0:00
Alina Dallal
Hi everyone and welcome to our panel, unlocking the power of Social Intent Data. I'm your host today. I'm Alina Delal, the content marketing manager at Oktopost and I'm joined today by the incredibly talented Bright and Joanna. We're going to dive into everything you need to know about social intent data. It's truly a trove of knowledge that marketers have at their disposal, whether we know it or not. But once you know how to find this social intent data and you know how to use it, you can enhance your marketing strategy for success. Convert more prospects into customers. Equip your sales teams with the insight they need. Need that can help them drive sales, improve the impact of social media on business outcomes. So we're going to get through everything that we need to today throughout the webinar. If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the chat in the Q and A and we'll get to it at the end. And all of you will be receiving a recording of this webinar at the end. So let's kick off and introduce you both. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your role and your background? Bright, I'm going to start with you.
1:00
Bright Uduji
Yes. So, hello everyone. First of all, thank you for joining. So Kansas City in there. That's amazing. I mean, well done to the chiefs. Yeah. My name is Bright Iduji. I'm a Senior insights analyst at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. My I've been at LinkedIn for about two and a half years now and basically I help clients in the Middle east and North Africa to basically make better marketing decisions on the platform. Leveraging our incredible first party data. In terms of my background, I got into the analytics world while I was at Siemens, amazing German company. I started from the engineering side of things and then I slowly transitioned into the sales and marketing side of things, helping the sales teams to better manage their lead generation processes and their sales dashboards. And that's how I ended up landing my gig at LinkedIn. My passion is to help businesses small, large, doesn't matter. Help businesses across the world to make better, smarter, intelligent decisions. Leveraging the power of data and technology to help them with their cost efficiencies and ultimately revenue growth. So I'm excited for this panel. I'm excited to learn and excited to share some of my experience.
2:25
Alina Dallal
Amazing. Thank you. We're so excited to have you here. Thank you for joining us. Joanne, I'm going to hand it over to you.
2:31
Joanna Braunold
Thank you. So thank you to Oktopost for having me and thank you to everyone for joining today. I work at Taito Care as the Content and Communications director. So I manage everything from pr content everything and social media as well. Also falls under me and we'll talk about it a little bit later, but we do kind of B2B and B2C, which is a really, really interesting combination. And I got into marketing really. I kind of talked my way into my first marketing job and from there was really lucky to be able to work at a variety of different startups and corporates, including Microsoft, where I was really able to kind of grow my experience, learn more on every job, and kind of work my way into the bit of marketing that I like the most, which is around content, storytelling and of course, kind of taking Bright's love of data and leveraging that as well to make everything I do better, hopefully.
3:39
Alina Dallal
Amazing. I'm so excited to get straight into this webinar. Thank you so much for joining me, both of you. So let's get straight into it. Intent Data is nothing new, right? So what is intent data and why is it so important in B2B marketing?
3:52
Joanna Braunold
Right.
3:52
Alina Dallal
I'm going to hand over to you again first.
3:56
Bright Uduji
No problem. So when I think of intent data, again, the clue is in the name Intent Data. Like what is intent? Right? When we're looking at intent in a B2B perspective, we're thinking, what are the interests, desires and needs of our clients and consumers? You know, what is it that bugs them? What is it that they're searching for? What are they looking to purchase in terms of products and services? So intent data are the measurable signals online that we can use to indicate what those interests are, what those needs are, what those desires are. So why is it important? Well, according to Oktopost, actually, 83% of B2B buyers search online before they purchase. That's. That's 8 out of 10 B2B buyers. And when you look at their online searches, they're actually searching at least 12 times before they actually visit a brand's website. So what that means is that your B2B buyers are. They take their time, they really do take their time to understand what they're going to purchase before they purchase it. And they are online. So that's why it's important for us to align as aligned business products and services to those needs and desires. So intent Data is your. Is your way to align your product and services to the needs and desires and interests of your potential B2B clients?
5:32
Alina Dallal
Definitely. Joanna, is there anything you'd like to add to that?
5:35
Joanna Braunold
Yeah, I Think Bright covered it very, very well. But I think, you know, also there's a lot of elements of, as Brett was saying, really understanding your customer and you can do that from loads of different angles and whether it's understanding what content they're interacting with and therefore that might be where their interests lie. So at Titlecare, we have a pretty long sales cycle. So it's not just about kind of capturing leads and then kind of converting them. It's about how we keep them interested across, across their journey with us. And part of the way that we do that is with social intent data and really kind of using it to drill down into what people are interested in as part of the buying process, but also as part of the struggles and the pains that they're having as part of their role and how we can then address them in ongoing conversations we have with them, in content that we create, in things that we target to them. And I think it really just helps us to get that whole picture and that helps us to learn more and target better.
