0:01
Kavita Singh
Hello everyone and welcome to the B2B marketing webinar in association with Oktopost. My name is Kavita Singh. I'm senior editor at B2B Marketing and Propolis the global community for B2B marketers. And today we're going to be talking about how to drive revenue with your B2B social media strategy. Over the course of today's event, we're going to be discussing how to use social media as a part of your omnichannel marketing strategy, how to prove the impact it's having on marketing success, and how social media can be used to build brand equity and drive engagement with your prospects throughout your campaigns. Just before we begin, it's worth saying that we're hosting a live Q and A at the end of today's event. So please do get in any of your questions throughout the session and we'll be sure to answer as many as we can at the end. And don't worry, there's no such thing as a bad question, so please don't be shy. The chances are if you're thinking it, someone else is too. So without further ado, I'd like to welcome our guest, Karen Tran, Principal Analyst at Forrester. As a Forrester Principal Analyst, Karen primarily concentrates on brand and communications, content operations, organizational planning and marketing Strategy. For over 25 years, Karen has connected the value and purpose of organizations with the customers and communities they serve. Her passion for collaboration and strategy has positioned her in leadership roles for both startup and emerging companies and technology and tech and service sectors. She spent nearly 20 years as a marketing leader for software firms and system integrators in the Microsoft Dynamics ecosystem. She has also led corporate marketing and communications at multiple B2B software companies. So yeah, without further ado, Karen, I'll pass the floor over to you now. Thanks.
1:47
Karen Tran
Thank you so much. So I'm happy to be here Today. I'll be sharing Forrester research frameworks and perspectives on social media and its role in driving revenue for businesses as this is a challenge for many businesses to prove out. You know, how social media drives revenue and the importance and value of social media programs. So today we will cover how social media is one part of your omnichannel marketing strategy. We'll cover the impact that social media has on marketing success and data that will help you make a business case for the investment. And we'll also cover how social media builds brand equity and drives engagement. So how important is social media for B2B businesses? When we look at the landscape of communication touchpoints for B2B companies creating brand experiences Social media is a primary channel for reaching audiences. So these audiences, they include buyers, but they also include customers. They include employees, influencers, they include journalists, analysts, investors, many different audiences. Whereas demand marketing optimizes to engage active buyers and the majority of an organization's future customers are not in market at any given moment. So social media optimizes to build awareness, to capture mindshare, and to establish trust with all audiences, including buyers. And the challenge is that many companies have social media programs that lack clarity around what they want to accomplish and how they will measure impact. On top of that, organic social media is sometimes viewed by organizations as free. And this causes some companies to put minimal support behind them. Minimal budget, minimal resources. But social media is a unique and important channel, and having clearly defined goals keeps it from becoming just another activity. So year after year, Forrester's Branding Communication survey shows that B2B companies continue to invest in social media. And the results of our 2023 survey are no different. So this graph shows the 13 different program areas that we survey for under brand and communications. And we asked the question of marketing leaders, where do you anticipate to put branded communications investments? So we have we're showing decreases in the first bar in each program category in the dark green. The bright green shows where it's anticipated that investments will remain the same. And the blue bar shows the increases. Now 2023 has been a tough year because of the economic headwinds and the instability in the economy. A lot of organizations have just kept their budgets the same. What we see with social media is that 57% of marketing leaders say that budgets remain the same. But on the increase side, there's increases anticipated at 34%. So social media is sitting right in the middle. But one thing that I want to point out is the decrease area. So if we look at the decreases across the program areas, we see that social media has a low decrease of 9%, whereas some of the other categories are showing double digit decrease or decreases in their investments. The other area that I want to point out is year over year we see website, digital, creative services and content, you know, outrank the other program areas. But social media goes hand in hand with these program areas and their investments as social media leverages creative services and content as well as website digital as an amplifier and, you know, helps to propel those brand programs forward. In a meta analysis of Fortune 500 companies, we found that social media followers and engagement was correlated with high revenue growth across all industries of companies. We compared the top 10% high growth companies with the bottom 10% growth companies. And we found that high growth companies have five times more social media followers and 21% more share of voice on social media. Organic social media is about brand building. And the way we measure brand performance and brand health is with the Forrester Brand Measurement framework. So this framework measures the reputation for the organization, not just the broad global level, but the broader specifically to the revenue generating situations and programs that we execute for brand. And we look at the reputation components of awareness, perception and preference and leverage, the performance indicators that fall under each reputation component category. And we do this specifically with brand programs within a campaign. So awareness is measured through KPIs that determine reach and share. Voice perception is measured through sentiment, positive, negative or neutral, as well as association, which is how much audiences understand your market category, position and your brand and your offerings. And preference is measured through engagement, loyalty and advocacy that indicate the depth of commitment audiences have towards your brand. And our research shows that brand matters to buyers. So Forrester's Buyer's Journey survey collects data from over 13,000 purchase influencers. And we found that reputation in the past