Tune Into The Digital Age of 'WOM'

In this age of ‘Word of Mouth’, how do you leverage social media to connect with B2B customers?

Do you shout it out, get everyone involved, and get them on board?

Do you listen, plan, engage and optimize social media channels?

The reason why it is important to use social media is because it helps you to know:

• Who is saying what about your brand and where
• Who is leading conversation share
• Where your customer are living online
• How to provide value addition
• When and how to engage with your community
• Why customers behave the way they do
• Why they prefer what they prefer

So, why do you need to build a social media strategy?

• To define objectives and integrate it with the overall marketing strategy
• To maintain a unified brand identity and image across the socialsphere
• To utilize various channels effectively and facilitate prospecting
• To integrate communication and build relationships with prospective buyers

When using social media, not every channel is suitable. Find out where your target market is active. For instance, if they are active on LinkedIn, join in on the discussion. If they are active on Twitter, tweet to keep them up to date. If they are on Facebook, post messages to keep them engaged. Check out the grid below, to understand which social media platform is best suited for your requirement.

If you like what you read, socialize it! Post, tweet, ping, poke or pin; let us in your socialsphere as well! 

Augment your understanding of your customer with Social Data
Know your “Share of Voice”
Get your database updated with Social Data

Why Social Data is the New Black!

Ever wanted to how much your brand is talked about in the social network?

Wouldn't you like to eavesdrop?

Customers today do their own research and interact with a brand only much later in their buying process. This has made it difficult for companies to gain insights about customers and to influence their decisions. Moreover, when customers do decide to interact, they do so quite selectively.

Here is where social data has become a critical tool. It is one the best ways through which companies can measure marketing campaigns, and observe, analyze and improve social conversations in real time. Tech savvy marketers are using tried and tested marketing tactics and new techniques to improve interaction and increase quality and quantity leads; from direct mail marketing, telemarketing, email marketing to social media marketing.

Techniques of mass mailing done earlier are replaced by more customized forms of marketing. B2B marketers today are segmenting customer groups to implement targeted marketing programs. And social data provides just that information required to organize customers into specific groups and develop relevant messaging that revolves around them.

In all the digital frenzy, positioning your brand could become quite a relentless challenge. You need to be ‘happening’ in the social sphere and the best way to get around is by knowing the right people.

Big Data is something you may already have

Augment your customer analysis with Social Data

Get to know your “Share of Voice”

You got 60 seconds before people close your video!

Imagine this…

• Every month, more than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube 
• Every month, over 4 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube
• Every minute, 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube 
• 70% of YouTube traffic originates from outside the US
• YouTube is localized across 53 countries and in 61 languages

Source: - YouTube Statistics 

So how do you get people to view your brand above the noise, connect and resonate with it through your videos? With ‘YouTube marketing’….

• You don’t have to be viral, tell a story – While viral videos do generate millions of visitors to your video, they may not necessarily visit your website. Instead everybody loves a good story. Telling your story, about the passion of your business, about the history of your brand, will create a better brand connect than unrelated videos of dancing monkeys.
• You got to keep it short - Attention spans of your audience are down to a few seconds. While the receptiveness of people has shifted from words to visual content, even videos nowadays fail to capture their short-wired attention span. Maybe the number of devices a person owns and uses, at a single point of time has something to do with this distracted interaction. A 30 second video is definitely more preferred than a 20 minute one.
• You Have to Personalize and Customize - YouTube is localized across 53 countries and in 61 languages and 70% of the traffic originates from outside the U.S. If you are not customizing, personalizing and localizing your brand message, it may not resonate with the global audience. 
• Get Real, Use Live Streaming – It is always exciting to watch something that’s happening miles away in real-time. Live streaming, used by big brands such as Coke and Intel, has brought the brand experience to millions, transcending geographical boundaries. Get real and share your brand experience with your audience. This definitely makes your brand personal and helps in building trust.
• Analyze and Get Insights, Don’t Speculate – With YouTube marketing it’s not about the number of visitors, it is about who are the visitors. Similar to any lead generation effort, it’s not about the number of people who visited your page or liked your video, it is about how many of them are interested in your business, how many of them can buy and how of them are willing to become customers. 

With video marketing and YouTube marketing, it is important to know the objective and goal of your video first before creating it. It should be aligned with your overall social media strategy, so that all channels are effectively utilized and your audience gains an overall brand experience through various touch points.

Here’s an interesting article we came across on, "How YouTube can be a Marketing Tool for Small Business” 

What you think of our video? Did you close it in 6 seconds?

