 2021 for a B2B marketer? And especially when you're looking, you know, at CMOs and speaking to them, what do they think? Where are we seeing those high performing channels, Natalie?
6:27
Natalie Binns
Yeah, and it's not a huge surprise when we look at the results. And thanks for kind of bringing that up, Jen. You know, we've seen a massive shift over the years. You know, there's been a lot of kind of key topics that have become the kind of interesting topic of the day. All the thought leadership content has been around email marketing. And then that shifted to let's talk about paid and PPC and display. And then we really moved into abm. Everybody's talking about abm. That is the thing. For many people, they didn't really know what that meant. It sounded like a scary kind of science that only the clever people were doing. Until we then realized that actually it's not that complicated. And so abm, that's been around for quite some time. Then content became a huge thing. People were hiring content strategists, content teams, really seeing the value in getting the best out of content. And I think, you know, it's not a surprise that we're seeing social media as a direct reflection of that, that kind of trend becoming the growing trend for 2021 and actually, in fact for next year, you know, we know that social media goes hand in hand with the content on your website. The two are very closely, you know, married up. We know that so many people as part of their research don't really want to engage with a salesperson straight away. They want to gather as from social media from websites before they engage. We're very tired of seeing a lot of ads. We're a lot, you know, our inboxes are overflowing with the same email over and over again. And a lot of us have been at home. So, you know, direct mail has not been an easy thing to do, you know, and I think just I wanted to kind of touch on community. Although the stat is reasonably low, I also think that that is going to become a new trend as we move forward and that's going to come closely with social media, you know, community building, which is pretty hard to do from a brand perspective. But a lot of our social media customers, you know, the practitioners are really emphasizing and spending a lot more time and energy in the community building space. So, you know, I see that as a, as a hot tip for the future. Jen, if you're going to place a bet, I think that's going to be getting towards the top of the list as we move towards next year. Hand in hand with social media and the website makes sense.
9:17
Jennifer Gutman
So for everyone listening on in, Natalie has just bet with me. So if she wins, you know, what, what, what are we betting on, Natalie? Let's make a little competition, probably a
9:30
Natalie Binns
little Octa, choose the next design. There we go.
9:35
Jennifer Gutman
Sounds good. So I'll be waiting for my little Octi. But until then, I kind of want to, I mean, I think this is an interesting topic. I think a lot of us marketers, we're always somewhat curious on what our peers are spending or not spending if we're in the ballpark. If we're not in the ballpark, do we really want to give that information? What are we spending it on? But I'm always curious to understand, especially working, you know, in the marketing technology, technology space, what do you feel is the priority right now for marketing investments for 2022 and for, for decision makers and for marketing leaders, planning for 2022 in terms of budget?
10:12
Natalie Binns
Yeah. And I think, you know, as somebody that's been in, you know, a number of different tech companies over the years, you know, budgets go up and down. How you spend your money changes depending on the, the business objectives. And we as marketing leaders are used to trying to be magicians and do more with less. And you know, we were talking about this yesterday in the, the roundtable that we had and you know, it's all about gambling, if you like placing bets, but also being scientists and running experiments. Because for most B2B marketers is it's always about what is going to give us the best results for our money. What am I going to get the best ROI on. And that's going to come down to what their goals and objectives are. But for many of, certainly my peers and people that I engage with that are in B2B marketing, their goals are very often around the high growth, around high revenue, attaining new customers, creating a great customer experience, experience promoting the brand. And because of these kind of objectives and goals, this is something that, you know, really aligns with what, what channels are actually working for them, what tactics and initiatives are actually resonating. And so it was no surprise. And if, Jen, if you want to kind of lead on to the next slide for me, thank you. It wasn't a massive surprise to see that there was a huge amount of people shifting their budget towards social media. And so 60% of the people that we spoke to were cutting between 10 and 20% of their overall marketing budget for social media. And that's quite a growth. You know, social media, particularly when we talk about organic social media, it's always been a bit of a nice to have. We've got to do it, we've got to promote the brand, we've got to send out the same blog or, you know, tell people that we're hiring, whatever it is. But to see that massive shift in spend shows how serious the channel is, you know, as a viable kind of tool to really drive business and really have a big impact. If you're cutting, you know, 20% of your overall marketing budget, specifically on social media, it's got to be working. And this is something that we discussed yesterday and also from previous conversations with customers as well. They're really seeing the value. And it really helps if you've got the ability to report and see some good business intelligence so you can prove that value to the board, to other people within the business to justify that spend.