6:38
Alina Dallal
Definitely. I think both of your answers covered the question really well. In general wise, it's so important. I'm so excited for the rest of the questions because we're going to dive into really all the different practical uses of it. So have said that when it comes to social media, we're seeing a lot of intent data that we can collect on these platforms, as you guys have mentioned. In fact, there's so much data that I think it's actually really hard to keep track of. And we know that there's been a shift in buyer behavior. According to LinkedIn statistics, 70%, 75%, sorry, of buyers are researching solutions online. With 50% of those, 75 are actually using LinkedIn to look for a solution. So, Bright Jo, how are you incorporating social intent data into the way you work and what are you using it for? Bright, I'll start with you again.
7:24
Bright Uduji
That's good. Oh no, this is a very good question. So, you know, intent data coming out of COVID I mean, everyone is. Everything is so digitized now. People B2B buyers are making decisions online. People are online so much of the time now. And just to set the context for my answer to this question, there's over 1.1 billion active members on LinkedIn today. There are over 67 million active businesses on LinkedIn today. Right. When you. There's over. One more interesting stat is over 80 million director level and above active members on LinkedIn today. That's incredible. That's an incredible pool of audience and when you think about the fact that LinkedIn is not just marketing data that's on there, it's also, there's also people on there who are just on LinkedIn to learn. You know, there's people on there to market, to learn to, to, to get a job. There's people on there to, to just connect and network with people. So there's all kinds of, and interests and desires. It's like this incredible pool of professional activities on the platform. So one way that I really want to emphasize that I use on my day to day intent data for is what I would refer to as target audience, deep understanding. So clients that I work with, they really want to understand who is the target audience. Like who's engaging with this subject matter that we're, that we're trying to be thought leaders on. Like who's engaging with our brand, who's engaging with our products and services. Like tell me about them. Like what's the, you know, looking at demographics from graphics, like what, what are they engaging with? What are they, what are they engaging with? Newsletters, posts, thought leader pieces, document ads, what, what are they engaging with? What types of ad content, creative types are they engaging with? What interest signals are they showing? How can I better tailor my marketing solution to reach that audience with the right content at the right time? So that's basically a big part of my day to day and I help them at an aggregated level to understand how to do this, put this together, sorry. As I put this together as a story and then get them to use that, to leverage that to build their marketing campaigns better tailored to those customer experiences.
9:49
Alina Dallal
Yeah, I think it's a really important thing we were mentioning and we're going to dive into a bit more but you can use it really to tailor these marketing campaigns that really resonate with your audience and it's such an important way to get insight into what they like and understanding them on a deeper level. Jo, how about you?
10:06
Joanna Braunold
Sure. So we run ABX marketing at Taito Care. So that's account based. So it's really important for us to really understand what is the icp, who do we need to target, what is important to them, what isn't important to them. And social data really helps us to understand that a lot more deeply. Also what's interesting for us is we also run, as I mentioned earlier Briefly, we run B2B and B2C marketing. And I actually took me, it took us a while actually to kind of understand how closely interconnected those two sides of our marketing is. So on the one hand, we're targeting healthcare systems, insurers, and that's obviously on our B2B side. And then we also target B2C, we target our users. So we have a. I did mention this before, we have a small little device that does medical exams from home. So we also run campaigns to people, to parents, to people who are using it. And what we realized and what social intent data helped us to. Tracking better data helped us to understand is really that the people who we would be targeting naturally on the B2B side are really heavily engaging with us on our B2C channels. So we've got loads and loads of interactions on Facebook and Instagram from people who are kind of coming up on our Salesforce lists and accounts. And that's really helped us to kind of understand how we can better target the group, that specific group in more places, how we can really understand what they want to interact with. Right. You don't necessarily go and say, right, I'm going to target the CEO of a healthcare system who is managing healthcare for like 100,000 people with a meme on Instagram. But it turns out that's what she wrote. Hahaha. On I want to learn more about this thing. Right. So this is a really great way not just to kind of get into what is the icp, what do we think they want to know about, but to actually kind of get into the inner workings of their brain. And that helps us to kind of then tell a better story to them, market to them better on a more kind of human level as well by leveraging that data.
