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MarketingLaunch Your

MOON!

Marketo Social Marketing:

to the

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If you’re using marketing automation, you’re no stranger to its powers: management, analytics, email engagement, financial insight, and more. What you may not know is that marketing automation, combined with the powers of social marketing, can launch your marketing results out of this world.

Most marketers use some social media in their marketing efforts, but until now, social has lived in its own orbit—useful, but separate. Your mission? To make social marketing an integrated, essential element of each and every marketing campaign.

Social media is no longer a “nice-to-have”; it’s a need-to-have for marketers. Social media engagement accelerates prospects through the sales funnel and shortens your company’s overall

sales cycle. If you don’t have the proper tools in place to effectively leverage social interactions, you might never complete your mission.

Listen to the digital body language of your prospects and customers, and let those behaviors trigger more—and more relevant—engagement. As marketers increasingly use social media to disseminate content, it’s essential that social campaigns are fully integrated with the rest of their marketing efforts.

Marketo Social Marketing: LAUNCH YOUR MARKETING TO THE MOON

Marketing automation software makes that possible.

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You have a basic understanding of marketing automation. (If not, check out our Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation first.)

Your organization is already using social media—although maybe not as effectively as you wish.

You have some content.

You want your social marketing to contribute to lead generation.

BEFORE WE LAUNCH, A FEW BASIC PRESUMPTIONS:

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The goal for a social marketer is to start conversations, priming potential leads for engagement. Although more and more people are searching for information through social channels, these people are generally in the very early stages of their research. At Marketo, we have found it takes between 2 and 3 months for a lead generated by social media to convert into an opportunity.

To move these leads through the funnel, marketers need features and reporting tools that improve integration between social media and all types of content, including email, blogs, online resources, video, and more. There are plenty of individual solutions to those issues, but if you’re looking for a streamlined, comprehensive solution, marketing automation is your answer.

A suite like Marketo Social Marketing (MSM), can unite your marketing automation with social applications and analytics.

Adding a social element to your marketing allows you to harness the power of word of mouth, track the impact of an individual’s sharing through social channels, and nurture relationships with the most influential customers. Tools like sharing buttons, referral campaigns, and sweepstakes make it easy for your customers to engage. In turn, you can harness the reach of each individual’s social network—one inspired influencer can make content go viral, reaching hundreds within seconds.

MAKE EvERY CAMPAIGN SOCIAL WITH MARKETING AUTOMATION

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Social marketing truly can be used at every point in the funnel. When combined with marketing automation, social campaigns can impress anonymous prospects, capture new leads, and nurture those leads as they enter the buying cycle.

After they’ve become customers, you can use social media to encourage loyalty through retention, and offer opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling.

In the following pages, we’ll delve into specifics about how social marketing can help you:

• Develop relationships with early-stage prospects before they’ve entered your database

• Gather social data about prospects and leads

• Build and maintain relationships with known prospects as they educate themselves

• Support the sales cycle after the formal buying process has begun

• Deepen and expand relationships with existing customers, turning customers into advocates

SOCIAL MARKETING IN THE CUSTOMER LIFECYCLE

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There’s no denying it—your prospects, buyers, and future advocates are on social media. 1.5 billion Facebook users spend a combined 20 billion minutes on the site each day. 40% of LinkedIn’s 238 million users, and 76% of Twitter’s 500 million users check the platforms daily.

Both B2C and B2B marketers alike are waking up to the power of social. When Marketo surveyed over 500 marketing professionals, only 10% of B2B marketers, and only 9% of B2C marketers, said that their company was not engaged with social media.

WHY SOCIAL MARKETING MATTERS

How would you describe your company’s engagement with Social Media?

B2BB2C

SOMEWHATINVOLVED

NO INVOLVEMENT

MODERATELYINVOLVED

VERYINVOLVED

FULLYINTEGRATED

10%

27%

20%

36%

30%

19%

31%

8% 10%9%

Marketo’s survey of B2B and B2C marketing professionals

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Clearly, social can play a major role in driving revenue and accelerating the buying cycle. Still, many marketers find themselves frustrated by social’s difficult-to-demonstrate ROI. Every marketer needs to know how social affects their buying cycle, not only at the top of the funnel, but also throughout the entire buying journey.

Luckily, the technology to map these connections exists. That technology is marketing automation, powered by strong content and a smart marketing team.

