0:03
Shanie Zimerman
Hi everyone. As some of you may already know, I'm Shani and I manage our strategic partners over here at Oktopost. Thank you so much for joining me in our eighth episode. I can't believe it's our eighth episode of our from the Expert series. With me today are Colin Day, Oktopost Managing Director in Amia and we have a super special guest, we have Jamie Lewis, who's the Director of Business Development over at Adobe. I always forget to skip slides in this part. Sorry. This is Jamie. Jamie, the Director of Business Development over at Adobe with the Marketo Engage group and a really fantastic partner. We're so excited to have you on board for this webinar today, these two and myself, we're going to be talking all about the power of social media engagement inside of Marketo Engage. I do just want to remind everyone you are on mute if you have any questions at all. There is a Q and a box and, and a chat box just on the zoom screen. Feel free to drop them in there and we will be sure to get to them at the end of the webinar. And another thing, we have Jen Gutman, our director of Social strategy live tweeting. So if you have any thoughts or any feedback, any input at all, please feel free to tweet usktopost and use the hashtag. Hashtag from the experts. All right, let's go ahead and jump right in, Colin, to set the tone for today. Why do we B2B marketers need social media?
1:34
Colin Day
That's a great question, Shani, but before we get into that, so you're actually, you're actually saying that we've got Jen Gutman's like live, live tweeting stuff. So we're actually using social. So we're actually using social like during, during this actual podcast.
1:49
Shanie Zimerman
Sorry, it's like I handed this topic to you on this webinar.
1:52
Colin Day
You did, you did. So what was the question? Sorry, I've forgotten it now.
1:56
Shanie Zimerman
Why do we need social media as B2B marketers?
1:59
Colin Day
Oh yeah, so look, that's a great question, right? I mean, look, how many of us are carrying phones and tablets and smart devices around with us, right? The B2B buyer's journey has changed and you know, customers have started to adopt a level of self sufficiency and proactiveness that no longer aligns with what we would class as conventional sales models. You know, how often are we on our phones? How often are we checking social. It looks like you're checking social media right at this minute, like Shani, right You would think, right?
2:33
Shanie Zimerman
I'm just casually in the middle of my webinar.
2:36
Colin Day
Exactly. You know, it happens. You know, my grandmother phoned me in the middle of one slacker the other day. Not sure where she got a mobile phone from. But the sales model is changing. Right. So, you know, today more than ever before, social media plays a significant role in shaping the way that our prospects and our customers engage with us as individuals as well as with the brands and the companies that we work for. If you look at the B2B buying journey, more than 50% of B2B buyers now turn to networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram in order to get peer reviews, in order to get information, in order to help them with those key strategic purchasing decisions.
3:28
Shanie Zimerman
Absolutely. I think. I mean, I know when I was first looking at Oktopost nearly four years ago, I went to social media first. I wanted to understand what this organization is, what the company culture is like. And this is just from a hiring perspective as well. We go to social media for everything these days. It's really that first touch for a majority of people, which I think is hugely looked over in the B2B space. And luckily, there are ways that we can now understand social media a little bit better and understand its role in that overall buyer's journey.
4:03
Colin Day
Yeah, no, I totally agree, Shani. Right. In so much as, you know, if you think about, like that buyer's journey, right, and you think about that journey that people go on, right, like it used to be, hey, I get a phone call from my sales rep, right? Or I place a phone call to my sales rep. Sure. That still happens. How many sales reps have tried to connect with people in the last six months? Right. Like, you know, unless, you know, people's mobile phone numbers. Yeah, this, this, this time that we're, that we're living in at the moment, this, you know, this moment in times like, you know, it's, it's near on impossible. Right. You know, the, the events that we used to go to in person events. Jamie, what happened to Marketing Nation this year? Right? It's like it went virtual. Right. So the opportunity to engage with people in person is no longer there. And more than ever, people are turning to social in order to fill some of that void and some of that
5:07
Jamie Lewis
gap and that human connection.
5:12
Colin Day
You had more people at Summit this, this year, did you say? Yep, tens of thousands more. Because. Because they could do it virtually. Right. They didn't. They didn't have to get on an airplane and fly. Right, Right. But you know, what does that have to do with. With social. Like, you know, the, the fact is, you know, social is just a key engagement channel these days. You know, whether it be what, you know, some people call social selling. Right. It's like social selling, really. Yeah. In this day and age is just selling. Right. Like how many people have LinkedIn profiles? Probably the majority of us. Right. Like how many people use LinkedIn in order to get leadership material or get insights into topic X, Y and Z? How many people use LinkedIn to go out and ask a question of someone with. Inside their network? Because people trust. Yeah. Their peers. People trust people they know. And it's very easy. Right. It's like I had an inquiry come in today from a former colleague asking me statistics around, like, social media and, you know, what are some of the best practices historically, probably wouldn't be able to get hold of me because of time zone differences, et cetera, and the distance. And social media just connects people no matter where they are in the world.
6:39
Shanie Zimerman
It bridges gaps and I think it definitely breaks down the barriers and it just makes it a lot more of a personable, humanized experience, which is really what we're all after.
6:48
Colin Day
Yeah. And people buy from people. Right. So it is really, really important that.
6:54
Shanie Zimerman
No better place to be a person than on social media.
