Over the past couple of years, I’ve heard a growing drumbeat of complaints about marketing in the IT channel. I’ve heard it from channel managers, field marketers, partner marketing and sales teams. I’ve heard it phrased a dozen different ways. I’ve heard it applied to email, digital, events and telesales. But the message is always the same: “We’re not getting the traction from marketing programs we’ve always counted on.”
For seven years now, we’ve been delivering social media intelligence to some of the world’s largest brands, and we’ve watched marketers struggle with the concept of segmentation in social media. Segmentation is one of the fundamental principals of good marketing–the idea of dividing customers with similar needs and attributes into groups for more targeted marketing. Demographics, psychographics and behavioral economics are all time-tested techniques for segmenting markets in meaningful ways, and marketers have done backflips trying to apply them to social media.
Today, SocialRep is launching a new chapter. After years of engineering and product development on social data systems, analytics and curation, we’re bringing all the pieces together in a single platform focused on enabling social marketing for the B2B channel.
As we’ve previewed our solution with analysts over the past few weeks, we’ve heard it called Inbound Channel Marketing, Through-Partner Social Marketing, and Social Channel Marketing. Whatever label you put on it, we’re proud to deliver the first end-to-end platform that enables businesses to empower their partners to engage customers authentically through social media.
The story that several HubSpot customers and prospects tell is that once they were attracted as an inbound lead, they were handed over to a high-pressure and highly scripted inside sales process.
My post? blasting LinkedIn? last week was a long time in coming. I’ve been working with clients for several years, strongly advocating LinkedIn as a powerful tool for engaging customers and prospects. But time after time, I’ve watched marketers get burned by poor planning, poor communication, and poor decision-making at LinkedIn. Last week I focused on? LinkedIn’s seemingly arbitrary decision to wipe out Product Pages, after thousands of companies invested in creating them, only to replace them with “Showcase” pages, which seem like a really cheap imitation of GooglePlus. I now have customers for whom we built Product Pages and championed LinkedIn asking what they should do, and whether or not LinkedIn should still be a part of their content strategy.
Read moreOne Content Error That Will Get You Banned On LinkedIn
It makes sense for CRM heavy-weights to continue the migration of marketing applications and infrastructure to the cloud, but the real challenge is actual customer engagement. The battlefield is not your CRM system, it’s the platforms and networks where customers are already engaging
Successful social marketers offer links to objective content that is relevant to their customers, they offer their own insights on articles they read and share with the community, and they respond to the discussions that are driving engagement without relying on automatic responders.
Good partners—especially growing partners—don’t just want to be fed leads, they want to learn how to drive leads themselves.
LinkedIn is the world’s largest social network for professionals. They’ve done a fantastic job of making themselves an essential part of business networking. Just about anyone who wants a job, or wants to connect with other professionals, has a LinkedIn account where they carefully curate their profile. LinkedIn has almost … Read more
The key to enabling your partners for social marketing is to provide a stream of relevant content that makes it easy for partners to select, personalize and share in a way that helps them authentically build their own voice and brand.