12:27
Alina Dallal
Definitely. I think both of you covered that really well and you really can reveal what people's interests are online. And I think it's really interesting what you're saying with, with the B2C to the B2C. B2B content is that people are still interacting with it in the B2B sphere. So you can help upgrade almost or scale up your marketing strategy because you know that that's what people like. So I like the trial and error and like learning from it. It's really interesting and Right. I'm going to direct this question to you as you're working at LinkedIn, which is known for B2B professionals spend their time. You said before there's a sheer volume of B2B professionals that have an account on LinkedIn and the amount of members there are. How do you then as a marketer, understand the patterns of social intent data to inform your marketing strategy or even use it to make data driven when we know that the journey on social media can be unique to the individual buyer. So let's just say, for example, you have a prospect that engages with your post once, let's say, but then they make a purchase. And then on the other hand, you have another prospect that's engaged with your post a handful of times a week, let's say, but doesn't buy. So how do you as a marketer understand these patterns?
13:39
Bright Uduji
Yes, that's a great question. Firstly, I'd like to agree with that point that different businesses and different use cases are different. The marketing funnel is very dynamic. I think that's one thing that's not as advertised as it should be. Like, buying journeys are different and, and the funnel is very dynamic. I have a framework that I use that tends to work, I would say, a lot with my clients anyways, it resonates with them. And the framework I use is very simple. It's what is, sorry, why, what, who and how. So like, I'll explain this. It's like a 400 approach. So first of all, the why, like, who is. Is there actual engagement with this topic or subject matter or product or service or brand on the platform? Like, that's the starting point before we start delving into patterns. And that's like, is there an, is there an actual need for this? Is there, is there, is there noise? You know, is there, is there stuff happening around this? That's a starting point. And then if there is, okay, well, now it's time to look at who's engaging with that. So we look at things like demographics, firmographics. So demographics, like what countries are these engagements coming from? Cities demographics like company sizes, industries, job functions, job titles, things like that. You know, we really try to start to break it down of where is this coming from? Because we start to find the patterns in the data of like, oh, it's coming from this type of job as opposed to this type of job, which you might think it's coming from. And then when you understand that, you then move to, okay, what are they engaging with? Are they engaging with newsletters, different types of ad formats, content types, creative types, objective types, what's the pattern there? You know, and then, okay, how are they engaging? So across the funnel, from metrics such as click through rates and engagement rates right through to bottom funnel metrics like lead generation rates and website conversions, you're like, okay, what are those metrics that are showing up with that, with the engaged audience, you know, and, and why? So all of a sudden you've gone from this sort of wide approach to like, okay, this markets and these industries are looking at these specific types of content and that's what's driving up the engagement rates and follow through website conversions. You see what I mean? Now all of a sudden you found that pattern in the data and then you put that together as a story and then you feed that to your clients and your clients are able to use that to then analyze. Okay, what's our reach penetration of that audience? Right? Is it 2%? Okay, we have a 98 opportunity white space there. What's the, what's the Persona match rate? So this is the Persona we're thinking of, but like how matches it to what the data is telling us. So all of a sudden you start, your client starts to make better strategic marketing decisions. They're doing better segmentations, they're doing better packaging marketing packages for different audience types at different times, which helps them then hit the ultimate goal, which is can I reach the right audience with the right content at the right time. So and the other thing I would like to talk about very quickly is sample size because this always comes up in conversation. You know, on one end you have hyper tuned marketing, right? On another hand you have over generalized marketing content. You want to find that sweet spot by having the right sample size. So one technique I tend to use is just to use the median engaged audience rather than the super highly engaged or just everyone who's engaged. I use that sort of median engaged audience and I'm like, okay, because that's where you find the richest and most diversified pool of audience that represents the population of engagement. I don't want to get too technical but, but that is how I find the patterns. I feed it back to the client and that's also how I make sure I use the right sample size so I can communicate the right information to the clients.
17:40
Alina Dallal
That definitely made sense. I think you broke it down really clearly. And I think what's so important when looking at these patterns and drilling into the data, I think sometimes we focus on how many likes is there, how many comments is there. But you're right, you need to focus on how many engagements there are. But who is the person engaging, what background are they from, what job are they from, what position are they in the company, what company are they from, are they our target audience? And it's not the, it's not one size fits all, it's not the same for every company. So that's why it's so important to drill down into that data. So thank you for sharing That. I thought you broke that down really well. It was a really good framework to follow. I'm going to move on to the next question. Joanna, I'm interested to know, as a marketer, as you're working with social and TED data in the B2B space, how are you using it to empower your marketing strategy?