6:58
Colin Day
You can sometimes hide behind your social profiles. I'm not going to bring Donald Trump or any political people into this convers, Shani. But you know, people buy from people. Right. And as you say, you know, social helps to break down some of those corporate barriers and it helps you. Look, I was always taught in my career at Sungard, many years ago, right. We had a saying that the power was in the network. And when we're talking about the network there, we weren't talking about the fiber, right. That connects computer systems or connects technology. We were talking about the network of people.
7:38
Jamie Lewis
Right.
7:39
Colin Day
And the power that that network brings with you.
7:44
Shanie Zimerman
Definitely. So because today we are talking about really the power of social media engagement, I did just want to add a little bit of a breakdown. When we think social engagement, I think it's very easy for us to think of the metrics, the likes, the shares, the comments, but it does go well beyond that into the link clicks and into social conversions and impressions. And really, at the end of the day, the most important thing is to understand what you're being measured on and what effective, you know, data can help you better yourself at your job and your role and continue improvement. So when we're talking social media engagement, we're talking about all encompassing, from the link clicks down to the retweets and everything in between. And I did just want to include this in here because we do send the deck afterwards and I thought that this could be a helpful little point. But move. Well, moving into our next topic, how can I. And when I say I, I actually mean the audience. How can the audience benefit from having that social engagement data in this scenario into Marketo engage, but in marketing automation and being able to leverage it even in CRM? Colin, did you want to maybe take the lead on that one?
9:02
Jamie Lewis
Yeah, sure.
9:02
Colin Day
I mean, look, Shani, the simplest way to look at it, right, is four specific areas, right? You know me, I love numbers and I love statistics, right? But four specific areas. Simplest one is lead nurturing, right? So from a social engagement perspective, you know, Shani, you're quite socially active, right? You put a lot of material out there. Sometimes that's done on Oktopost behalf, sometimes it's done on your behalf as a brand. If I was able to get to see who is engaging with the content that you're posting out on behalf of the company and say it was Colin, right? Just use me as an example. I engage with a post you put out there and that post has some relevance or semblance of relevance to the brand. Let's just say that based upon what I'm engaging with those social posts on, take that information and be able to root me in or place me into a nurture stream or a nurture queue so that you can drip additional content out to me through other channels that you may know I participate in, such as email, right? So that's number one. Second part is, look, the reason for automation or marketing automation technology such as marketo is to enable us to do things at scale, right? And what do we want to do with those results? Once we've done stuff at scale, once people are engaging with us, we want to put it into our lead scoring models. So the second of the four would be how do I take social engagement activity and based upon that activity, use it to impact and influence lead scoring. So for example, that LinkedIn post, just following on from that example, it was a LinkedIn post you put out there. I engaged with it. I put a little comment on there. I said, you know what, Shanice, like this feature or this function or this topic is fantastic. Yeah, sign me up, right? Guess what? That's probably deemed as positive sentiment, right? So I've engaged with you through LinkedIn, through a social channel. I've given you a comment, you're able to Interpret that comment and now you're able to do something with it. Take it back into the scoring and maybe increase my marketo lead score by 5 or 10. Right. Anything that's done socially is a very, very public act. Right. So maybe positive sentiment on a social channel is probably a higher indication that someone's gonna buy something from you than opening an email or clicking through on a call to action on an email. The third area, bringing all of that together is really lead attribution. So where did my leads originate from? What marketing tactics did I deploy against this particular individual or this particular opportunity that saw it close versus this particular opportunity? At the moment? Most organizations have a huge gap in that because there isn't any social engagement information brought into their attribution models. Right. So that's another area to focus on. And then the fourth area is really lead segmentation. And it goes back to a little bit with regards to nurturing, but based upon social engagement activity and behavior, being able to bring that back into the marketing automation platform in order to better segment your leads so that you can improve. The flow through the lead funnel. When I think of sales, I always talk about the 3Vs of sales, right? Volume, value, and velocity. And really what better lead segmentation does from a sales perspective is hopefully it starts to impact those three Vs, especially the velocity side of things. How fast can I flow something from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel and the bottom line of the business?
13:38
Shanie Zimerman
I think it's also, you know, we always say at Oktopost, you can't improve what you can't measure, but at the same time, you can't understand what's effective until you're measuring its effectiveness. You don't know if social is effective if you're just, you know, posting out there to have a social presence, why not take the time to understand how that content resonates with your audience and understand how far that reach goes with your advocates and with your, you know, fellow employees. It's crucial information to understand, to be able to really, again, know and understand which touch points are the most effective for which individuals or which group of individuals. And I think people will find more and more that social media is a really crucial touch point along the way. I always say thinking a prospect goes dark because they're not opening your emails anymore, or you don't see that they're visiting your website, they they could be clicking around and doing a whole lot on social media. And when that data is sitting in a silo and it's sitting to the side you're missing out on really a world of opportunities there.
14:45
Colin Day
I think you hit the nail on the head right there, Shanice. Like you don't know what you don't know. Right.
14:52
Shanie Zimerman
You don't exactly.
14:53
Colin Day
Right. And one way to get to know it is to measure it. If you can't measure it, then guess what? Did it really happen?
15:01
Shanie Zimerman
Yeah, exactly. What is it? The tree in the woods, it falls and you know. You know the spiel.
15:08
Colin Day
No, I don't. You've lost the fall.
15:10
Shanie Zimerman
If tree falls in the woods and you don't hear it, did it happen? Is that a thing? Tweet me if I'm right, please.
15:19
Colin Day
There you go. There you go.