year ranked third right after price and technology expertise as the primary reason buyers select a vendor for a purchase. And this shows how much value brand delivers in a buying scenario. In past years, brand has ranked first. So it tends to jockey between technology expertise and price. But brand is important and there's some really interesting Forrester research that highlights what we call the B2B early deciders. So our B2B buyer survey shows that there's a cohort of individuals, they tend to be young millennials in positions of responsibility and they say that they know what they intend to purchase before they even begin looking for solutions. So imagine that they know what they're going to buy before they even go searching. So how would they know that? These individuals, they're tech savvy, they're decisive, they're persuasive, and they prioritize things like customer experience, product value and innovation. They also value brand. And they're an example of buyers that you have to impress often before they show intense signals. These buyers with whom you have to make an impression, a connection and win them before they've entered a buying cycle and sent intense signals that are typically detected in demand programs. So you can make impressions on these buyers through connections to social media. And if we think about what social media really is, is social media taps into the human desire connect the human desire to learn from other people as well as from brands. And when you deploy your social media programs, it's important to not just deploy them from a brand standpoint, but to leverage your employees to make these kinds of connections with people like the early deciders. According to Forrester's Buyer's Journey survey from 2023, almost 2/3 of buying decisions are made from complex buying groups that include several departments with two to nine or more people in a buying group. Now, these buying groups might contain two or four or six individuals from outside of the company. So who are these individuals? Right. They can be consultants and influencers with demand generation programs targeting buyer Personas. How are you creating impressions within individuals who don't fit into the buyer Persona profile? These consultants, these people from outside the company. And you need to do that through demand creation programs leveraging social media touchpoints that create brand experiences for a broad array of audiences. Our research also shows that in a B2B buying cycle, purchase influencers find 18 interaction types meaningful across the buyer's journey. And half of those are self guided interactions. So from discover, through evaluate through commit, buyers and purchase influencers are defining their own journeys and they're also finding your content in a variety of places. And this is where social media touch points and outreach can help connect on the self guided journey. They can also help to create personal connections and interactions whenever you deploy and execute through employee advocacy programs and customer advocacy programs on social media and social media programs are part of the self guided journey and they fuel demand generation. We asked over 18,000 global purchase influencers to select the self guided resources that were most meaningful in helping them across all stages of their purchase. As you can see here, social media ranks in the top five. And when we look at the impact of brand on demand, we can see that brand lifts demand programs, brand makes demand programs stronger and faster and better. When brand awareness is high and perceptions are accurate and positive, we see an increase in organic flow. At the top of the funnel we see deal acceleration because there is a heightened level of trust with your brand and that costs less due diligence and less comparison to competitors and less searching for more answers and more solutions and more proof of you know that you can do the job and that you should be selected as the top choice. As buyers become customers, they advocate for your brand and that advocacy creates more trust, interest and engagement with prospects. So brand aligned demand programs help build positive reputation over time that help drive people through the marketing and sales funnel. And to better understand the impact of brand investments through social media channels, let's start by looking at how brands build relationships with Audiences. So people's relationships with brand happen through the three reputational components. And each stage represents a deeper connection and a deeper commitment to the relationship. So brand awareness is level one, where you've entered into people's consciousness. It's where they recognize you, where they have a broad knowledge of you. It's where they can name your organization your brand, or when they hear the name of your brand, they recognize it and acknowledge it. Brand perception is a level two connection, and this is where people validate your brand through having a feeling about your brand, known as sentiment. So positive, negative or neutral feelings, and they have an understanding and an association of the category of products and services your brand represents as and what you do as a company. And what's really interesting, you know, new companies oftentimes are looking to build awareness and build perception, right? They're not understood yet. But perception can be a challenge for established organizations as well. Organizations that are known for a singular thing in the market, but then expand their portfolio offerings, they too are looking to shift perceptions to gain a better understanding of what they are today versus what, what they were yesterday and how their offerings have changed, grown and expanded. Level three is brand preference, and this is the deepest level of the relationship where your brand is not only recognized and validated, but hopefully favored. It's where we tend to see loyalty and advocacy. And your goal as a brand is, you know, when we think about preferences, to make sure you're not the best of the worst, what you're really looking for is to build the connection of, you know, not the, the only choice out there, but something that people are excited about and feel connected to. And the beauty of what social media provides, again is, you know, that human connection that people are looking for. So, yes, we deploy programs from our brand accounts and our brand handles, but we also had the opportunity to amplify the execution, the messages and the content that we put out there from the people who work at our organization. So the connections and relationships are built not only at the brand level, but through the representation of the people who represent our brand. And those are our employees, those are customers, those are partners. There's significant opportunity to leverage the