13:11
Jennifer Gutman
Makes sense. Makes sense. So we have some questions popping in, so I don't mind taking a look or if, Natalie, we want to get to them at the end. You can just kind of direct me.
13:22
Natalie Binns
We can go ahead if you, if you would like to. Yeah, sure, sure.
13:27
Jennifer Gutman
So I don't know why my Q and A box is not opening.
13:31
Natalie Binns
I think I've got a question from a lady that's put a question in. I think it says, will you be sending the deck after along with the insights, which, Jen, I'll let you answer that question.
13:46
Jennifer Gutman
Absolutely. We will be sending the report as well as the presentation, so please don't worry. As well as the recording. So you, you'll have your bases covered. So thanks for the question. And I want to go ahead now and kind of shift over into some of the findings, you know, get a little bit deeper, get a little bit more Radically transparent with us. Natalie, if you will. I'm seeing here, right, 84% of CMOs plan on increasing their social media spend in 2022. I think that's pretty fascinating. I know you just shared. Right. It's something that we're seeing in overall trends, trend where people are seriously investing in social media. Shall I go ahead and hop forward
14:23
Natalie Binns
and just on that point, you know, that's quite a large amount of people that are increasing their social media spend. And, you know, there's a lot of speculation as to what's going to happen in 2022 in terms of business, you know, travel, all those kind of things. But we've had long enough now where we've kind of been in this weird situation to see whether social media has really helped grow businesses, if it's been a new thing for you to do. So the fact that that number is so high only kind of reinforces the fact that during the last 18 months, coming up to two years, which is kind of scary, you know, people have been able to see the real value. And for those that haven't necessarily had the tools to measure and see the performance, they're speaking with people that have been able to do that. They're seeing more opportunity to use resources, get great content and measure the results and be able to really see the difference between using social media in a thoughtful, strategic way versus a. Okay, so let's just shove, you know, any old content out there.
15:42
Jennifer Gutman
Makes sense. Makes sense. So just kind of hopping forward. Right. And I think this is my favorite question. It's my favorite topic. This, you know, today that we're going to dive into because there are numerous ways that social media is helping businesses today. But I think what's interesting, after surveying so many CMOs and speaking to so many marketing leaders and posing this question. Question and kind of gathering these findings. Right. The question, Natalie. Right. How is social media helping businesses today?
16:15
Natalie Binns
Lots of ways. And, you know, I think in the results that we saw and what people were actually experiencing, you know, the top three, you know, shouldn't be too much of a surprise. I think probably the first and the third one are probably the most surprising. Surprising to people, customer experience. You know, in a lot of businesses, their world is quite competitive. Their market. They're dealing with a lot of other companies that do similar things. Probably not as good as them, I'm sure, but, you know, similar things. We've kind of got to a position where as B2B buyers, we're fussier than, you know, we're not just Looking at price, we're not just looking at features and functionality or service details. We're actually looking at the overall customer experience. And it's really interesting that, you know, this isn't just the experience of the customer once they become a customer and transact with you, but from the beginning is that consistency in how they communicate and deal with you as a buyer, you know, is, is that something that you can see how you're going to be treated moving forward? You know, and I'm sure that all of you at some point have complained about a brand from a personal perspective at some point on social media. And I think it's interesting to see how businesses respond to those kind of things. And I think B2B has kind of followed B2C in a lot of ways. And we're a little bit behind. We're now buying from people versus brands. And that's why I think that is so high on the list. Brand awareness, that's often going to be a really important thing. You know, every company wants to make sure that they are at the table, they're at the conversation that people that are looking for their products and services know that they exist and that's never going away. You know, even some of the big brands that we speak with, you know, they still have that on their list as a key objective and goal for social media. And then the third one, I think it's quite new that people are starting to use social media in a more sensitive way to really understand more about their customers. Salespeople have been doing this for a while, but they're starting to do a lot more with social selling. As marketers, the more information we have about our audience or customers, the better it is for us to shape the conversation and our messaging and present the information in the way that they want to see it. So by being able to collect that information through social media, it's really having a huge impact. And we're seeing that with a lot of our customers today.