15:22
Shanie Zimerman
So, I mean, listen, I jumped ahead a second. Sorry. But when we're speaking about the power of social media, the point of the conversation, it's not to say social is your number one or your most effective channel for revenue, for conversions, for whatever. I just got someone say it's a thing. Thank you.
15:47
Colin Day
They can't hear you down the road. Can you shout it a bit louder? Whoever put that, you've just like really slack made a day. Thank you.
16:00
Shanie Zimerman
You really did. Thank you. So we're not ever saying, you know, hold on. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, did it make a sound? Same thing with measuring data on social.
16:14
Colin Day
Absolutely.
16:15
Shanie Zimerman
Apples to apples. Back to the current conversation. When we're talking about the power of social engagements and the effectiveness of social media, we're not to say only focus on social media and put all of your efforts into social media. It's simply understand how it contributes to the bottom line. When I'm looking at this slide, I understand here, you know, we're getting our data in marketing automation from three main sources. We have our email clicks and opens and. And we know that because we're sending our emails from marketing automation. We have our website visits and we know that because we have our tracking and our cookies on our website and we have our CRM data because those are integrated and they're communicating together. When we're adding social data into the mix here, we're just enhancing and improving our existing programs, our existing flows, our existing smart lists. It improves it on an overall level from that customer experience down to the communication strategies. And really, I think I like to kind of associate social media with real time. Ish. I think it makes it very easy to act in real time when we see an individual that's engaging with our content on social. They did that action right then and there. We can jump on that opportunity and nurture and have a bit more of those meaningful conversations based on those likes and those comments and those shares that are happening on the corporate profile, on the corporate pages and the advocacy profiles as well. So I think that's always important to drill in. It shouldn't only be this and it shouldn't only be that, but it is important to get that 360 degree view and that bigger picture. And social media has to be incorporated into that bigger picture.
18:02
Colin Day
Yes, Shani, it really comes down to having an integrated campaign strategy. Right. That's really what you're talking about there. It's not, not everything on events, not everything on Slack, you know, white papers. We wouldn't do everything on blogs. Right. Slack, you know, it's not, it's not one content type or one slacker, you know, delivery channel. It's. It's a blend and an important, you know, an important channel and an important part that blend is, is social. Yeah, there's no getting away from it. Right. Whether you're B2B or B2C. Right. It's or B2G or B to whatever. Right.
18:36
Shanie Zimerman
Or B to C to B.
18:39
Colin Day
You've got it like social's here and social's here to stay.
18:42
Shanie Zimerman
Yeah, for sure. So I wanted to jump into just some use cases just because I think that this is really where the power lies. Colin, I'd be happy to kind of pass this over to you if you wanted to discuss some of these. Jamie would love obviously to hear your input being on the marketo engage side. Although I do know that you have a pretty important section coming up that I think is going to tie this all together. But Colin, did you want to maybe talk us through some of these use cases? I think we have like three or four in here.
19:11
Colin Day
Yeah, no worries, no worries. So, you know, look, Slack, the reason you asked Jamie if you wanted to comment is, you know, just looking at the color. The color's purple. Right. So these are obviously screenshots that you've taken from, from a Marketo instance somewhere, right, Shani? Yeah, yeah. But you know, Slack, you know, what this one really talks to, right? Is you know, the four points that I raised earlier on Slack, you know, one of them was around segmentation and how do you go about incorporating social engagement or leveraging the power of that social engagement in order to impact segmentation and add people to various smart lists or move them from one smart list to another? This one really shows you what happens when someone's clicking on a social link. And being able to take that information and change value A to value B. In this instance, it's adding someone to the advocacy list. Shani, if you want to just move on to the next one for us.
20:28
Shanie Zimerman
Yeah.
20:31
Colin Day
And I just have to move the video slack of your head. I've got your head over everything. So I apologize. That's a very beautiful head. It's a very beautiful head. But, you know, you know, so on, on this one, like, you know, this, this again, slack, you know, coming directly out of Marketo and you know, this is, this is, this is dropping someone into or moving someone from, you know, a one nurture campaign or placing someone in a nurture campaign. Right. So, you know, just an example of through the social engagement that is taking place, we're able to take that or Marketo has the ability, coupled with the Oktopost platform to take those social engagements and use them for the purposes of ensuring that someone moves from nurture stream A to nurture stream B or someone is placed directly into a nurture stream based upon that content that they're engaging with.
21:41
Jamie Lewis
You can jump in real quick, you know, and that's the power of Marketo is to be able to listen to those behavioral and make decisions, automated decisions based on that. And so that's why it's really powerful to integrate Oktopost to Marketo Engage because they can sync based on the person's identity, based on what the person does across social, across email, across web, you know, mobile. All those different channels can be unified and you're listening to all the different channels and understanding what their behaviors are. Some people like to be on mobile, some people like to be on social, some do email. I like email myself. But you're going to be listening to all those channels and reacting differently based on what channel they're interacting with. You know, people on social might be more interested in funner content, more lively content, more lighter content, and so you'll interact with them based on that preference. But other people who are more in a kind of a buying states are researching, they're following influencers, they're doing, they're downloading white papers, they're more serious and they're, they're looking for more serious content. So you're listening to all these behaviors across multiple channels. Then you can make those decisions within Marketo to put them in particular types of nurture streams.