faces of your brand through those advocacies and through deployment on social media and through those programs. And brand programs address a wide array of audience types. So as I mentioned earlier, buyers, employees, customers, partners, etc. And these are the audiences with whom you are establishing the relationship. So we can look at the reputational components and connect them with the relationship journey on the right. And this relationship journey. It represents the levels of relationship and the experience of individuals involved in the relationship, from awareness to advocacy. And we can relate this journey to the sales funnel or the marketing funnel or the revenue waterfall. We can relate it to the recruiting process and the employee life cycle or even an investor funnel. And you can correlate the levels of brand and see where brand has an impact. And when we think about the tangible impact of brand, we can look at the relationship level and see that tangible impact in a step like fashion. So at the base level, as awareness builds, we see increases in funnel activity. As we move through perceptions, positive perceptions, we see improved market category position, we see a steady pattern, we see a healthy partner channel, we see increasing revenues and then at the level three commitment, we see increased win rates, we see decreased churn rates, increased customer retention, we see advocacy, we see loyalty and we see impact on the business. And we can measure brand performance through a collection of KPIs and intent signals. Data gathered from social media programs. So we look at things across the reputation components and we look at things like social network size that help to determine, you know, what our active reach is. We look at things like social media share mentions, we look at reports, we look at reposts, we look at social media engagement views and likes and we correlate the performance of these KPIs with the performance of demand programs to demonstrate lift. We also can see active intent here. So as people engage with us on social media and we collect these metrics, we can identify who's interested in our brand and who's interested in moving forward in a relationship with us. Social signals can be key drivers for buyer engagement. So Forrester's campaign framework shows how reputation, demand and customer marketing programs live inside a campaign that addresses a specific audience need or pain. Typically our Campaigns run for 12 months, but your programs within that campaign can run at different lengths and different cycles. Reputation programs leverage social media to engage buyers and those programs track social engagement and intent signals and can be used by sales and revenue professionals to drive the next steps with buyers. They can be connected to demand programs and customer engagement programs to help move business forward. So we asked marketing professionals which social media platforms and channels is your brand present? And it's not surprising at all that LinkedIn is the leading platform used by B2B marketing professionals. X, formerly Twitter, ranks second followed by Facebook. Now our expectation we're going to run this survey again in 2024 and it will be really interesting to see see what the changes might be since the changes at X In the past year we also asked, you know, what is the most strategic social media platform? Again, you know, no surprise, LinkedIn, which is the leading B2B platform, it's where businesses go, is the leader here. Twitter, which is a very conversational platform and used, you know, for things like deploying information quickly for debating conversations, ranks second. Again, will be really interesting to see if there's a change in ranking and scoring here when we run this survey again in 2024. And finally, where are paid programs? Where are marketers deploying their paid programs? Again, no surprise, LinkedIn is the lead. And there's been a lot of change on acts recently due to brand safety and and brand adjacency to topics and conversations that brands have been uncomfortable with. So I know a lot of major brands have pulled their advertising from acts. It's not the first time that this has happened. We've seen this happen a couple of times over the past few years where brands are put into, you know, they feel that their reputation is put into danger when their ads are appearing on, you know, next to unsavory content. So again, will be really interesting to see what changes happen when we survey marketers. Again, One of the biggest challenges that we see in social media programs is that they lack clear goals. So I see this at large organizations, I see this at small organizations, I see it at global organizations. It seems like oftentimes people jump into activity and forget to take the step back in planning and determine what their goals should be and how to execute our targeted programs. What we're looking at here is the Forester customer life cycle framework for social media. So a customer's relationship with brand, it's cyclical rather than linear. And we convey this in the seven stages of a customer life cycle. And your social objectives, they could sit in one or multiple or all seven stages. So on the right side of this framework, you know, what we see here is the discover, evaluate and commit phases. So you can focus here if this is core for you. And then once customers commit, there's ways to engage throughout the customer life cycle. You can keep them informed and educated and excited with content during the initiate stage. This is when you're doing onboarding. You can provide ways to solve customers problems for them to engage with you as they're using your product and or services. You can enable customers to successfully use their purchase by what you provide, the content you provide through social media and the opportunities to engage there. You can enable customers to share stories in the actualized phase to celebrate their success with your brand. And you can also create opportunities for community engagement, sharing and advocacy. Your goals and KPIs can vary depending upon which stage or stages of the customer lifecycle your social programs are targeting. So. So in those early stages when your goals are to create awareness or drive consideration and win business example, KPIs might be the number of followers that you have, or impressions, the number of likes, click through, rates, driving webpage visits, or even the time spent on your site. And then as customers onboard, as they become active clients and as they actualize their experience, your KPIs might include the number of community members or engagement rates. They could include things like customer satisfaction scores or net promoter scores. It really depends on your business, how your customers are looking to engage, and your team's ability to execute