Marketing Advisor Blog

Always fully integrate your social media campaigns within your global marketing strategy

Marketing Advisor recently interviewed Bart De Waele, social and digital marketing expert, regarding his view on how to set up a good social marketing campaign (and more).

To start we asked De Waele what the different steps are that should be taken in a social media marketing campaign.

De Waele sums them up as follows:

• Defining and getting to know the overall marketing and communication strategy
• Translating this global strategy into a (long term) social media strategy
• Preliminary tracking of the online reputation of brand, product or company
• Executing the social media strategy
• Tracking and comparing the online reputation.
• From then onwards: lather, rinse, repeat and optimize where necessary.

When reading between the lines you will notice that for De Waele online reputation management is important. But what other types of marketing and CRM are fit for social media (customer acquisition, retency, loyalty, customer service etc.)?

Len Cercone: identifying customer issues and solve them en masse on Twitter

In his recently published eBook Len Cercone from US-based agency CerconeBrown&Company writes that one of the mistakes of social marketing is believing that a Facebook page or Twitter account will attract prospects.

Cercone explains (we quote from the paper): "Maybe it’s a hangover from the dot-com boom, but too many companies think that if they build it, they will come. Sadly, it just isn’t so. Think of it like this: If you want to sell a house and your only promotion is a sign on in the front yard, you won’t get much traffic. But get your listing with multiple directories, agents and promotional vehicles and you’re suddenly open to more prospects. The real key is the content in those listings. They must give prospects the valuable information the want in a way that’s easy to use, pass to a friend or client and, ultimately, act upon."

What does this have to do with social media marketing? Time for an interview.

Michael Kahn explains everything marketers should know about Twitter

In the seemingly endless stream of expert opinions, product announcements and Twitter marketing tips it is hard for advertisers and marketers to get the full picture and understand what Twitter can really mean to them.

What it was meant to be is obvious: a communication service to enable people to inform friends and acquaintances about what they are doing. Twitter is ‘hot’. And marketers want to understand what it can do for them. Being a hype is not a bad thing. Internet was a hype too once. And after having interviewed Performic’s Michael Kahn, we can only conclude that this hype is worth the effort for most brands and maybe it’s already past its hype phase.

But should marketers close their eyes and jump on Twitter or should they understand it first and develop a strategy? The answer is obvious.

As you could read in previous posts we have asked several experts about their views on Twitter from several viewpoints. But in this interview with Michael Kahn, SVP Marketing at performance marketing specialist Performics (Publicis Groupe/Vivaki), we really look at it from all viewpoints.

We know people don’t like to read long articles on the WWW but this one is a must if you have any questions or doubts about Twitter from a marketing perspective. So keep reading!

How Twitter and social media can and should be used for marketing purposes

Last week we wrote that US-based marketing automation specialist Marketo announced that it has integrated B2B social media capabilities, including Twitter, with its lead management solution.

We asked Jon Miller, VP Marketing and co-founder, to share his view on how Twitter and social media in general can and should be used for marketing purposes. Below you can read Marketo's view on the subject.

Because the Internet has profoundly changed buying behavior and consequently how marketing gets done today, Twitter and Facebook have fast become a rich source of leads intended for customer acquisition (sales) or customer retention (service, up-sell).

This is especially important for subscription-based services like Marketo, where it is a top priority to maintain a trusted advisor relationship.

Social media, marketing automation, and lead management: fitting the pieces together

Steven Woods, CTO at leading marketing automation software provider Eloqua, kindly answered Marketing Advisor's request to explain how he sees the role of social media in marketing automation and lead management. 

Marketers today are learning about a barrage of new concepts and techniques. Social media is clearly a topic that cannot be ignored, as messages are spread through ever-larger social networks with increasing speed.  Marketing automation is being adopted at rapid pace, altering the way that marketers are able to define and deploy campaigns. 

Sales teams are increasingly becoming more aligned with their counterparts in marketing as the need to develop a lead management plan for the full lifecycle of a lead becomes an increasingly important strategic imperative. 

It may at first seem like these are three new tasks to add to an already overflowing task list that still includes the events, webinars, campaigns, and white papers that we have long used to promote our products and services.  However, there is a transition happening that underlies all of these changes, and that makes these merely related aspects of the same marketing challenge.