Social marketing is constantly evolving, which means that your measurement methodology will have to be continually revised. That said, there are definitely best practices to follow as you solidify the place of social marketing within your organization.

• Develop your vision. Meet with key stakeholders to determine the most important metrics for your team to track. Make clear distinctions between essential and non-essential data.

• Leverage new social applications. Use social applications like Marketo Social Marketing to accurately track social campaigns and engage your audience.

• Review the quality and relevance of content. Your social media engine is fueled by content—but only if it’s both relevant and useful. Measure which content pieces are downloaded the most, which are shared the most, and which resonate the most with your audience.

SOCIAL MARKETING BASICS

Social sharing can become part of your

marketing campaigns at the earliest stage

of your sales funnel—before you even know

your prospect’s name. We know that up to

70%—and sometimes as much as 90%—

of the buying process is now done through

self-education. Prospects visit your corporate

website anonymously, research your products

and services through third-party resources,

seek out word-of-mouth recommendations,

and, of course, visit your social media sites.

What qualified leads see on your social

media sites will impact their buying cycle.

During this vital part of the sales process,

you’ll need to invest in and build

relationships with prospects, even before

they’ve volunteered contact information—

if you don’t, more agile competitors will.

This is where seed nurturing comes into play.

Phase One: SOCIAL AS SEED NURTURING

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Seed nurturing is the process of building relationships with unidentified prospects.

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1. Build your reputation. If you can establish your organization’s credibility and thought leadership, you’ll gain the trust of early stage prospects. Share your high-value content on social. In most cases, this information is already freely available on social sites— you may as well be the source.

So how can you leverage social marketing to nurture leads?

Use Twitter and Facebook to comment on developments in your industry; join LinkedIn’s Influencer Program to share original content directly with LinkedIn users—even those who aren’t directly connected to your brand. Buyers trust industry leaders who demonstrate that they understand and can solve buyer problems.

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2. Humanize your brand. You shouldn’t only be sharing thought leadership—social media is the perfect place to have some fun. While this will depend on your brand’s public image, your company might share funny memes on your Facebook page, or use humor to attract positive attention on Twitter.

This is a great way to endear yourself to anonymous leads who may have just discovered your brand. They may not be ready to buy, but when they are, those positive associations will pay off.

A fun, Halloween-themed post to Marketo’s Facebook page

“Companies often forget that people aren’t ‘all business’ when it comes to social media. They want to have fun, not engage with robots.”

– Carra Manahan Marketing Programs Specialist, Marketo

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3. Use Native Advertising. Native ads on social, like Sponsored Posts on Facebook, blend in with a user’s friend activity—though they’re always labeled as “sponsored” or “promoted.” According to a 2013 study by IPG Media Lab and Sharethrough, consumers find native ads significantly more visually engaging than traditional ads. Using eye tracking technology and surveys to study 4,770 participants, the report found that native ads generated a 9% lift in brand affinity and an 18% lift in purchase intent.

4. Publish landing pages to Facebook. With marketing automation, you can publish multiple landing pages directly to Facebook. These pages don’t redirect users to your site, but allow you to gather data from customer behavior—in the same way that you can gather data from a page built on your marketing automation platform.

A Marketo landing page published directly to Facebook

The integration of social marketing with your

lead generation process is one of marketing

automation’s biggest benefits. From social

engagement, you can glean data about

both your prospects and your customers—

individually, and as a whole.

Phase Two: GATHER LEAD DATA WITH SOCIAL MARKETING

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Using marketing automation, you can not

only see how many leads you’ve captured

from social, but you can also delve deeper

into their data. This gives you insight into

which social channels are most effective.

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1. Social Sign-On. Marketing automation makes it easy to insert a social sign-on or single sign-on, which prospects and customers can use to access gated content. The individual chooses a profile to sign-on through, and that information automatically populates the form.

Asking a prospect or customer to fill out a form before downloading content is a great way to gather lead information, and social sign-on makes filling out forms easier. If you’re using marketing automation, these forms will also capture demographic information from the user’s social profile. For example, if a person signs in through their LinkedIn profile, your marketing automation system can collect information directly from LinkedIn.

Social sign-on form, linking social profile data to your database

Here are 3 of your most valuable tools when it comes to gleaning data on social sharing platforms:

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2. Polling/voting. A marketing automation system with a built-in polling or voting function, like Marketo Social Marketing, makes social engagement simple, allowing organizations to place polls on any Facebook tab or company landing page.