18:59
Jennifer Gutman
Absolutely. And that third finding, for me, it really resonated as a social director only because I can share that what I do on a day to day. And what I find so interesting is that who, for example, I am as Jen on LinkedIn, it's not who I am on Facebook and it's so certainly not who I am on Twitter. I, you know, I see some of you popping up, you'll probably laugh with me. But you know I hate Twitter, right? That's like radically. I hate that network because I talk too much. But what I find so Interesting. As a marketer and with, you know, collecting customer intelligence, you can learn so much. There's just so much out there to learn. Right. If you see, for example, and I'll throw this out there, but let's say your customer might be commenting on one of your competitors, you know, threads, or, or, you know, getting involved with, you know, different conversations that are really, you know, being hosted by competitors. That's something to have an eye on as well as understanding. For example, you know, who are your buyers on each social network and then how do you kind of bring that data together and how do you use that to really understand who your buyers are and then in general, right. Like learning a little bit about them. I know, you know, we have a podcast here at Oktopost, but one of the questions I love asking is, can you tell us something about yourself that's not on your LinkedIn profile? But most likely, whatever they're going to tell me, if you do a quick Google search or even go over to Facebook, you'll find it. So I just think it's a really interesting. Right. It's new, it's up and coming. A lot of big questions about how do we use the data, how do we understand it? Because there's so much of it. But I think this one, if you want to up your bet, Natalie, I think that this one is actually going to be, in 2022, an even bigger trend. So maybe that's two little Octis we're betting for now.
20:46
Natalie Binns
Yes, absolutely. And I definitely agree with you. I think, I think, you know, people buy from. From people. And, you know, as salespeople, we know that. And, you know, Jen used to be a salesperson and I used to be a salesperson in a former life. So, you know, we both come from the dark side to the good side. But, you know, that's all about relationships. And when, when we talked about customer experience a little bit earlier, a salesperson can make all the difference as to whether you buy their product versus somebody else's. But we've also seen that if, if that salesperson leaves the company, you know, that that can often have a massive impact on the business. And the same with any other key role where you're engaged with people. And so, you know that that personal element, understanding the person you deal with, you know, I'm sure other people on this call have got suppliers that, you know, they've taken from company to company because they've got on well with the account manager or the account team, and they trust those people might not be that they're the cheapest. They might not necessarily be the best, but they're reliable and they're people they know and trust. And so that can often have a huge impact. That that relationship is definitely going to be key. And yes, I'll take your bet for the two little octaves.
22:09
Jennifer Gutman
Whoever's listening, keeping score, I'm going to
22:11
Natalie Binns
hold you accountable at the end.
22:12
Jennifer Gutman
So shifts nicely into the next section. We examined best performing social media marketing initiatives. And I think, again, this is one of those things that really, the sky's the limit with what you can do on social. But there were some trends that we did start seeing from, you know, interviewing our CMOs. So, you know, Natalie, I'll let you kind of talk about what we found here.