programs. But what's really key here is identifying your goals, identifying the KPIs that you're going to be tracking, and making sure that you have alignment within your organization on those KPIs and that you're reporting on them. So all organizations should have an operations model that serves as a guide for how your social plans will be managed. Social operations is the hub of social strategy and organizational enablement. In the early phases, social operations may be planning and executing most of the social programs. And as social activities grow, social operations becomes more of an enablement function supporting distributed execution. So this can be applied in a small organization or in a global organization. And a key role for social operations is to provide measurement and insights. So here with the Forrester social operations model, we have it organized into five stages. Prepare, listen, plan, engage and measure. And they're supported by the foundational elements of business strategy. So it's vital that social operations must be informed and guided by the organization's business strategy. And again, this is oftentimes where we see teams having a disconnect when we ask what are your goals with your social strategy? What we see happening a lot of times is there's a lot of activity, but there's not alignment with what the business strategy is and what the business goals are. Oftentimes the business strategy and the business goals are a three to five year outlook and sometimes as long as a ten year outlook. Marketing plans typically live within side a year with a lengthier three to five year vision. So aligning your social plans with a business strategy is vital to making sure that your KPIs line up with the goals. There's also the cross functional interlock. So social operations must interlock with teams including legal, customer service, HR as well as Marketing, sales and product. As marketing teams, we're accustomed to needing to interlock with sales and product. But as employees are posting information as you are posting information. And we also use social media for crisis situations. So involving legal, involving hr, involving customer service is vital and foundational to your operations plans. Before you get started, there's also the technology that is foundational to your operations plan. So many organizations use a variety of tools for social management, social monitoring and influencer identification. And by having social operations weigh technical requirements across teams, this can ensure the relevant use cases are top of mind for technology decisions and help to drive adoption, training and ultimately performance. You want to make sure that you're leveraging tools to the best of your ability and you want to make sure that your tools connect. So for instance, if you're using a social media management tool, you want to make sure that it is integrated with your marketing automation platform and your CRM system. This way you're driving insights, you know, intent data, intent signals, and those KPIs, you're sharing those across the organization. You're sharing them with your sales team so that sales and marketing can act and take actions on the information that we're receiving in real time from the campaigns and programs that we're deploying. So we have six components for a global social media marketing strategy. And this is really important because you know, there's. When you're a global organization, you have to consider your regions, you have to consider your business units, you have to consider the nuances is involved in such a large deployment of social media. So the first thing that we look at is what is your account strategy? And we use market intelligence to determine where there's opportunity. We want to understand which network should we be using, how many accounts do we need, what should the handles be? And we want to have a clear governance around, you know, what the business case needs to be in order to create new accounts. Now I can't stress enough how important this is because we see so many organizations where field teams, different business units, different regions or different product teams will be creating social media handles, social media accounts without having a centralized governance or process. What happens there then is we lose protection of the brand, we lose consistency in messaging, we lose the ability to maximize our results and this can actually be a danger to the brand. So having governance and account strategy ahead of time that's clearly communicated to the organization and can see considers regional teams needs, business unit needs, teams needs, you know, portfolio marketing team needs is really important. So you want to approach this in a collaborative way, and you want to have an open dialogue so that, you know, things aren't locked down completely, but there's opportunity to consider just that, you know, additional opportunity as needed. You also want to have governance over, you know, managing accounts. So oftentimes organizations have social media accounts that they don't have passwords to that they can't close the accounts that they can't manage the account. So really vital here we talked a little bit about that functional interlock. So you know, who is accountable for what in the process? You have a social media team, but that might not extend to different regions. So who do you work with in different regions to help execute on social media programs? How do you get the feedback that you need to create the content that's going to apply to different regions? How do the buyer profiles potentially change in different regions? And then what is that balance between centralized and regional roles? You know, what kind of subject matter expert do you have? And content support, you know, and how are you going to execute on localization? The next area is campaign interlock. And we talked about, you know, talked through the Forrester campaign framework a little bit, gave an introduction to that. But again, this is another area where organizations can have more success. You know, where social media is more than just an activity, but it's defined within a campaign that works to address a particular pain point of audiences. So understanding how those campaigns, how that activity fits, you know, into global and regional campaigns is vital to the success of the social media program execution. Then we look at social segmentation. So again, looking at the Personas, because they may have differences across regions. So it's really vital to look at that and not just look at the Persona from the headquarters and the centralized area from where a lot of the programs may be deployed. You know, and looking at what intelligence can you gain about audiences through social media in different regions, Competitive mapping is another important area. And