23:12
Colin Day
And it also comes down to personalization. Right, so you mentioned channel there, Jamie. Slacker or device. Right. How do I, how do I want to consume my data or my information? But it's also about what information gets delivered out to them right through that channel. Right. So it's really like right message or right content, right channel, right time. Right. So it's I want to consume it. I think what you were saying is I want to consume it when I want it, not when you want to give it to me. So I want to consume it when I want it and I want to consume it on whatever channel is most appropriate for me. Be that social, be that email, be that whatever. Right. And I want the message that is put out to me to be meaningful, relevant and pertinent. Right. So being able to take social beacons, let's call it that. Right. Like data points about what I'm engaging with on social and then being able to use that to impact what nurture stream I fall into in this example then helps as an organization, helps the brand drive that personalized content strategy out to the consumer. And consumer there, I don't mean B2C. I mean consumer of the information. So in this particular, I love this one.
24:52
Shanie Zimerman
I think that this is just the perfect example of marketing technology communicating effectively together. So this is, I just, I love this use case.
25:07
Colin Day
It's like you've got a little love fest going on there.
25:10
Shanie Zimerman
I mean I do love me an interesting moment. What can I say?
25:16
Colin Day
So Shanice and say just to bring on like for those people that may not have the visual in front of them because they may just be listening. Right. And not have the visual talking of personalization. Right. So just paint the picture. What we've got, right. What we're talking about here, right. Is based upon social engagement activity. Someone's been put into a smart list and that's driven an interesting moment. And that interesting moment in this example get sees the sales rep yet notified that some activity has taken place that the end person has engaged with some social content. So putting that into context and the way that I use it with inside my sales team as an example and we have a number of technologies with inside our own tech stack like Marketo for Marketing Automation, Salesforce for CRM Oktopost. From a social perspective, if we post something out through the Oktopost platform, someone engages with it and one of my sales team has an active opportunity that they're working inside Salesforce. Yeah. And this contact, this lead is associated to that opportunity. And so say it's Shani and Shani clicks on it. Then the seller that is working that opportunity is notified via email as well as via interesting moments but is notified that this, you know, that Shani engaged with this piece of content. And, you know, if it was a comment that she posted, like, what was the comment? Was it positive, negative, neutral? I mean, it gives the seller an excuse. Excuse is the wrong word. An opportunity. I think that's the right word.
27:23
Shanie Zimerman
That's actually the right word.
27:24
Colin Day
An opportunity, not excuse. It gives them an opportunity to further engage. Right. Whether that be via the phone, via email, via social, with that lead and that prospect in order to hopefully have a positive impact upon the opportunity. And the way that all came about was because of that link click. Yeah. Because they were put into a smart list off the back of that inside Marketo. And then because Marketo sparked its interesting moments.
27:59
Shanie Zimerman
Yeah. So again, a very, very, very efficient and clear way to see how marketing technology can communicate together from a social link click all the way through a marketing automation smart list and into the hands of a salesperson. And I think the bottom line is, you know, we want to have meaningful conversations. We're not robots. We don't want to sound automated. We don't want to just send out generic newsletters and generic pieces of content. And when we can really hone in on what's interesting for the individual, it does open the doors. And meaningful conversations then just come naturally.
28:36
Colin Day
Yeah, I guess, Shanice, like, the key thing there. Right. Is as marketers, why do we exist? Right. Why are we there? Right. What's the job of marketing? Right. And that's a question that we get asked day in, day out. I'm sure you do as well. Right. Jamie, what's our purpose in life?
28:54
Jamie Lewis
Perfect segue there. This is a great opportunity for marketers to influence the sales cycle because oftentimes, once the opportunity is created, the salespeople might block the marketer and turn off marketing because they don't want the, you know, the wrong piece of content that they don't want the customer or the product to see. So this is a way now that we have an interesting moment. I've alerted the salesperson that this is happening socially. But I can, as a marketer, I can also provide campaigns, individualized campaigns within the CRM or with that, the salesperson can access and they can automatically or manually put that person into a marketing campaign, a very personalized marketing campaign based on that channel that they're communicating over. And we can send content based on that. So not only can we capture this information, but we can still influence the sales cycle even after we pass the lead and the opportunity over to the sales team.
30:02
Colin Day
I like to say selling's a team. Sport. Oh, sorry, Shani.
30:06
Shanie Zimerman
No, no, you go.
30:08
Colin Day
Selling's a team.
30:09
Shanie Zimerman
Better one liner than mine was.
30:11
Colin Day
No, no, no, no. I mean, selling's a team sport. And an important part of that team is marketing. Right. It's like it takes a village to close a deal. Right. And you know, whether it be the seller themselves, whether it be the marketing team that supporting it, whether it be the financial control operations, it takes a whole village to close a deal. Right. Don't get me wrong, sales get the glory, but the marketing team are certainly a key and important part of the sales success. Because if it didn't start with marketing, where did it start?
30:52
Jamie Lewis
Definitely it's easy to get that attribution as well. Not only to influence, but actually like you said earlier, to quantify that influence. And so to be able to track all of these different interactions, not just the emails we sent or not just the event we threw, but the posts that we've made, all those kinds of things that created engagement, that is important to understand, to be able to track that and then to be able to report on it so that the CMO or the, you know, VP of Demand Gen or whoever can go to the table and say, hey, this is how we influenced your pipeline. This is how we influence the bottom line at the end of the quarter.
31:32
Colin Day
But the difficult thing, Jamie and I think the reason that social is so often overlooked is that most people think of social metrics as being at the post level. So post level analytics, how many clicks did this particular post get?