22:34
Natalie Binns
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, obviously when you look at social media initiatives, you know, there's so many different things that businesses are doing now, and I think there's so many more people involved in it. You know, social used to just be the thing that marketing used to shout about and make a lot of noise about, and nobody else in the business needed to worry about that. You know, whether you love or like the brand that you work for, in some cases, you know, you might just not bother to do any social engagement. But now it's really grown and social has become, I think there was a quote that was given by a customer recently that said that it has become a business skill. It's something that everybody should have. They should know how to be effective in social media for whatever role they have, whether they are, you know, a leader in business, whether they are in sales, customer success, hr, whatever their position, it really has a massive impact on their own personal development, learning, being able to promote the product. You know, in my career, there's been numerous occasions where I've, you know, shared, where I've just joined as a new organization and I've had people reach out to me to ask me about the product. And that was, you know, without being in a sales capacity, which is always nice. But what we've seen in the data, which obviously always the important bit is that employee advocacy has really shot up to be our top performing initiative in social media. For the CMOs that we interviewed, employee advocacy, and there's a ton of data out there in some of our case studies as well that you can have a look at, it's really made a massive difference. In some cases, it has dramatically beaten other programs because as we know, yes, we all want our corporate accounts to do well with engagement and reach with the content that we're pushing out. But we also know that when an employee of the organization, whether they're a leader, whether they're part of a team, share something, add their own opinion or commentary, that will go much more viral than anything we would do as a brand. That's really what's going to promote the company to other people. Whether that's to buy, to join as an employee. Whatever it is you're trying to share, the employee advocacy thing, it is golden. And there's still, you know, a lot of people out there that aren't necessarily even using any type of advocacy or even thinking that that would be able to be a tool that could create ROI to the business. And kind of hand in hand with that is the social selling element. You know, we're seeing this salespeople and you know, we love our sales guys at Oktopost. They are a fantastic bunch of people. And they've had to be really creative. You know, phone numbers are hard to get hold of. No one answers the phone these days. Email just bores a lot of people. And they've got to be really creative and they've got to build those relationships in a different and compelling way. And so social selling, through understanding how to use social media and really getting the best out of it and becoming, you know, their own thought leaders in content, has really made a massive difference. And, you know, we've really been able to tie that back to Pipeline, which is such a strong message for B2B leaders, because that's really a big part of what we're trying to do. We're trying to drive Pipeline, we're trying to win business. And so if we can support our sales team, if we can support the rest of the business through employee advocacy programs, that can really help us hit our numbers, which, you know, gets all the credit for the marketing team to be able to do what they're doing.
26:46
Jennifer Gutman
I love that. And I really couldn't agree more. And I think when it comes down to it, with employee advocacy, you know, even maintaining the program, there's a lot of tricks. And you mentioned earlier, you know, one of our customers, I think, said social media has become a skill set, right? So if you kind of zoom out and you think, think about even employee advocacy, which applies to the entire organization, it doesn't matter what role you hold, right? The marketing team almost in essence, then from what we found becomes that core central hub where the entire company is kind of leaning on for that thought leadership on how to be. How do I be strong on social? Does my LinkedIn profile looks okay. What should I comment if somebody comments on what I share? And I think it also, as you mentioned earlier, we see this shift where social media is sitting in the organization, how it's working, but also for the marketing team. I think for so long we've kind of sat on this island where, you know, people, what is marketing doing and we're on this island and nobody really understands. And then here comes social media and suddenly everybody starts to understand, you know, in an easy way. And then you put employee advocacy in the hands of your team members who are not marketers and they even start to see their own impact. Right. Driving their own, you know, pipeline and books of business to close their own business. They're seeing how social is impacting. So I think this is also an interesting conversation to have. I know we have inside of the report there's a lot more questions we dive into and share. So definitely worth focusing on the employee advocacy section. So I just, I'm pulling up this slide now, Natalie, because I know we could talk forever about employee advocacy and how much we love it. But best performing social media content. Can you talk a little bit about what we asked or what exactly we were trying to get at here and what we learned from it?