18:28
Joanna Braunold
Yeah, so I think it's a really good question because I think a lot of what we do is we kind of take the social intent data and we use it to. We can use that to kind of work out who to reach out to. But what we're trying to do as well, of course we're also doing that, but what we're also trying to do is feed that back into our marketing strategy as well. So, for example, we can understand based on social intent data, if we get more conversions from a specific post or if we get more relevant engagements on a specific post on. On LinkedIn, for example. Great. That's really interesting. That is that that message resonated. So perhaps we should run, you know, not about 1:1 necessarily, but if we see a pattern, then we want to say, well, maybe we should start creating some bigger content around that. Should we run a campaign? Should we do a webinar about that? That's clearly a big kind of ticket issue, which we recently did with. We ran a school summit for. We saw a lot of our audience was struggling to kind of share information around how they run school healthcare program. So we actually created an event which turned out to be a great success. And that was based on some of our learnings on social, where we saw there was a massive uptick in questions around school healthcare and how people are running virtual care programs there. And then I think the other thing that's really useful for us and so that's kind of how we. We take it and we kind of bring it back into the strategy. And then on the other side, of course, we're using that to. To sell, right? I mean, we're talking about social setting, we're talking about social intent data, and we're using that to really be able to enhance our strategies. Bright was talking a lot about, you know, how we reach the right people at the right time. And that's very much really what strategies are about is. Is really narrowing down that. That ICP and then really going after that specific audience. And our social intent data really helps us to do that because we're able to track who's really interested. You know, we have our Oktopost instance linked with our Salesforce instance and that really helps us to kind of understand which accounts are really interacting with us, which accounts are really engaging. And I think that, you know, we kind of like dislikes and comments a little bit because of course there are bigger, There are bigger fish to fry. Right. But these are also good indicators
21:09
Alina Dallal
and
21:09
Joanna Braunold
we shouldn't minimize them too much because not as a vanity metric. Right. I don't care how many likes a post gets, but I do care if they're relevant people liking that post because they might not have time to comment, they might not have anything specific to say, they might not go fill in a form. But if I see that there is a lot of relevant engagement and not just, not just regular engagement, but relevant engagement around that post, then that is an indicator that that is a hot topic and we should, we should drill down into that.
21:38
Alina Dallal
Yeah, definitely. Exactly. It's like what we were saying before. It's about who it is. So if you see on those list of likes, these people are engaging with it, they're interested in it, and it's relevant to your marketing. It's relevant to them. Sorry, it means that it's relevant to your marketing strategy, which I think is really interesting for you to share. And I'm wondering, because as we know, what we want to talk about on this webinar is social intent data. Really is this trove that marketing people have. It's so many times marketing is collecting it and we sit on top of it. Right. We're great at that. The action, we've got that down. But we need to learn how to share it and we need to learn how to share it with our sales teams. Because as you said, if there's somebody who is in talks with your company, let's say, and they're liking a post on LinkedIn, that's really relevant for that sales leader to know that. But once we share it, because we know what it means, what good is this data if our sales teams don't know how to use it? So to round that up, my question to you is how can sales teams use intent data as their North Star and really know what it means and how to use it?
22:42
Joanna Braunold
Yeah. So I think, I think this follows on really nicely from what I was saying. We, we work very, very closely with our sales team. We have an amazing relationship with them. They're all fabulous. And we really work also especially close to with our BDR team. I was actually sitting with the head of our BDR team today and he showed me how intrinsically, how intrinsic the social intent data is in their Strategy. He has a dashboard for each of his BDRs within Salesforce and as part of that dashboard he has a list of social interactions that anyone who is on their one of their target accounts has done and they literally run through that on a daily basis and they use that to decide how or to help them decide. Obviously it's one of the factors, not the only factor, how relevant that person is to reach out to how if they're already engaging, if they see an uptick in their engagement, they should kind of push a little bit harder on their other, the other elements of their strategies. He showed me a good one today and this kind of goes back into that B2B B2C thing where the same woman had interacted with like every Instagram post that we had shared nothing on LinkedIn. And that's what I really like about kind of taking a higher level or let's say a wider look at what people are doing. And again not to kind of plug Oktopost again but that I really like that we can kind of have our B2C channels set up there as well because you're really getting that look of the kind of picture of what different people are doing. And we had, I would say that kind of some of the, some of the sales use it a bit more than other others of the sales but we're really seeing great results from those who are using it and really kind of digging into that data.
24:46
Alina Dallal
I think it really does make a difference to those Once they understand and sales get over this little like oh like and they work together is basically what I'm trying to say and it goes hand in hand, then I think it can unlock so many opportunities to use this intent data for them to fuel their own jobs and their own responsibilities. And it's a good way for them to understand how to reach out to prospects again. So if you see a prospect that's like to post on a certain topic instead of being like hey, I'm looping back in, your sales team can be like, I saw you interact with this post, I saw that this is relevant for you. Maybe not say that type.
25:22
Joanna Braunold
I mean they can send an email and be like would you be interested in learning more about X? Like guess what, we already know that you want to learn more about X. But like we could, you know, we can do it in a non stalky kind of way and it's really effective.