31:51
Shanie Zimerman
How many likes did it get or how many comments?
31:54
Colin Day
People aren't thinking of it down at the lead level. Right. Like people aren't thinking about the. Who has engaged because getting that information. Yeah. Has been. Is hard. Right. Like it's, it's. Especially if you're doing it manually. It's like, you know, how many, how many posts does a. Does the average like, you know, brand Send out on LinkedIn Slack, you know, every day and, you know, having someone sit there and look at all of those posts and look at all of the engagement. Right. Slack, you know, whether it be comments, whether it be Slack, you know, reactions, getting all of that information is hard. Right. And that's where technology really has a role to play. Yeah.
32:33
Jamie Lewis
The technology here is key to getting all that data into one area, particularly Marketo or CDP or something like that. And to be able to analyze the entire data set. And from that data set you can then really understand what's going on.
32:51
Shanie Zimerman
Yeah. And give the credit and the attribution and the KUDOS and the pat on the back where it's due. I think one of the, one of the examples, or not examples, but a story and an important story to be told also has to do with Oktopost tracking and being able to really, again, understand those different touch points. We're able to attribute back to social very easily. We have our conversion tracking. It's not difficult for us to see who from social is clicking on our. Is clicking on our content, reaching a form and filling it out. But what happens between, you know, the social media research and the clicking on the links to the form? Maybe they did a Google search and maybe they ended up, you know, from Google on that landing page. SEO would get all of the credit in that scenario because, hey, they came from Google. But the reality is, is that that first touch and that second touch and that third touch actually originated on social media. So if you don't know what's effective and what works for your organization, it's going to show. You're going to, you know, the proof is going to be in the data that you're, that you're providing and you're going to continue putting the resources and the budget and the time into SEO and you're going to see less and less because you're putting less into social media. That's just that in that specific story right there.
34:16
Jamie Lewis
Yeah.
34:17
Colin Day
With any social activity, though, Right, or any social program. Shani. Right. Content. Content is a key thing. And I know that's a topic for a whole different day. Right. But with marketing automation, Right. It's like if we're deploying Marketo, for example, and a social strategy, don't underestimate the investment that you need to make in content, because content is king to all of that.
34:47
Shanie Zimerman
Yeah. All right, guys, we have this section, I think really just sums it all up. It ties everything that we've spoken about together and we're talking here social data inside of Marketo. Engage. Jamie, I would love to hear from you a little bit more about this. I know we have a couple of slides. If I cannot, if I'm not switching fast enough, nobody hear them. If I'm not switching fast enough between the slides, tell me and I will move quicker.
35:17
Jamie Lewis
No worries. Yeah, so thank you for queuing this up, but I've been working at Marketo for seven years now. I've worked with maybe 200 different customers of Marketo helping them set up their marketing strategies. And many, most of them have a really strong social strategy or aspire to have that strategy. And over time, we've found Four key steps, really, to making that a reality and really very straightforward. The first thing you really need to do, synchronize your social data with your marketing platform. So don't let it be in a silo. Make sure that you have a great. Oh, you can stay at the first slide, actually.
36:00
Shanie Zimerman
Oh, no, I'm going back. Sorry. I tried.
36:04
Jamie Lewis
Yeah. So synchronize your social data into the rest of your data. Very key. You don't want to be doing this in a style. It's very important to have it together. Create a marketing plan that orchestrates across all of your different channels. Because social usually supports other channels and other campaigns. It's not always just the main focus. You want to calculate your lead score. So especially, you know, kind of in the B2B space, you really want to have lead scores and you want to incorporate that social data into the lead score because, you know, just another channel and a very active channel. Myself, I'm on Twitter all the time, I'm on Facebook all the time, Instagram. I'm doing different things. I'm looking at different content that. That's very relevant, very recent data. And then lastly, you really want to understand the ROI and the different insights that you can gain from these behaviors and do your attribution, do your analytics and prove the value to the executive team. That's really key because you want that budget. Not only do you want the accolades or what have you, but you want the budget and you want to be taken seriously in the boardroom. And the only way to do that is to come with the numbers, right? So go ahead and move forward.
37:28
Shanie Zimerman
There we go. That was the cue. I was waiting for
37:34
Jamie Lewis
this. But you really want to synchronize your social data with the rest of your data that could be in your marketing platform, that can be in your cdp, variety of different places to put that data, but you want it all in one location so that you don't have this silo. If you're having a great social campaign, you're going to get conversions. You're going to have new people that are introduced to your brand and that's going to grow your database and that's going to help you with your next campaign. And growing that campaign, like I said, it's going to help you with more accurate lead scores with this recent data, recent activities, relevant activities that are going on in social media. And again, it allows you to calculate that roi. So go ahead and move forward, which
38:25
Shanie Zimerman
is, I think, always key. That's always the bottom line. We want to know if we're putting money out there. What are we getting in return? And being able to collect that data and see it in that one place really allows us to identify that roi.
38:42
Jamie Lewis
Yeah. And again, developing the marketing plan, really, Again, social media is not a silo. These buyers are moving across channels. They go from one channel to the next and back that data. You also want to be personalizing the data so, you know, when people are on, you know, like I said, when people are on Twitter or when they're on Facebook, you know, a little bit more lighter content. When they're interacting with email, you know, you can have more detail, more. More business like. And then also when you're using these different channels like email, you can incorporate social. You can encourage them to go to your Facebook page, you can encourage them to go to your Instagram or other channels that you're using in the social space, and vice versa. You might be advertising on Facebook to download a white paper or something like that, or to get them to sign up for an event that you have coming up. Maybe you're having a mixer downtown San Francisco or what have you. That's a great place to invite somebody to that mixer and so to get them to go from that social channel to a live channel, you know, so it's really a powerful way to kind of augment what you're doing with your other, more traditional channels. Sure.