28:31
Natalie Binns
Yeah, so we were trying to understand from the people that we interviewed, you know, what they saw as creating the best performance in terms of reach engagement, just overall best performing content. So, and you know, not a huge surprise, curated content across corporate channels. It's always high, especially when there's validation of either an awarding body or an analyst or you know, a really reputable media agency or publication, you know, where somebody is giving, you know, deep insights, but they're, you know, that they're not a brand specifically, that often resonates really well. The company content as well, you know, that's going to perform well in terms of engagement. But when we really dug deep and we really looked at what was performing throughout the entire funnel, not just a high level engagement area, which is, you know, it's nice to kind of see but you know, we can track all the way through and see where social media has had a direct impact on a customer's journey and bringing them in and engaging with the brand and you know, employee advocacy, you know, really drove amazing results and as I mentioned earlier, is consistently outperforming paid. That doesn't mean, say, drop all your paid promotion, like that's always going to be something you're going to want to kind of run. But employee advocacy content, especially when it's done right and What I mean by that is when it's not just your team just sharing the same message over and over again and you can see if you follow the same company employees, they're all posting the same message, but where your employees are being advocates, true advocates, they're being thought leaders and they're putting their personalization on it that is consistently giving much higher returns than paid. And that is such a compelling thing.
30:40
Jennifer Gutman
I agree. And I think the key word there is consistency. And what I love about this specific finding, right. In a world where literally as marketers, it is so hard to pin down and attribute, right. Why someone purchased something, where something started, what impacted someone, what triggered someone to do something. I feel like this consistent strategy, this consistent piece of content, it really just zooms in on something that you can do that literally is so easy to stay consistent and make sure that you're reaching the right people at the right time. And I just, I love that because right in a world where there's right multi touch ways people can get in touch with you, I think employee advocacy, seeing it shine consistently across all different types of, of content is really fun and interesting to see as someone in my seat, but I think for the world for so long everybody's been again like saying employee advocacy was going to be the next big thing, the next big thing. And then here we are, 2021, soon to be 2022, and we actually have the data to back that up. And I think that's pretty exciting. Anything more to add to this slide, Natalie, before I hop out of it?
31:49
Natalie Binns
Yeah, I mean, to be honest, and I was just taking a quick look at some of the questions that were coming through and I think, you know what's really interesting actually, apologies if I say your name wrong. I think it's Misha or Misha. Do you think the increased spend is due to positive results that they want more of or out of necessity as reach and impressions are getting tougher and tougher. And I think that's a really interesting question. You know, when we look at what's working and what's not working, you know, we are in a really crowded world constantly. There's a lot of information. You know, just as individuals, we consume so much information. I don't need to go through the statistics on how often somebody's looking at their phone or social media or whatever. Yes, there is always going to be an element of it becoming difficult and tougher and tougher to get higher reach and impressions, but it really goes beyond that. You know, most of the people that we're engaging with and particularly customers reach and impressions isn't necessarily a KPI that they're focused on. You know, that's perhaps something that is interesting to look at from a. From a high level, but it's really about the engagement. It's really about seeing the bigger picture in where they're engaging multiple times and where the individuals are in their ICP and where they are having a direct engagement with the brand and you're seeing the interest, you know. And one of the guys that we spoke to recently made a comment that if his wife looks at a pair of shoes once, she's, you know, she's just browsing. If she looks at a pair of shoes twice, she's ready to buy. Which I thought was rather amusing because I just thought that was. Was pretty true for me, but also true to a lot of people. So it's not just about the overall number of reach and impressions. It's about how much are they engaging with your brand and how often and are you seeing that. So spike.
33:52
Jennifer Gutman
Awesome. So I was trying to open the toolbar window there and zoom got me on the slide. So if there's any more questions that you see in that Q and A, now that you want to dive in, feel free. If not, I can. I'll. I'll skip to. Because I know that's. It brought me backwards.