25:38
Alina Dallal
Exactly. Amazing. It's so good to hear that. Right. I'm going to come back to you. So I know one of the important aspects Sorry. Of exploring social intent data is looking at our wider audience. But where I'm stuck oftentimes, as marketers are under pressure to widen those audiences quickly, efficiently and effectively and produce these reports in a certain amount of time. And as I, as we know, building a bigger audience does take time. So what are the ways that we can use LinkedIn to grow our audiences?
26:12
Bright Uduji
So this, I like this question because I think this question can be applied B2C, B2B. Like, even at a personal level or, you know, business level, you know, we're constantly trying to widen our audience, widen our reach, you know, reach the right people, gain more followers, all those kind of things. But so when I look at it, I have a three. I have three points. I have a framework on this. The first thing to do is, which is what we've been talking about, is how well do you understand your target audience? Like, do you actually have a target audience that you're trying to reach? And how well do you understand them? Because some, because think of it. How can you widen your audience when you're not even. When you don't even know which audience it is you're targeting, how well you're, you're. You're reaching them, you know, and how well you know them? Like, first of all, understand your target audience. Number two, what are your competitors doing on the platform that works? And are you doing those same things? How well are you doing those things? Obviously, differentiation is great, and I'm all for that, but it's also important to have a competitor analysis of, like, what are your competitors getting right? What's driving the social engagement with their content? And are you doing those things or not? And, you know, there's some things you can steal with pride, you know what I'm saying? And then lastly, I would say, what are you doing well that you could do better? Or what are you not doing so well, you know, that you need to start doing, you know, so there's that external, external approach, and then the internal introspective approach. So understanding your target audience better, on understanding what your competitors are doing maybe better than you, or doing that you could be doing as well, and then understanding what you could be doing better. Those are three sort of. That's the framework of how to widen your reach, widen your audience on LinkedIn. Now, if you, if you take that into practical steps, some questions you can ask are, how much thought leadership do I show on this subject matter? Like, am I running webinars like Oktopost, do you know what I'm saying? Like, am I Am I how, what's my thought leadership? What's my brand perception on the platform? What's my brand sentiment, especially with the audience I'm targeting? You know, what's my brand sentiment? So these are things that you need to measure, things you need to track for you to start to reach not just the wider audience, but the right audience. You know. Also another thing to consider is seasonality. So audiences tend to ebb and flow a lot with seasonality. So for example, let's say COP27 or COP28 is around the corner. What you find is that the audience engaged with sustainability topics will rise. Right. Also with like events, I noticed that events audience engage, event audiences tend to dip in the summer and at Christmas. That's because people are not going to events a lot sometimes in like July and December because they're on holiday. So my point is like you need to also understand things like seasonality. You need to understand, you just need to understand your audience a lot more and then ask yourself, what are my competitors doing that I could be doing, doing as well or doing better than them? And what am I doing I could be doing better? Like what's my thought leadership? Like how well am I active on the platform? You know, are we doing newsletters, are we doing events, are we doing our call to actions and our content very clear. Like, how can we improve our content? That way we can reach, take advantage of LinkedIn's incredible network effects. Because in about LinkedIn is the better content you put out and the more people engage with it, the more the network effects kick in. Like your impressions all of a sudden start to reach places you never thought it would reach. Like is a very powerful platform in terms of amplifying quality content. So yeah, that's, those are the three points I would, I would say I
30:05
Alina Dallal
think that's really useful. I know that this is a question that's on a lot of marketers minds all the time. So your answer is really useful. And I think that as much as we focus on our brand presence and posting and keeping our brand visibility online is so important. Important as you're saying, to drill down into the analytics and see what's important, what's performing and what's resonating so we can continue to propel it for success. And a really good way to do that is looking at social intent data and these signals. Like you're saying, Joanna, I'm interested to come back to you for a second just to ask you what are some of your biggest hurdles in helping sales understand the importance of using this data. And how have you overcome them?