40:04
Shanie Zimerman
Maybe one day we'll be able to meet in person again.
40:06
Jamie Lewis
Jamie, that would be great. You know, it's happening in certain places, but.
40:10
Shanie Zimerman
Yeah, slowly but surely, we'll make it. We'll make sure it's safe first.
40:17
Jamie Lewis
Yeah. So the lead score. So now when we get to the lead score, you really want to be using this data. So again, the data needs to be in one place, and you can use that data to create and, you know, enhance your lead scoring. You can, you know, you might have your traditional lead scores, your propensity scores, your buyer scores, product scores. You might have a social score, but you can use these to help you move, understand what people are doing, understand what their interests are, you know, what products they're interested in, what their propensity is to buy. Are they like other buyers? You know, what have other buyers done? What are the key signals other buyers have given before they actually made that purchase, what content they downloaded, what events they did, you know, what, What. How they interacted with you on social? Right. And so you can create different lead scores to track all of these things and then use those lead scores to move them through the funnel. Right. So you may not be engaging them on email, maybe they don't, they don't respond to your emails, but they may be driving their lead score on Facebook or on Twitter or wherever else you are. And you can use that to move them to a marketing qualified lead, for example, or a sales qualified lead. And based on their social activities, you can augment what you're doing on these other channels. So really important to have that data, to be able to understand the data. And it's not just like a one size fits all. You're going to have to do some trial and error. You're going to have to do some experimentation and have multiple lead scores going on simultaneously and continue to update kind of that algorithm, that calculation that you're doing over time. You know, just like they do with Google Search. I mean, that started off as an algorithm and over time it's changed and it's much different now than when it was 10 years ago. You're asking the SEO professional, they know that it's changed dramatically. And your lead scoring methodology will change over time as well. Based on the different social channels you're using and based on new social channels that may come to light in the next, you know, over the next few years. Sure.
42:41
Shanie Zimerman
It has to evolve, it has to mature along with the organization and along with the times it can't. You know, having a lead scoring model that's set in the ways of five or 10 years ago, you're not going to get the same, excuse me, the same type of successes that you would if you're now incorporating these newer channels and these more, you know, maybe not. So what's the word? I'm looking for channels that you, you wouldn't, that you would have least expected. And social is really taking a prominent step in the, in, in the B2B space, as you know, not just for the brand awareness and not just for the presence, but as a reliable source to go to, to get your news, to get your conversations, to meet new people to network. And I think, you know, your scoring model, you're nurturing. It has to evolve with the times as well.
43:34
Jamie Lewis
Definitely. I mean, you know, just, I think Even in the B2B space, you know, traditionally a lot of our B2B customers were not effectively using social, but they're adopting more and more now. And so that's even that's changing.
43:50
Shanie Zimerman
It's likely because they're seeing what their competitors are doing and what other people in their industry are doing and they see that, hey, you know, Company X is a huge competitor of Ours, they're on social media, they're very active, they have a ton of followers, they get a ton of traction. We need to be there too, and we need to see how we can get those types of engagements. And I think that that's again, it's an evolution of marketing.
44:14
Jamie Lewis
Definitely.
44:15
Shanie Zimerman
Next webinar evolution of marketing.
44:20
Colin Day
We can have Jamie back for that one, right?
44:21
Shanie Zimerman
Jamie, you're coming back.
44:25
Jamie Lewis
And lastly, you know, just determining the ROI and you know, the different insights you might gain from this data. And you can do your attribution using social data, you know, improving your attribution. Yeah, and we found there's several different kind of metrics that we do at Marketo in particular, this is what we recommend to most of our customers. But you know, three different kind of distinct stages. You got your early stage social marketing, you got mid stage and you've got late stage. So in the early stage, when you're doing this tracking to kind of understand the value that you're creating with your early stage social marketing, you really want to track number of followers. So how many people are following your content, following your different Facebook page, Twitter account, all the other ones that you might be doing, how does that change over time? Does particular content change that? How engaged are those people? Are they retweeting, are they commenting, are they sharing that content? Anyone there new name? So anybody who converts and starts following you because of your content, really great to know with that, who those people are and then the cost per lead. So how much did you invest in that channel per engaged person and new person? Okay, so that's how we track the early stage. At the mid stage, then what we're doing is removing these leads from the marketing platform, typically to the CRM. And we want to track how many MQL's did we generate from the social channels. So how many of these are really engaged and we can track them, we can understand who they are, the company they work for, you know, all the demos and the firmographics to determine an mql. Secondly, the SQL, how many of those marketing qualified leads were accepted by the sales teams? So that's a key indicator of the value of my social channel. How many of those turned into opportunities and what are the value of those opportunities at the mid stage? It's really all about of the people that we engage with in the early stage, how many of them are really good targets and what is the value of that pipeline we generated? And at the last, at the late stage, what we can do because we have the data and because we can tie that data to the person and the person or group of people to the opportunity. We can do the full attribution so we can understand how many opportunities we won from people who are engaged on our social channel, how much revenue that created for my company. And lastly, what's the lifetime value of those customers? Do they buy again and again? Are they engaged over time? And are we going to generate, you know, a really valuable customer that keeps coming back to us? Mm.