so there's not just understanding what competitors are doing centralized, but globally and looking for the white space and the opportunity of what you can communicate and what kind of programs you can deploy through campaigns to beat out competitors to find the white space, you know, what can you learn from their strategy and the influencers that they're working with, and where are the opportunities for you to take a leadership position, not just compete with them on the same issues, but differentiate your brand and ultimately knowing what our goals and measurement are. This is one of the most important areas for having a successful global social media marketing strategy. So you know, what should your expectations be in region, you know, how do you have a realistic expectation? And then creating a global dashboard can really help here. So you know, understanding your expectations and showing how you're performing in different markets and understanding what kind of resources you're putting in those markets that can help you determine what your expectations expectations should be. So when it comes to executing social media programs, we recognize that demand is what everyone is focused on. You have to balance between creating brand experiences, which we've already shown are extremely important to demand creation and demand capture. And so we focus on demand creation. Buyers, they don't want to feel like they are constantly being sold to. So with demand creation, your job is to create experiences that feed buyers relationship with your brand and your constituents, your employees, your customers. Demand creation is an extension of traditional and inbound marketing and offers through social channels. And these offers, they can include educational and deep dive content, they can include tools, webinars, definitely thought leadership, live streaming events. And you want to tailor your content to focus on targeted audiences within a campaign. So identifying the audience need or pain point is key to the success and addressing that need through a cohesive and consistent, consistent series of content and messaging. And this is another challenge point that we see a lack of consistency and a lack of real thought leadership. So thought leadership is, you know, a differentiated point of view and can be used as a content pillar for organizations. And you want to have consistent messaging and consistent content delivered through social channels to really make a difference. We see a lot of organizations have a mishmash of content. Again, you can use different kinds of content types, but the messaging should have consistency and this helps to build associations with your brand and offering. It helps to differentiate your brand
36:44
Kavita Singh
and
36:44
Karen Tran
leveraging a social media management platform is key for program management within a campaign. It's also paramount to tracking engagement and intent signals. As your social media platform should be integrated with your marketing automation platform. This enables you to share data with sales teams that informs them on interest from key accounts. The social Demand tactics framework is a tool to plan and implement social Social demand creation programs that are integrated with content and demand teams are metrics focused and leverage an integrated technology stack to capture metrics and drive demand creation, ultimately to demand capture. So in order to execute targeted demand creation programs, we'll start with the buyer Persona which is typically developed in portfolio marketing teams. And the key to successful social demand creation programs again is thoughtful and robust content. So your content plan should include key thought leadership pillars that demonstrate your company's unique point of view and differentiate your brand from competitors. Your content assets should address the buyer or Persona's interests and pain points. They also should stand out from the competition, not only in their content, but in the form and in the creative. Now, the social team may not have control over the content assets, but they'll likely have control over how to adapt those assets for use on social. So this is where there's a real opportunity to shine. You can take content and reimagine it in lots of ways. A white paper can become an infographic, a webinar. It can become an intriguing carousel graphic. You can have the live stream. You can do a shortened form of the white paper. You can do polls. You want to test different deployments in your social activation execution and use your social media software platform to measure engagement. So here we have a sample of social adaptation. Our buyer Persona Here is an IT security director. He or she uses LinkedIn acts and tech communities and they rely on peers and analysts. So the content assets that are created by a content team could include white papers, events, video demos, case studies, ROI calculators. So what can you do to adapt these things to social media to be in the content form that your audiences want to see, that your buyer Personas want to see on social media? And the examples here are infographics, video testimonials, influencer quotes, key trends and data points. And the social activation here is through LinkedIn engagement conversations on X community forums, polls and YouTube videos for instance. And the metrics tracked are click throughs and downloads and shares and mentions. And this is all being managed in the social media management platform so that you can monitor engagement, you can monitor metrics, and it's connected to your marketing automation platform so in real time you can feed this information to your sales team so they can take action. And this takes us from demand creation to demand capture. And when we look at social enactment, leveraging social demand tactics further example here, this is about creating content specifically for social media. So we're inspired by the content assets that are created by the content team. But then you're looking to say, well, what is it that we can develop and create that's going to specifically address the buyer Persona's needs and going to entice them and lead them down through the funnel in a way that we are tracking, that we are driving and that is accelerated for success. So the key takeaways that I'd like you to have from today's session and include that social media is a prime driver of brand equity, demand equity and brand engagement, especially social organic social media. It really is about brand representation not only from the Brand voice, but the people who represent the brand's voice. Social media builds self guided pathways for driving engagement and fueling demand generation. And finally, use social media signals to build your reputation, signal intent and facilitate the buyer's journey. So I'd like to open it up to questions.