What’s the Buzz about Social Media?

Buzz in on the chatter! Here’s a snapshot of stats, sayings, cartoons, checklists and cheat sheets. 
As much as an infographic as a monographic…

CHEAT SHEET

Social Media Platform	Best Suited As
Facebook	·         A one-stop platform to provide information ·         To inform about latest product updates, services and events ·         To obtain customer feedback ·         To attach photos and videos for brand association ·         To engage with fans
Twitter	·         To share new developments and upcoming launches ·         To gain opinion from followers ·         To connect with users interested in similar products / services
LinkedIn	·         To connect with like minded professionals in relevant industry sectors ·         To create discussion groups and invite professionals to share views on subjects
Google+	·         To share technology related information ·         To impact rankings
YouTube	·         To share informative and educative videos ·         To share videos related to your business

Like what you read. Socialize it! Ping, poke, tweet or pin, keep us in the network as well! 

Size Does Matter…With Big Data at Least!

Let us first clarify what ‘Big Data’ is and what the buzz around it is about.

Big Data is information about customers available through various sources and channels, from social and ICT networks, from videos and digital images, from sensors or GPS signals, to name a few. This data is something which can be invaluable for businesses. 

So why are people getting ‘buzzy’ about Big Data? 

Because it is the biggest source for marketers to gain real-time and in-depth insights into the preferences and behavior of their customers. 

How does Big Data help? 

It helps in creating targeted marketing campaigns. To give customers what they need more than what they want. While you may think this applies mainly to B2C companies you are mistaken, as B2B companies need to consider their clients’ businesses as individual personas as well.

Ask CMOs what defines a successful brand? And they will tell you it is primarily in using customer data to drive marketing decisions and ROI. What better way to obtain customer data than through social media channels. And yet, of around 85% of companies that use social media as a marketing tool, only 19% collect data from these channels! 

The best way to create brand awareness, build brand association and increase engagement is in conversing with customers, personally. Mass media marketing tactics for sure don’t work in social channels.

Your next marketing plan should go regional rather than national; it should go into sub verticals, into personas rather than demographics and focus on specific stages in the buying cycles. Your database of customers should be segmented to identify groups to enable targeted communication. 

This is where Info CheckPoint comes in by providing segmented databases that are socially integrated including LinkedIn profiles with every contact. 

So go get started, drill down, target, personalize and increase marketing ROI!

Psst - While size does matter, so does the quality of experience!

It Takes a Click to ‘Like’, ‘Pin’ or ‘Tweet’ – What is your Fan Engagement Rate?

Reference: - Research by Buddy Media - http://www.jeffbullas.com

In today’s D-Gen (digital generation) or I-Gen (Internet generation) ‘socialsphere’ we are all focused on increasing our fan base. Who doesn’t like to be ‘liked’? However is that enough? 

Are your ‘fans’ actually interested in who you are and what you have to offer? This is especially relevant in the business context. Corporate profiles more often than not, aim to increase the number followers instead of meaningfully engaging users to identify those who are potential customers.

The tone of social media strategies in the business sense should be informally formal. The idea of social networking is to gain a pulse of the market, to connect with customers and understand their preferences; besides gaining a fan following.

Whether you are interacting with the yuppie, ‘Digital Natives’ or the older, ‘Digital Immigrants’ keeping them engaged is one of the best ways of increasing brand awareness and informing them about new products and services. Developing relevant contests, conducting interesting surveys and providing ‘free’ valuable information will bring about the much required connection.

The train of thought should be to convert all your fans to engaged users, which in turn will increase the potential of increasing your customer base. 

Identify those sincerer clicks. If you ‘liked’ this post, socialize this idea!

Integration of Social Media Can Do Wonders to Your Business

Everyone these days talks about social media, and how it can affect your business for the better. Social media integration helps you to network with professionals, colleagues and business prospects, and share vital information about your business.

Combining social media to your business can help you:

• Increase the reach of your content to drive actions and sales
• Capture leads and build your database
• Collect data and segment your list
• Incorporate social content into email campaigns and promote it
• Add email signup form to Facebook page
• Post links to email newsletters on social sites
• Identify and treat your influencers
• Give people special offers and use sharing options strategically
• Measure conversions, test and retest strategies and provide authenticity to your business

You can change the way people perceive you by the help of social media as it brings admirable transparency and genuine honesty to your business. Infocheckpoint now allows you not only to target your key prospects, but also know about their social lives. (Read the press release: Info CheckPoint Ushers a New Era in Social Networking with LinkedIn Integration now.