47:29
Shanie Zimerman
Amazing, Colin. We are. Well, I cannot believe we're almost at the top of the hour that feel like we need to piggyback on another webinar off of this to carry on. Before we jump into the Q and A, we got a handful of good questions that came in. Anything that you wanted to maybe add on top of this? I think, I mean, this was clear as day for me. Yeah, no, I'm not good with the puns today.
47:58
Colin Day
Are you saying clear as day because my surname's day? Is that.
48:01
Shanie Zimerman
Yes, exactly. That's it.
48:03
Colin Day
Okay, cool. Yeah, no worries. No, I think, yeah, I think Jamie buttoned it up there. Right. It's like, you know, it's like the. Jamie, I'd have a question for you, if I may. It's like, oh, I don't know if I can keep the questions off, Shani, but I've got one for you, Jamie. Right. Slack. And not to lead the jury, Mihona, but just sticking with this slide, right? You've got early, mid and late stage metrics and things to measure. Would you see that the copy that you would share, it's like out through social. When you're trying to impact those different stages would change because it would normally write like, if you think about the, the assets that I would share, say through an email campaign, right. Like, you know, earlier in, earlier in the buying cycle, right. Like, you know, it'd be more educational and informational type message. Whereas, you know, later stage, as I'm doing more, more diligence on the, on the vendor or the platform. Right. It'd be more use cases or case studies and, and, and, and references. Right. It's like, do you see that the same kind of flow from a social perspective?
49:17
Jamie Lewis
Definitely, definitely. In early stage, we focus on fun content, entertaining content, engaging content. So it's not as much, you know, we do educate, but we focus a little bit more on fun. At the other stage, you want to capture their attention, we want them to like us. So that's kind of how you engage on socials, really focusing on the fun at the Mid stage is where you're going to focus on education and so really providing them the deep content. When you know they're engaged with you, you don't want to, you know, like if you go to a party and you meet somebody there at the party, you don't start off, you know, talking about physics or something, you know what I mean? You talk about your day, you talk about what you did, talk about taking your electric bike down to the beach and cruising around and having a good time.
50:06
Colin Day
Right?
50:08
Jamie Lewis
You try to make that person laugh and smile. That's what you want to do at a party. Maybe when you're having coffee and you're talking about maybe that person wants to work at your, at your place of business, that's when you get into the education, that's when you start really getting deep into what that person wants. You start to learn more about that person more at a mid stage and then late stage, you know, that's the interview I guess for this analogy. But the late stage, that's when you focus on closing the business. How can we prove and say, hey, let's close this deal, we're ready to go. So to me, I think early is fun, mid is educational and late stages, we're really focusing on value and closing the deal.
50:54
Shanie Zimerman
That makes sense.
50:54
Colin Day
Makes sense.
50:57
Shanie Zimerman
So we did get a handful of really great questions that came in. I am going to be conscious of time. So if I don't get to everything, there will be content following this webinar that will answer each and every question that has come in. So keep your eyes peeled and also I'll note right now that the recording as well as the deck will be sent to you. If not later today, then certainly first thing tomorrow morning. You'll have it in your inbox. But again if I don't get to your questions today, they will be answered and you can always reach out to any one of us. Shaniatoctopost, Colin Atoctopost and Jam Lewis. I love your email Jam LewisDobe we'll be more than happy to help. So to kickstart this, what's more important to measure link clicks or actually actual vanity metric type engagements like the likes, the comments, the shares.
51:50
Colin Day
Who's that to?
51:51
Shanie Zimerman
Shani, I would, I think that for you Colin, when we're talking about the social, like the actual social metrics to measure on and I certainly have, you know what I would say in here.
52:01
Colin Day
But so vanity met. So the question is vanity metrics versus something that's actionable, right? That's the Question. Yeah. Do I need to answer it? Do I need to answer that?
52:15
Shanie Zimerman
I think you do.
52:18
Colin Day
It's like, look, don't. I'm not going to say duh, right. But you know, to me it's a case of as marketers, again, like I'll put out there, right? Our job as marketers, yeah, Is to support the sales process, right. It's like, you know, it's. For me, I was always taught that it's, you know, how am I delivering value to my shareholders, right? And shareholders, you know, means public companies. I'm not talking about that type of shareholder. It's whoever, right? Whoever is a shareholder within the business, right. So to me, as a marketer, it's all about how am I impacting the return for the shareholders. Therefore, it's all about driving, you know, top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel activity. It's all about contribution to pipeline, contribution to close one business. So therefore my simple answer, Shani, is it has to be metrics that I can undertake business activity on versus vanity.
53:20
Shanie Zimerman
Yeah. I think I always give the example of my grandma who is very active on social media and goes like happy and clicks, like on every single post. She also has a LinkedIn. So every single social post I put on LinkedIn, my grandma, without fail is going to like that post. And that's not. I love her and I value her input and her feedback greatly, but I can't do anything with a, like, I know that she goes like happy. I know it's very easy to just click the like button with your friends and your colleagues and your, you know, you're whoever it is. What is a little different is when you're clicking on a link and you're taking the time to read the content and to understand what it means and then to then engage with further content. But on top of that, you know, at the end of the day, your CMO, your VP marketing, they have the criteria and your KPIs on what you should be measured on. And if it is likes and if it is engagements, then so be it. But don't take away from those more concrete engagements like the, like the link clicks and the conversions.