30:45
Joanna Braunold
Yeah, I think it's a really good question and especially based on, you know, as we were saying, as I was saying before, we work really, really closely with our sales team, and that in itself can often be a challenge at companies for marketing and sales to kind of be aligned. And I'm really lucky that we are at Taito Care. But it. Everything is a process, right? So if you go to your sales team tomorrow and say, right, I've got this new tool I need you to use, Go sign in, check it every day, no one's going to do that. They're busy, they've got things going on, and they've got other priorities, and rightfully so. So we kind of took it really, really slowly. First of all, we integrated Oktopost with Salesforce, which is really helpful because that's where they are. Right? We're not asking them to go somewhere else. We're not asking them to sign into a different platform. So everything. First of all, the social intent data is poor. Should have practiced saying that term more before speaking on a webinar about social intent data. Social intent data is pulled in to Salesforce directly. So we're not asking them to kind of go and hunt for anything. We're literally giving it to them right where. Right where they are. We also have our advocacy program in there as well. So again, they don't have to go anywhere else. And then what we really did was we kind of started with a really small target group pilot program of salespeople that we knew would kind of be a little bit more interested in trying something new, a little bit more, kind of happy to experiment a little bit. So kind of handpicked people specifically as well, around. Around the BDR team because we know that they're kind of the forefront. They're the ones going out every day. They're the ones speaking to people all the time, getting feedback all the time. And that kind of really quick turnover. And then we kind of did some training with them, got them on board. And actually, what was really interesting is we started to get other people from the sales team kind of reach out to us and say, well, he's got access to this, to this sales thing. I want it too. Or, you know, kind of seeing. Seeing that snowball kind of effect of. Of having people kind of telling other people from their team about the successes that they were having by leveraging this data. I mentioned earlier the. The report that our BDR lead showed me today, that's kind of almost A different approach because it's kind of come from the top down, you know, because sometimes, especially the BDRs, they've got to make phone calls, they've got to get meetings, they've got to do, you know, hit their targets. And what he, what he did, he was, he was like, guys, take a step back, take a look at this data. It is gold. This is going to help you. And it really, really has. This is the same guy I was, I was telling Alina a story a few weeks ago where he kind of came up to me in the hallway and it was like, Joe, It's like this new positive yell, not a negative yell but I mean that's kind of how people are. People are approaching it now with us. They're all really excited and when they see an email about a new feature or a new function or new way to get the information and we're also kind of telling that story like we're sending emails out like, well, BDR number one had saw this interactions on LinkedIn and was able to then kind of use, leverage that to tell it to create a meeting opportunity. So kind of doing our own mini internal case studies as well.
34:30
Alina Dallal
That's amazing to hear. I think it's also as you're saying, I lost you a little bit because the wife. I don't know if everyone did, if it was me. But with the, with your leader. No, no, I think it might be mine but with your, the, your sales leader coming and saying that these are so useful and they're really helping the sales team understand their prospects better and understand these patterns of buying behavior and what they're interested in. It's so useful on the bottom line and that is how you are proving that social media makes sense, an impact because you can use that to fuel these conversations further.
35:02
Joanna Braunold
Just taking it a little bit step
35:03
Alina Dallal
further with social media and how it is also important to sales and building that trust and that relationship and just having that one person on, on your side. I've spoken to so many people that started with a pilot program, got them on their side, they understood even things like employee advocacy, social selling, they understood that the value it could bring to them and it snowballed in other companies as well. And I think it's a very common way to start out and it's very useful and they can see the benefits that it has for them and how it can help them, it can build up their profiles online, thought leadership. So I think it's really interesting to hear what you were saying about it.
35:38
Joanna Braunold
Yeah, I Think it's like leveraging our marketing skills to market this almost as a service. Right. Like we're very good at marketing our companies. We need to also market what we have to give internally and then, and then it kind of as, as you said, kind of snowballs.
35:55
Alina Dallal
Yeah, definitely. So we're going to move over to the last question I want to ask you both as it's so clear that social intent data is such a big part of both of your day to days and it's so important to how you approach your work. What is one thing that you wish you had known about social intent data a year ago or before you started using it to drive more business, increase pipeline, improve social media's value on the bottom, on the business. Right. I'll start with you.
36:23
Bright Uduji
Yeah, this one is, I like this one. One thing I would if I could go back 12 months and wish I knew about and glad I know now and I think it's important going forward that B2B marketers really, really understand more is their buying groups. I believe that coming out of COVID you know, according to McKinsey, a lot of businesses, a lot of business decision makers on not afraid anymore to spend huge amounts online. You know, I'm talking over $500,000 on B2B purchases, you know, digit on a digital platform. Like they, they, they, they spend that money online now. It doesn't have to be face to face anymore or like oh, let's go sign the contracts in face to face meeting space. So what that means is that the process of buying and the buying groups involved have also changed over time. So now buying groups are more diversificated, they're more digital, they're more online, they're more digital, they're probably more in multiple other functions and also they probably make quicker decisions now. They're probably, you know. So my point is it's important more than ever to understand the social intent signals shown by your buying groups. Do you, how do you understand the buying groups that are interested in your product and service or your subject matter? What's the, what's, what does it look like now compared to the past? You know, are there more people in the buying groups or less people in the buying groups? It doesn't involve more departments. And also is it a more digital process? Are you prepared? Is your marketing content tailored to that digital process or tailor still tailored to the old school way of like you know, events. Let's do this at this place, at this time. Like it's very important going forward that B2B marketers understand their buying groups and the int social intent they show online.