34:08
Natalie Binns
Sure. I mean, there's a few questions in there. Do you have any suggestions for communicating these trends in terms of that sales turn sales teams really care about? Yeah, I mean, what we're seeing with a lot of our customers is that the advocacy programs are all about helping salespeople understand what's in it for them. You know, ultimately they're busy folks, they've got a lot to do, and they're really only going to be interesting interested in anything that marketing do if it will help them make more money. And so, you know, when you're communicating how social media is going to help them, it helps to have a case study. It helps to have a small group of individuals that you're perhaps testing with. Maybe pick a couple of your sales guys to kind of start with and show their results. And I think often within the sales team, you know, any new methodology, whether that's a sales methodology or a new tool, you know, salespeople want to trust that what you're giving them is going to really help them not create more admin, more work for them, but will actually resonate and help them make more money and hit their targets. So that's really Important. And so my suggestion, and Jen, you know, please feel free to chime in, would be to create a small group of kind of people that you know and trust that are very open minded and that are actually going to give it a good go and then show their results to the rest of the team. And usually that has a great impact.
35:47
Jennifer Gutman
Agreed. I also think, you know, sticking to taking that, you know, if you want to call a pilot or power users or your test group or guinea pin group, whatever you want to call that small group, I think what's also important to show and tell salespeople for one, I was once one. Right. And we live in a world today where we want instant results like we want immediately. Right. So with the interesting thing about social, employee advocacy and sales and when you think about those three things. So sales, we want people to listen to our pitch and be like, yes, we want to buy now. Like we're waiting for that, you know, golden buzzer to move forward. And when it comes to social media and employee advocacy, I think what's important and what resonates most with a sales team is really explaining to them that even if you post something on social media and you have absolutely zero engagement, it does not mean that people are not seeing that post. And it essentially what you're doing as a salesperson is you are helping people make micro purchasing decisions in their mind. So maybe they're not commenting on that post, they're not liking it and they haven't shared it. But if you take a look at that individual post impressions, you will see it's more than one. Right. And in those impressions you may not know perhaps one of those impressions and one of your prospects and then again with the right tools you will be able to see that journey. And once they go ahead and whether it's convert into, you know, a sales ready lead or you close, you know, your business on that specific person who started their journey on social through your personal LinkedIn profile. I think that's where that group starts to get really excited because they see it works. But I think it can be an a little discouraging in the beginning when you're trying to train sales or anyone on social media to, to get active because. Right. It's like you need that little bit of fire or success to want to keep doing it. And sometimes with social media it takes a little time to get there. But it again, I will say it again, it doesn't mean that people aren't seeing what you're writing. So keep at it.
37:46
Natalie Binns
That would be my One, Yeah, absolutely agree. And then from a marketing perspective, you know, we're often on this constant push to do better and get more. And you know, we had a customer where, you know, they were using their social channels to promote event events, online events, and you know, previously face to face, their online promotion was, was really converting about 1.7%, but from the employee advocacy, it was over 24% wild. That's a huge difference. And you know, when you think about that, we're all in this together. I mean, I often say that marketers were salespeople, but now what we're doing is we're converting salespeople to be marketers as well. We're all in this together. We're all actually trying to get the same goal. And I think that's really important.
38:39
Jennifer Gutman
So I'm going to go ahead and move forward. So we talked about this slide that was a little spacebar glitch. So I just kind of want to dive into some of the key takeaways and again and remind everybody that this is all available and more in our CMO report, which is publicly now available. You will get a copy sent directly to your inbox from yours truly. So, Natalie, you want to kind of just share or I can share, whichever you would like. Kind of the key findings that we found that we feel are important to mention as we, as we close up.