41:55
Kavita Singh
Thanks Karen. That was all really good. Yeah, I think that was brilliant. Really enjoyed the presentation, all the insights you gave. I definitely think in today's day and age there's so many things that we can be doing. I especially like the three reputational components of brand awareness, perception and preference. Just to kind of break it all down and obviously like the six components of marketing strategy as well. It looks like we do actually have a question that came in. In addition to social media, what other channels can be used for precision targeting with a humble budget?
42:31
Karen Tran
Could you repeat that? I had a hard time hearing you.
42:33
Kavita Singh
Sorry.
42:34
Karen Tran
No worries.
42:35
Kavita Singh
In addition to social media, what other channels can be used for precision targeting with a humble budget?
42:43
Karen Tran
Let's see. With a humble budget, that's always a tough one because when we are looking at a brand specifically, it can be expensive. So you can use email as a channel. Definitely. When we have limited budgets, oftentimes tap into customer advocacy programs as a way to really validate your solution. I think that can be a really important and valuable program to use and a place to lean on whenever there's limited budget. You can also leverage if you have partners, as a way to communicate and help to target when you have a very limited budget.
43:31
Kavita Singh
And I know you mentioned social intent signals. Where can you use those? Can you just maybe delve a little bit into that?
43:40
Karen Tran
So, you know, social intent signals, where can you use them or how do you use them? You know, typically what we're looking at, you know, with those intent signals, you know, it's when people are following you, when they're liking you, when they're engaging with you, and when you're using a social media management platform, you're capturing that data in that platform. So as those intent signals come in and you're integrating that with your marketing automation platform, you'll share that with your sales team and they can monitor key accounts and new accounts to see who's engaging with your content on social media social and when is the right time to have outreach and engage with those individuals or you can start to push content out to those people or you can understand what content is ranking highly through those intent signals and you can create more of that content that's going to create additional engagement.
44:41
Kavita Singh
Yeah, definitely. It's a really great point. I think we have another question from Juan Pablo Garcia. How do you track LinkedIn DM activity?
44:52
Karen Tran
You know, typically you're going to use your social media management platform to track that, that data, that information. Oftentimes salespeople are engaged with the, the DM activity. So I definitely highly recommend investing in technology in your tech stack. That's going to really help to automate those processes and track that information. Awesome.
45:20
Kavita Singh
I think we have a couple more coming in, which is great. If anyone else has any other questions, definitely get them in. Given the changes in social media algorithms, how important do you feel that paid media and advertising is for enhancing brand awareness and engagement for larger B2B organizations?
45:38
Karen Tran
Yeah, absolutely. You know, you need to have a, you know, multi prong approach to your marketing program. So you absolutely want to couple advertising, you know, with organic social media. And again, you know, it's dependent upon what, what your budget is, what it is that you're looking to achieve. So, you know, are you new to market? You know, what is your business scenario? Is building awareness your number one goal? If building awareness is your number one goal and, and you have a limited timeframe, you wanna put budget to advertising. Absolutely. You know, if you have a limited budget, well, you know, limited or unlimited budget, you wanna have targeted advertising, you wanna be thoughtful and make sure that makes sense. I have been hearing about the changing algorithms on social media, particularly on acts. I've been hearing from clients that that has produced some challenges and as well as on other platforms. So it's definitely something to watch. But again, you always want to have a multi pronged approach to your marketing.
46:45
Kavita Singh
Yeah, definitely. And like, I think it's a really great point that there seems to be a lot of activity out there, but not enough that goes into like the initial planning. And that's where I think a lot of marketers are finding issues along the way, aren't they?
46:58
Karen Tran
They definitely are. And it's important, you know, to take a fresh look at least annually and ask yourself the question, you know, why, why are we doing what we're doing? And I see marketers try to answer that question or think that they've answered it when reality they haven't. They haven't aligned their strategy either with the marketing strategy and, or with the business strategy and the business goals and the marketing goals. And it's, you know, again, we're so close, quick, all of us, to jump into planning and execution. We have great ideas, we want to make things happen, we're eager, but it's really important to take the step back to do the planning and the thoughtful foundational work that needs to be done to have the structures in place to support your execution. You know, it's the best laid plans that you can provide that foundational work that will ultimately save you time and hard heartache in the long run. You know, and that planning includes not just alignment across the organization, but agreement on what you're tracking and what you're measuring. You know, those things set your goals up. And if you do that in a vacuum and it's, you know, not accepted or understood by leadership, that can cause problems. It can cause problems for securing budget and resources and continuing the work that, that, you know, is effective.