38:18
Alina Dallal
Yeah, that's a really good answer. Thank you for sharing that. And Joanna, how about you?
38:25
Joanna Braunold
So I think I would always say something that I relearned in the last year almost. I think that especially when we're looking at social and in places where data plays a really heavy part in our decision making, something that I kind of reminded myself over the last year is data is really, really important. It's not necessarily everything, even though I know Bright might disagree with that. But you know, we have to kind of also sometimes take a step back up and say, well, what, what story are we telling? What, why am I doing this? Right, because, because, because you can get, and I do get like sucked into data spreadsheets and graphs and how do we, how do, what are the minutiae of what's working in our messaging? But sometimes it's really important to take a step back up and sort of go back out and say, right, I'm going to put a bold statement out now on social that fits in with our brand that really kind of tells our story. And if it doesn't get the most, if it's not the most successful post that we have in terms of whatever metrics it is that we're using to measure success, that's okay. Because sometimes it's also really important that on our social feed there are statements of what we believe and where we're coming from. And you know, kind of, if it's a case of like telling a customer story and maybe it's not the most well interacted with or maybe it hasn't had the most impact in terms of kind of social selling. We haven't had the most leads come through from that. But it's a really important story to tell because it's about helping a kid get better access to health care. That's still important that we share that. And it's still kind of important to sometimes poke your head above, above the, above the noise and not the data is noise. Data is key, but kind of still important to kind of take that and, and remember that as well.
40:34
Alina Dallal
Definitely. I think that's a really important thing to share because it's still something that's important to your marketing strategy that shouldn't be replaced by anything else. And it's sort of like you've got the storytelling and the data between the two of you, which I know, Joanna, you've mentioned to us before. So I just want to say with that and your answers, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for joining us. This was really valuable and really useful to to everyone listening. While we're going to move over to the Q and A section, feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn if you want to continue the conversation. We love talking about social intent data, especially Bright. He's like the data guru, so he loves to talk about it. And Joanna obviously uses it day to day as well. So we're going to move over to the Q and A portion. Feel free to continue to drop your questions in the chat. I'm just going to start with you, Joanna. What stands out to you when you're receiving these intensive goals? When someone's what's worth taking an action on and what action would you take?
41:33
Joanna Braunold
Yes, I think the best answer in the world, it depends. But I do think that sometimes what we look at is kind of the amount of engagement or so like I said before, don't discount alike. I would potentially discount one like. But if you're seeing a pattern of that, then I think it's really interesting to start exploring that person's intent and kind of leverage those messages in ongoing engagements with those people. And then I think kind of then there's the higher level pattern of if we see a particular topic resonating or a specific type of post resonating. We're running a campaign at the moment and I'm testing for the 8,600th time carousels versus videos. And again that that will then play into ongoing decisions that we make about how we share content. Does that answer the question?
42:43
Alina Dallal
It does answer the question. Thank you. There's also one more thing I want to ask. I know Bright, aren't you answered this when you typed it out. But I want to bring it to the chat. Somebody asked us how are you funneling social intent data to your sales team? Which I think would be really interesting. If Joanna, you want to speak about
43:01
Joanna Braunold
it and Bright, if you also.
43:02
Alina Dallal
I know you already typed something out, but maybe so everyone can hear as well. Joanna, I'll start with you.
43:08
Joanna Braunold
Yeah, sure. So we're definitely leveraging Oktopost's integration with Salesforce. That's really the key way that we're. That we're feeding them that information again because that means that they're going in to check on their accounts. They're going in to leverage that tool anyway. And then these things are part of that, part of that data search or part of that information gathering process. And the other thing is again not to continue to, to boost Oktopost, but we love the new, I don't know what they called the social and social signal emails. So that was, that was, that was one of the tricky ones that I was a bit nervous that people were gonna say there's too many emails coming my way. But instead I got the opposite reaction which was that people were really excited because again it was data into their inbox immediately that they can immediately take action on.
44:17
Bright Uduji
Yes.
44:18
Joanna Braunold
Just to touch on that about the likes and.
44:20
Bright Uduji
Oh, sorry, sorry, I thought you, I
44:22
Joanna Braunold
thought you, you cracked up my Internet cut out again. My kids are watching Star wars downstairs. They're stealing all the data. Go on Bright, you go, you can.
44:33
Alina Dallal
Oh, you finished? Okay, over to Bright. Bright, you take it away.