You can ask your audience any multiple choice question, add pictures, choose the maximum number of votes, and create a message that appears when customers share the poll. Additionally, polls are an easy way to collect contact information—use the social sign-on feature to minimize friction in the process of collecting it.

If a visitor shares your content, your marketing automation can also collect that data, which will be tied to their record as a known lead. This data also allows you to identify visitors as influencers (or potential advocates) by reviewing who shares the poll and who has the greatest social reach.

A poll built in Marketo, which syncs with lead data

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3. Sweepstakes. Reward prospects for sharing their data with a contest offer. Much like polling and voting, entrants will have to provide email addresses in order to participate. Automation software with a social marketing function will allow you to customize your sweepstakes. Sweepstakes can be added to any landing page, webpage, or Facebook tab.

Customize your sweepstakes offering with entry limits, bonuses, timeline, and frequency.

A contest offer (with an incentive to share) published directly to Facebook.

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Social is about more than seed nurturing or

lead generation. If your social marketing is

fully integrated with your marketing automation,

you can also use it for lead nurturing—

building and maintaining relationships

with your newly identified prospects. As

we learned in the previous section, social

interactions give you valuable insights into

your prospects—not just who they are,

demographically speaking, but what they do.

Phase Three: BUILD AND MAINTAIN RELATIONSHIPS

“Imagine social media as a way to stay in

contact with a long distant friend. If you

want to keep the relationship alive, never let

the spark fizzle out—in other words: Stay in

contact. Maintaining a fluid connection with

prospects throughout the sales process will

maximize your chances of conversion.”

– Jessica Ayala Account Coordinator, Red Kite Business Advisors

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1. Be relevant. Have fun on social, but make sure you’re engaging in a relevant, valuable way. If your prospect shares information that could be useful to your other followers, feel free to retweet. Retweeting is a great way to turn a monologue into a conversation, as well as to get a hot prospect’s attention.

2. Segment and trigger based on downloaded content. Segment and trigger communications and campaigns based on the type of content people have downloaded on social media platforms. Get a strong indication of buying intent by combining knowledge of these interactions with your record of other engagement activities—such as email click-throughs, downloads, and visits to your website.

3. Interact with prospects over multiple media channels. Integrate social marketing channels with traditional channels such as email, direct mail, and phone. Nurture email campaigns are crucial, but you can multiply their power by creating (or re-using) complementary social campaigns. Wherever possible, entice leads to visit your social sites, and include social share buttons, making it easy for your customers to engage with your message on every platform.

Here are four ways you can use social interactions to nurture leads once they’re identified:

Once you’ve identified your prospects,

social marketing can be of real value to

your internal marketing and sales operations

teams. Bolstering the “lead lifecycle”—

the path that your leads take once identified

by your lead management system—

also promotes alignment between your

marketing and sales teams.

Phase Four: SUPPORT SALES

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Note: agreement between marketing and sales on what constitutes a “sales-ready” lead, as well as when a lead should be recycled back to marketing for further nurturing, is necessary to a successful lead lifecycle.

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1. Alert sales reps about increased activity or interesting comments. In the social sphere, hot leads indicate their sales readiness through “interesting moments” or behaviors. In the case of social media, this can include increased interactions and conversations on social media sites. By notifying the sales team of these interactions as they occur, you will dramatically increase the relevancy and timing of their conversations with these prospects.

2. Emphasize social marketing activities in lead recycling campaigns. Make the most of prospects’ increased activities on social sites by setting up a rule to trigger a lead score change, which will prompt sales to re-engage the lead. While you can make this an automated

trigger, sales needs the ability to manually indicate a specific timeframe in which the lead should be re-engaged. This way, sales can put their deeper insight to use in the relationship.

3. Reach prospects through preferred channels. Social marketing interactions are a great way for your sales rep to build relationships with prospective buyers, especially younger contacts who may be as comfortable interacting online as through email or phone. The key is to identify the preferred channels for each contact, and then communicate via that channel.

Online social interactions can provide deep insight into a lead’s sales readiness and buyer intent. Here are a few key ways to make social insight valuable to your sales team:

So you’ve built credibility with your

anonymous leads, used social data and

nurturing to drive them down the funnel, and

helped your sales team convert full-fledged

customers. But your mission isn’t over:

The final task is to turn those customers into

life-long advocates, and incentivize them to

share your valuable content.