48:25
Kavita Singh
Yeah, very well said. With B2B content marketing, such as ebooks, white paper, webinars ceasing to work so effectively, do you see social first activities filling the gap and are there social conversations in the new opportunity to identify leads? Good question.
48:43
Karen Tran
That's a great, that's a great question. What we, you know, people are being hit with so much content, an overwhelming amount. Can social first activities fill the gap if they're executed right? And the same thing goes for content and the content that you provide on social media. So if we're doing the same old, same old, if we lack a unique point of view, if we don't know what our audiences are interested in, if we don't make the investments in creative so that we, you know, capture people's attention and there's, you know, lots of balance there, there's, you know, really outstanding creative that can be a complete miss of audience if it's just creative for creative sake. So yes, you know, thinking about social first activities that are really targeted, well executed, they could absolutely fill that gap and capture attention that's been lost by the overwhelming amount of content that's put out there.
49:53
Kavita Singh
Yeah. And I agree, I think if there is a creative going out just for the sake of it, you know, what's the intention there? I think that's really important to kind of nail. There's someone else. Alicia Ambrose, she said, can you share favorites in your tech stack? Oh,
50:11
Karen Tran
you know, I'm not sure if I can just share favorites in my tech stack or not. I, you know, when I have, because I have so many technology partners that I work with, but you know, there's leading, leading platforms that exist for sure. You know, I'm working with Oktopost today on this webinar and I'm a former client of Oktopost, so, you know, they're definitely a favorite of mine. But I'VE worked with, you know, in terms of the marketing automation platforms, worked with all of the top ones, worked with the, you know, ABM top leading platforms and I've worked with several social media marketing platforms and again it in part depends on your business. You know, are you a startup, are you an emerging growth company, are you an enterprise level company company? What are your needs and what are your budgets? But some things, you know, that I would look for, you know, you definitely want to have if you're looking at social media marketing platform, you know, you want to have the ability to track, you know, different campaigns for sure. You want to make sure that your platform can integrate, you know, throughout easily throughout your tech stack. You want to make sure that it's tracking intense signals. It's, you know, a nice to have as social media monitoring in your social media management platform. So that's just some of my thoughts.
51:44
Kavita Singh
Yeah, definitely. I definitely agree it's not necessarily about which one's your favorite, which one's the best. It really is about is what suits your needs, isn't it? So I know you mentioned that LinkedIn is the primary network for B2B sales and marketing teams, which obviously is not a surprise. I don't think to anyone. I hear that LinkedIn recently surpassed 1 billion users as a B2B brand. What would you see as the best way to use LinkedIn as part of the sales and marketing motion? And what content do you see performs best?
52:16
Karen Tran
I mean. The content that performs the best is the content that is understand the targeted audience realistically. Now if we're talking about form, I would say video for many years now has been talked about as up and coming. What I don't always see is execution on video being well done. People don't seem to know how to do video that is enticing and not boring, doing it right or not just advertorial in a negative way. So executing on video I think is still a challenge. Where I think there's opportunity is live streaming events having a unique point of view, a thought leadership point of view and then live streaming events on LinkedIn, those kinds of things seem to perform well when they are executed well. You know, it can be challenging to, you know, when you first start out, it can be discouraging when you, you first start out to get followers. But it takes time. You have to understand too that again, organic social media is about brand building and brand building takes time. So anytime you start something new, it could take several months unless you're advertising it. So I think going back to the earlier question, coupling advertising with organic, ultimately, can you drive the best results?
53:53
Kavita Singh
Definitely. And I know personally, when I'm on LinkedIn, I see just a ton of content out there. How important is it for also key business leaders to develop their own personal brand outside of the business brand and the business strategy?