39:13
Natalie Binns
Sure. I mean, you know, obviously the trends kind of speak for themselves. The data speaks for itself in terms of the growth with social media being the, you know, top choice in terms of growth as a viable marketing channel. You know, one of the things that we talk about is, you know, being able to monetize and measure results from social. And that's been the big shift. Shift. You know, without being able to measure and monetize social media, you know, there hasn't been as much justification this is now available. People are seeing this, they're seeing real value from it. And so that's having a huge impact, but it's also really impacting the need to increase those budgets. And you know, some of the people that we, you know, surveyed, you know, were spending, you know, significant budgets on social media. As you can see there, you know, 21% increase on people that are spending, you know, between 101 and 150k dollars in 2021, planning to double their budget. That's huge. To double your budget, you know, and especially at those levels, you know, that's quite a compelling point. When we also look at the effectiveness and this benefit of customer experience and Moving towards it becoming an all encompassing business tool for social media. So it's going beyond marketing really and it's providing sales, customer success, the entire business, that great experience which helps everyone, it helps increase our budgets, it helps make it easier for us to win customers. You know, there's so many benefits in improving the customer experience and we expect it. We've got fussier over the years. Our standards have definitely increased, obviously mine, mine too. But you know, I think, I think we are expecting a lot more, you know, out of everything that we buy, whether it's, you know, B2B or B2C. But you know, I think employee advocacy, you know, it used to just be about, oh, let's, let's just share the love. Let's have everybody at the organization shout about our brand. It's become so much more. It's become something that is, it's changing the game. You know, I've been hiring, you know, we're building our team here at Oktopost in marketing and in sales and customer success as well. It's really hard to recruit. It's very hard. There's lots of jobs, it's been a candidates market. And so, you know, the way that we're really reaching people is through employee advocacy. The way that we're reaching new prospects is through employee advocacy. There are so many use cases around this. And you're absolutely right, Jen. It is one of those kind of flywheels that I know HubSpot like to talk about. It takes a little while to get that momentum going but it only needs a little bit of wins for people to really buy into it. You know, whether that's, you know, somebody joining the company and posting a picture of their laptop and their perhaps their you know, company branded mug that they've been sent or you know, wearing a T shirt or whatever to, you know, actually talking about key things and asking questions and being thoughtful about responses, you know. And so a lot is moving towards social media and you know, there's a lot of debates as to, well, which social media channels are important. You know, for a lot of the people that we've engaged with, it's the usual Suspects. You know, LinkedIn is going to remain a really key channel for us. Twitter. I know you hate it, Jen, but some of us love it, you know, and you know, Instagram, Facebook, you know, it's surprising how much Facebook is growing on the B2B side. So, you know, a lot is changing there. So I've done a lot of talking. I realize that this 20 to 30 minute webinar has not quite been quite as short as that. So I'm going to shut up now.
43:36
Jennifer Gutman
Well, Natalie, you shared with us a lot of really great insight and you know, for everyone listening, we are always happy to continue the conversation. We encourage, you know, and love to speak, as you can see. So if you have any questions, if you have any insight, if you read the report and you know, you want to talk about it with somebody, feel free to email us. Our emails are here. You can reach out on social. Obviously we'll also respond. And Natalie, just want to point out I did see a question pop up on my Q and A, but I'm having a little bit of a difficulty when I click on it to open it. So I just want, if you could check, maybe it's a delayed notification.
44:13
Natalie Binns
So I can see another question which says what, what is meant by community? I'll just very quickly answer that and then we'll have to kind of head off Community. It's, it's about having a conversation. It's about having a trusted group of people that you can ask questions to. And, and you know, I love Twitter. And so for me it's, it's a group of people that I can actually go to. I might not actually know these people face to face, but they've become trusted advisors through their content and we've had conversations. And so, you know, creating that engagement is really key in building that community so that you can have a safe conversation about anything related to the product, the brand, the industry, the problems that you solve as a business. Those kind of things is something that's evolving and it's something that brands are learning how to do on the multiple channels. You know, LinkedIn has had groups for many, many years. A lot of people are going on to Slack these days and creating communities through Slack channels. So, you know, you're kind of starting on a social channel and then moving to perhaps a different platform or you're staying in groups, you're going onto Facebook groups. When I look at my Facebook feed now, most of it is the groups that I'm in. So, you know, community is about being in a like minded group of people where you can have topics that are relevant to you that you can kind of talk through and get people's opinions and engage.
45:50
Jennifer Gutman
Fantastic. Thank you so much for answering that. So I'll wrap up. If anybody wants to speak more about community, if anybody wants to speak more about our findings in the CMO survey, please feel free to reach out to Natalie or to myself. We look forward to hearing from you. And of course, thank you all for joining us today. And I hope everybody stays safe, stays healthy, and keeps smiling throughout the day. It's almost the weekend. Bye, everybody.