54:36
Colin Day
I'd say in that example though, Shani, right, when you say like your CMO may be measuring you on those vanity metrics, sometimes that's because the CMO doesn't necessarily know what, you know, what, what, what is capable, right? Like what, what can be achieved out there, right? Like, you know, some of this stuff is, is relatively new, right? And you know, the CMOs may have been, you know, a more seasoned veteran from a marketing perspective. And what was capable or what, you know, what, what they had slacker in. In their day and age when they started out. Slacker may be different now. So sometimes it's a case of. Of. And I'm not saying that the, you know, I'm not saying the lack of knowledge. Right. Is an excuse. Yeah. But sometimes people just don't know what the art of the possible is.
55:26
Shanie Zimerman
What else is possible. Yeah, no, I get that. Again, being very conscious of time this question came in, and I think that this is very related to the people buy from people that are the conversation or the earlier topic that we were speaking today. With so many places, players in an organization who can benefit from social engagement, how do we get everyone on board and being able to execute the plan? And we're talking here, the sales team, the support team, the marketing team. How do we unite everyone together for the betterment of the organization and for the betterment of that individual as well? I suspect this is someone that might have listened to some of our advocacy webinars or might be familiar with our employee advocacy solution. But employees should not be taken out of this equation by any means. They're a huge asset to any organization. Colin, I'll let you take the lead on this and I'll add my two cents afterwards.
56:27
Colin Day
Yeah, sure. I mean, look, it all starts with education, right? It's like, you know, forget the employee advocacy side of things at the moment. Right. But it starts with education. It starts with getting the team and getting everyone to understand the value that social engagement can bring, right? Now, if we take that specific question and put an employee advocacy spin on it, why would a brand want to go down the route of getting all of their staff involved? If you look at the reach typically of all of the corporate social channels and you look at the collective reach of all of the employee social channels, the reach of the employees is typically 10 times more, at least than that of the corporate channels. And then add to that the people buy to people element, it's statistically proven that eight times more engagement will happen. Right. For social posts that go out from an employee through a personal channel than through a corporate branded channel.
57:49
Jamie Lewis
One thing I've found as well is you should gamify this and give an incentive to the employees to do this. So that's another key way to drive behaviors. Just provide incentive. If you do that, you won't get everybody. You might get. You'll get 10% of the people, but they'll be like, you know, superstars.
58:11
Shanie Zimerman
Super users.
58:12
Jamie Lewis
Yeah, they'll be super users. They'll be into the game and they'll be trying to win.
58:16
Colin Day
And so actually Jamie, statistically there, right it's like you said, 10% statistically you'll see on an advocacy program at a corporate level you'll see around 25% of the workforce actually get engaged and jump on board and become advocates. So a little bit, it's a little bit higher than that.
58:39
Shanie Zimerman
Head to head with Colin on statistics.
58:43
Jamie Lewis
That's good though. That's perfect. I think that, yeah, I think maybe. Yeah, absolutely. More than 10%. But you know, whatever that number is, it's going to be. Those are going to be the key people to help drive that initiative.
58:56
Shanie Zimerman
Right, right.
59:00
Colin Day
People will fight over a coffee card. Right. Over a Starbucks card. People all compete over the smallest of things. Right. Like I've seen people give away iPhones or tanks, driving experiences. I've seen people give away like you know, a five bucks.
59:14
Shanie Zimerman
I saw Apple watches for like every single month they gave away Apple watches. And I was like I'll for you, I'll add myself to your board.
59:26
Colin Day
Yep.
59:28
Jamie Lewis
No.
59:28
Shanie Zimerman
And I think the beauty is is that advocate and your employee social data also does not have to sit in a silo. It can be measured, it can be understood. You can very well understand hey, is my advocacy program even more effective than my corporate social content? Not to say we shouldn't put our cut out content on our corporate profiles but it just shows how effective your employees can be and it really for the employee as well. It's extremely beneficial for them. We are at the round hour guys. I have a feeling we could go on for a much longer time than this. I know I didn't get around to all of the questions but as I did mention we will be creating some more bits and pieces so keep an eye out on our social channels, keep an eye out on our blogs. I'll make sure to incorporate the questions into some sort of forum so that our audience can have some follow up answers and some things to go off of. But obviously you know, always reach out to us. Again our emails are right here. You don't need to memorize it because we're sending you this deck.
1:00:35
Colin Day
What's your social handle though? Shanice? Like this is social. You should have put our social handles on there. Right.
1:00:40
Shanie Zimerman
624tbright624 no, but I want to say thank you again Colin. Always a pleasure. I mean we speak quite regularly but love seeing you in a button down on a webinar. And, Jamie, thank you so much for joining us today. It was so much fun. It was great having you. It was great having your input and feedback. And I hope you had a little bit of fun yourself.
1:01:12
Jamie Lewis
Good to be here. Thank you so much.
1:01:14
Shanie Zimerman
Amazing. Thank you both. And thank you to our audience. So, as I said before, I'll say it again, we're continuing with our from the Expert series indefinitely. So stay tuned for our next episode. It's going to be towards the end of October, and I look forward to seeing you guys then. And in the meantime, continue to stay healthy, stay happy, and we'll speak soon. Thank you all. Bye.
1:01:39
Colin Day
Bye.
1:01:41
Shanie Zimerman
Bye.