54:10
Karen Tran
Yes. Social media, again, it's just that it's social, it's really about humanity, human to human connection. You know, that brand connection is important also. But key leaders, you know, they're subject matter experts, they represent not just the brand, but they represent the corporate values, they represent the culture, they represent the differentiators, they represent the expertise and the vision of the organization. So for leaders to have their own personal brand on social media can really benefit the business significantly. Now, some leaders are hesitant to do this because it can be scary to put yourself out there and some leaders surprisingly aren't sure what they should be saying. They're not comfortable on social media if they don't use it regularly, especially at enterprise organizations. I find at smaller organizations, startups, it feels less risky, like there's less. But when you're working at a really large global organization, you feel the weight of the business on your shoulders, you know, so I would suggest, excuse me, you know, figuring out again, going back to thought leadership, you know, where are you like, you know, putting your post in the ground, you know, what issue, what point of view are you going to take a stand on and stick with that and leverage your know, years of knowledge and expertise to speak to your constituents and to really represent the brand? So that, that is a great strategy and that I'm actually doing research on that in the coming year?
55:52
Kavita Singh
I'm not sure if this is actually, I'd love to know your opinion on this, but with LinkedIn's algorithm penalizing brand pages for including links, should we look to double down on repurposing this content to keep our audience on the platform? Yeah. Is that, is that actually true?
56:07
Karen Tran
I will be honest. I've, I've heard of that, but I'm, I, I'm not really sure what the answer is there. So if anybody on, on the chat has an answer, we'd love to hear what your answer might be.
56:21
Kavita Singh
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. If anyone has any thoughts, feel free to pop in the chat. What is your opinion on LinkedIn's move to clamp down on URLs and posts? Do you foresee the platform getting tougher to use and will it remain the best platform for marketers? What's the best way to kind of Navigate these changes.
56:41
Karen Tran
Yeah, that's another tough one. Yeah, it's definitely a challenge. And they're looking for you to leverage their platform, post your content on their platform, use their video, you know, LinkedIn's video capabilities so that you're not leaving the platform. You know, I feel like they will continue to be the lead for B2B marketing unless other platforms come along and threaten them and take over. So it just depends on, you know, how much pushback they get and you know, how dissatisfied or satisfied marketers are with the changes.
57:24
Kavita Singh
How can B2B social media managers balance creating content that tells the value of their organization but also creates a community and evokes emotions quite a lot?
57:36
Karen Tran
Yes. You know, I always go back to being authentic in your motives and that, you know, might sound not super businessy, but I find that if you want to be goal focused, you need to have the metrics you need to understand your target audience. But if you're really looking to share information that communities care about, the results will follow. So if you're authentic in understanding your audiences and understanding your communities, understanding your brand attributes and your corporate values and marrying those things together, you know, then the results will come if you're trying. And this is where we talked about, you know, towards the end of the presentation of balancing brand experiences with driving demand because buyers don't want to be sold to. And sometimes for some businesses that can be a hard pill to swallow because you say, what's the value of this? What's the ROI on this community? You know, why aren't you selling, getting, you know, what kind of activities are you doing to sell this community? And you have to make sure that you explain to leaders and that there's buy in and support for brand building, knowing that that kind of commitment to your brand and the relationship with brand, when we talk about the tangible impact of brand is going to ultimately drive business. That there will be a result and showing a correlation can be challenging sometimes. But if you have KPIs that you correlate to demand generation activities and changes, that can be a way to show that impact.
59:20
Kavita Singh
Amazing. Yeah, these are all really great questions. I think we have time for one more. So does anyone you work with incorporate Sales Navigator for the lower funnel engagement?
59:33
Karen Tran
I'll be honest, I haven't had any conversations about that with clients. So we haven't gotten to that level of conversation, that detail. So sorry.
59:42
Kavita Singh
No worries. I'll leave maybe one more question then just to kind of end things off. I guess going into 2024, what should marketers be focusing on when it comes to their social media strategy moving forward?
59:56
Karen Tran
You know, so in terms of planning, again, I always suggest going back to basics, right? So, you know, understanding what the business goals and the business plan is for the next year, understanding what marketing's goals and marketing plans are for the next year, and then aligning those things, you know, aligning your social media goals with the business goals. So, you know, grounding there and starting there. Before you jump into planning, you know, the next thing that I would suggest is really understand your audience and your audience's needs. You know, you might want to consider, you know, doing interviews or looking at the current data and engagement that you have, you know, building your goals around that, looking at the reputational components and understanding what are you driving towards. Do you need to grow awareness? Do you need to shift perceptions? You know, is there a misunderstanding of who you are in market, you know, or are you focused on preference, customer retention, customer advocacy? What are the goals of your program and why and how do those things align to the business? And the next place I would look is to say how are you differentiating not just with content, but with creative? So how are you making yourself stand out? And how can you maximize the use of your resources not to just make a lot of stuff, but to make stuff that matters?
1:01:26
Kavita Singh
Well, I think that's a really great note to end on. I think that's all the time we have for today. So, Karen, thank you very much for sharing your expertise with us and really great to hear insights.