Phase Five: TURN CUSTOMERS INTO ADvOCATES

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1. Referral Campaigns. This is an easy, automated way to reward your biggest advocates, put a social twist on your referral programs, and amplify your reach by leveraging your customer’s social connections. If your marketing automation system has a referral application, customers will be able to share offers and track their progress toward a referral goal.

Increase participation with a social sharing incentive.

According to a recent Forrester Research Report, 70% of consumers trust recommendations from a friend, while only 10% trust advertising. Here are three of your most powerful tools for converting happy customers into advocates:

In Marketo Social Marketing, you can customize sign-up and progress tracking buttons, define offer details (like the number of referrals required to receive the reward), and the information you’ll collect with each sign-up. These forms can be placed on your website, or on any existing asset— making them useful for lead generation as well.

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2. Integrate intelligent share buttons. These are buttons that can be added to landing pages, web pages or Facebook tabs. Visitors can click on them to share a page on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. When a visitor shares, your marketing automation system can capture data about the sharer, which networks they used, their social reach, and the share messages they used.

3. video Sharing. Marketers can embed videos (with social network sharing options) on any existing landing pages, Facebook pages, or on your website. Ordinarily, video assets are limited to static, traditional marketing outlets; this feature allows prospects to share your videos across all their social media channels.

A social share button allows viewers to share videos across social channels.

Now that you’ve completed your social

integration, it’s time to report back to

mission control. To prove that your social

marketing is worth the investment, you’ll

need to track how your social campaigns

affect and contribute to the multiple touch

points across your sales funnel.

If you are mapping engagement to every

touch point throughout the sales funnel,

you can see clearly how each moment of

engagement affects each prospect. After all,

if you score a $50k deal as the result of a

tweet, you’ll want to know.

Luckily, if your social applications are

integrated into your marketing automation,

you can track individual leads (and

customers) as they interact with your

campaigns. You can also review referral

traffic—visitors to your site who were directed

there from another site—measuring the

source and frequency with which social

media platforms direct traffic to you.

Phase Six: TRACKING AND ANALYTICS

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Through these social tools, organizations can track engagement through dashboard reporting metrics like social reach, impressions, mentions, and conversions, thus measuring your campaign’s performance.

Social Metrics 101

Impressions: The number of times your post, tweet, offer, or announcement was displayed to users

Social Reach: The number of unique users who received at least one impression of said post, tweet, offer, or announcement

Mentions: The number of times a user tags your company’s hashtag, or tweets “at” your company’s Twitter handle

Conversions: The number of customers who first entered your database through social channels

Marketo Social Marketing dashboard

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The world has changed for marketers—there are more people to reach, and more ways to reach them. It’s clear that social is still evolving, but it’s also become clear that social marketing is crucial to every marketing campaign.

As marketers, however, we’re not satisfied to perform routine maintenance, or to do just enough. Many of us have long suspected the enormous power of social, but have struggled to tap into that power. To do so, you need to use a marketing automation system that integrates social, email, web, and offline marketing.

Social marketing on its own is nice; social marketing that’s integrated with your entire marketing strategy is gravity-defying. Your ability to integrate social into the rest of your strategy— from lead nurturing to customer advocacy— will determine your mission’s success.

Mission Landing: CLOSING THOUGHTS

About MarketoEasy, Powerful, Complete.

Marketo uniquely provides easy-to-use, powerful and complete marketing software

that propels fast-growing small companies and global enterprises alike. Marketo’s

marketing automation and sales effectiveness software—including the world’s

first integrated solution for social marketing automation —streamlines marketing

processes, delivers more campaigns, generates more win-ready leads, and

dramatically improves sales performance. With proven technology, comprehensive

services and expert guidance, Marketo helps thousands of companies around the

world turn marketing from a cost center into a revenue driver.

Known for providing breakthrough innovation and fueling explosive growth,

Marketo was recently named one of America’s Most Promising Companies

by Forbes, the #1 Marketing Software Vendor on the INC 500, and the

#1 fastest-growing private company of 2011 by the Silicon Valley Business

Journal. In both 2011 and 2012 the company received the CRM Market Leaders

Awards Winner for Marketing Solutions by CRM Magazine. Salesforce.com

customers also honored the company with two AppExchange Best of ’11 Awards,

for Best Marketing Automation Solution and Best Chatter Exchange.

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