44:39
Bright Uduji
Yes, sorry. The Star wars comment got me there. Sales and marketing alignment is something we preach every day to our clients at LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a big champion of sales and marketing alignment. And we also offer so not just marketing solutions, we offer sales solutions. So we have LinkedIn LMS, which is LinkedIn Marketing Solutions and then LinkedIn LSS which is LinkedIn Sales Solutions. So the cool thing is that we have both backend and front end integration. Like we have the, we have the data that we, that we marry up together in the back end where we can look at the full, full funnel picture and the full conversions and how aligned, for example are your leads in terms of the marketing leads versus your sales leads. Do you know what I mean? And we, we measure this, we track this and we report on this so the client gets the full perspective and the full picture from our side and then we champion for them to do the same on their side so they can get that full attribution of visibility. So it's something that we, we actively do on the platform.
45:40
Alina Dallal
Yeah, it's really, it's really interesting the way that you do it through LinkedIn. I just saw another question come through. Someone asked Joanna, are you talking about data in aggregate or looking at it more individually? From this ABX note it sounds like more individually. Can you cover what it looks like individually? For example, who is liking or what to look in to aggregate. We can also get back to these questions afterwards if we like to think about these answers because I know they
46:06
Joanna Braunold
might be answer that as long as my Internet doesn't go out. Again, sorry everyone. So we do both is the short answer. The slightly longer answer is from. We're looking high level to say as I kind of mentioned before, like what patterns can we see? So if we see a particular theme or particular question coming up a lot or a particular piece of content being particularly engaged with, then we start to look at what we can learn from that. Does that tell us something about the market? Is there a particular pain point that we weren't aware of or we weren't aware of how impactful it was at the moment? For example, in the healthcare field, there's a lot of staff shortages across the world. So whenever we mention staff shortages we see, we see a lot of engagement there. But on the other hand, we are looking also on the, on the, on the individual level and kind of really drilling down because that helps us with our one on one ABX elements of is this customer engaged? Is what is the customer's intent and what is their long term intent as well? Because as I mentioned earlier, we have a pretty long sales cycle. So they might be interested in learning, they might be interested in starting to talk to somebody. But then even once they start to talk to somebody, it might take them six months to a year to sign a contract with us. So we need to kind of keep them engaged the whole way through that process. And leveraging that social intent data can help us to understand how to do that. So they're getting towards the contract signing and then they suddenly interacted with a post about an area that we potentially hadn't addressed with them. A challenge that they're facing that we didn't know about. We can then use that to continue the conversation with them as well.
48:06
Alina Dallal
Amazing. Thank you for sharing. I'm going to end with one last question. I'm going to direct this to you. I'm interested as a data storyteller, what stories do you think resonate most with sales and can help bridge this gap for social intent data for the two departments together?
48:25
Bright Uduji
What. Say it again please.
48:28
Alina Dallal
Which stories or social intent data resonates the most with sales? What do you think is the most useful to pass over
48:37
Bright Uduji
Leads? I think, okay, I suppose leads is the answer, to be honest. But I think sales, they didn't just want, the client wants the full picture. So clients more and more want to make better decisions. So first of all, sales ask all kinds of questions. Like every day it's a different question. When should the clients want to know? When should they do this content? It's like what, what audiences engage. They have, they want everything all the time, which is, I love my salespeople but you know, they are, they're a lot to handle. Right? But I would say ultimately what the sales people would love is again, I go back to it, that sort of clear picture of who is engaging what are they engaging with and how are they engaging with it? Because that way they can paint the picture to the client of what their sales and marketing campaigns should look like. Because, you know, the biggest problem the client has is they don't really know how. How. What their campaigns should look like, how it should be formatted, when it should be ran, how is it going to drive roi? Upper funnel, bottom funnel, as quickly as possible. So if the salespeople can. Can understand this at a deep level in terms of the target audience, they can go to the client with confidence and say, based on these signals, you know, this is the. This is the full picture. Like, this is who is engaged, this is what they engage with, this is how they're engaging, and this is. This is how you should package it. Here you go. So it's not a specific metric. It's more the full picture. They want that full, intelligent picture of what the audience is, what they like, how you should reach them, and then the client can run with it.
50:30
Alina Dallal
Yeah, definitely. I think the best stories also that resonate is exactly what you're saying and what they know can fuel their conversations further, which is really important. With that, I want to say thank you so much to both of you for joining us. It's been amazing to have you share your insights. To all the questions left in the Q and A. Your CSM or representative from Oktopost will reach out to you to get them answered. So with that, I want to say thank you so much to both of you for joining. It's been a pleasure and I've loved having this conversation with you both.
50:58
Joanna Braunold
Thank you very much.
50:59
Bright Uduji
Thank you.
