A diamond mine is still a diamond mine if you walk into it with nothing more than a wallpaper scraper and a toothbrush. True, you’re not going to walk out of it at the end of the working day with anything more than broken tools and sore hands – and, even after a year of hard work, you still won’t have a single diamond to show for it – but the mine is still just as lucrative as ever.
But a diamond mind is a much better asset to have if you’ve got the right tools for extracting those valuable little nuggets of carbon.
The same is true of social media. For B2B brands looking to maximize quality lead conversions and diversify their digital presence beyond the traditional marketing avenues, social media publishing holds as much promise as a diamond mine. Then again, if you want to get serious about leveraging social media, you need to have the right tools.
Our B2B social media marketing platform offers a suite of tools for marketers and account managers, and our marketing automation and CRM integration are key elements you really can’t do without. You also need to know how to utilize them, so here are key social media lead-generation techniques to adopt as you start leaning into social media marketing.
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Maintain a proactive approach using social listening in real-time
Don’t sit and wait for the grass to grow on social media. These channels are highly lucrative, but they don’t just produce KPIs and insights like that – they require a proactive approach to lead generation, content marketing, and social listening.
A lot of this can be automated – yes, that counts as being proactive – and the rest can be carried out in the space created by those automations.
One of the most important things to automate is social listening and monitoring. This is the ongoing process of supervising social media for key events like brand mentions, keywords, competitor mentions, or anything else that clues you in on what audiences are interested in, what their pain points are, and what’s capturing their attention (and relevant to you) at any given moment. If you want to master the art of jumping on a trend at the most opportune moment (rather than a few days after it’s already peaked), then social listening is the only reliable way to get there.
Why automate it? Because it just makes sense. Without the right tools, social listening in real-time would be a very labor-intensive process for anyone. It would require teams to manually trawl social media for specific hashtags and key phrases to check-in on competitors’ pages and leads round-the-clock.
With the right social media listening tools, key insights can simply arrive on your dashboard as and when they occur on social media. You don’t need to waste time looking for them, which means you have a lot more time to work on creating and scheduling content ahead of time. If something valuable pops up on social media, you can jump on it using content you’ve stored on your dashboard for future use – and reap the benefits of consistently positioning your brand at the front of the conversation.
Collaborate on social media marketing rather than catching up
It’s only natural that different departments have to invest a certain amount of time into updating other departments on their progress. Often, if these updates don’t naturally occur during day-to-day business, they can just be reserved until the next quarterly update or company-wide meeting. They’re part of building a strong workplace culture rather than keeping the business going.
But interdepartmental updates and catch-ups put a cork in creativity. Why? Because collaboration is the key to ingenuity, particularly when it comes to matters that impact more than just one department.
There’s a pretty big matter that impacts sales and marketing alike: lead generation. Marketing is all about acquiring and converting new leads, and so is sales. It’s more complicated than that, of course, but both teams share the same foundations.
A centralized social media management platform with integrations for key tools like your CRM and analytics platforms is the ideal collaboration platform for sales and marketing to utilize alongside one another. This platform will enable teams to visualize every part of your social selling and lead generation strategy.
Collaborate on CRM
With CRM integration, sales can monitor how social media is feeding into other aspects of customer management and lead nurturing, while your MarOps can keep up to date with what interactions sales have had with specific, high-quality leads. If you can get this right, the result is a very fluid, very personalized experience for leads and existing customers, whether they’re interacting with a post on your LinkedIn or having a one-to-one phone conversation with an account manager.
The very best companies are able to make customers feel valued and unique, but so much information is lost between sales and marketing – information that could be used to instate a very customer-centric, account-based marketing strategy that bridges the gap between your social channels and the other channels you use to communicate with customers and leads.
Collaborate on lead scoring
How do you sort the leads full of promise for a high revenue from the leads who, let’s face it, will probably never make it more than halfway through the tunnel or the leads who will but offer a very limited scope for sales? Most sales teams do this to some degree, but not everyone creates a clear framework that makes qualifying leads an objective process rather than a subjective one.
The benefits of having that objectivity are clear to see. It means maximizing the time and resources you invest into the right places and minimizing the time and effort that is currently wasted on low-prospect leads.
If sales and marketing are on the same page, then everything – every comm, every social post, every interaction – can be aligned toward the same goal.
Collaborate through cross-team data analysis
Social media is constantly generating fresh insights, performance metrics, and key analytics that prove valuable to both your sales and marketing automation strategies. This data should inform your B2B social media strategy going forward, but it will also give you valuable information on your market, audiences, leads, and competitors.
Oktopost’s platform automatically curates these insights into reports, generates actionable insights, and turns data into compelling visuals that tell a story rather than simply requiring your team to fill in the gaps themselves.
Create content, then put it on the shelf
Great content is the backbone of any social strategy. You can’t even make a post without some form of content, even if it’s just a few words with a compelling CTA. The concern that deters a lot of marketing teams from making content ahead of time and putting it on the shelf is that it’s going to gather dust – go out of date, out of style, and prove to be nothing more than a wasted opportunity that passed however many months ago.
But automation is your friend here. Great content that homes in on important questions, pain points, and considerations in your industry will never go out of style. True, a particular conversation may not always be trending, but it will come back to the forefront again.
For content that’s always relevant, creating a social media publishing schedule so that social posts can be made automatically is the best way to ensure you’re never playing catch-up with your own strategy. True, jumping on social listening insights will require you to select pre-written content that fits the bill but the rest of the time, you can make this automatic.
Utilize AI for better personalization and community management
In B2B, effective lead generation is about directly engaging those top-quality leads – creating memorable and meaningful interactions and self-promotions. But community management is a big task. It could easily represent the most significant part of your day, particularly if your dashboard is lighting up with key insights from your real-time social listening.
This is why we developed a range of AI-assisted content tools for busy MarOps to use when they need to adapt existing content, rephrase or simplify or even auto-generate messages, and ensure a diverse range of messages and replies to customer interactions that still align with the company’s unique voice.
A social media management platform is a fundamental tool-of-the-trade for any B2B marketing team – or B2C, for that matter. But, on its own, it’s limited, just like any tool used in isolation.
That’s why Oktopost is designed to be fully integrated with other key tools in order to automatically provide teams with 360° insights into their market and existing customer base. From your CRM to your MAP, analytics tools to your BI, creating a real-time dialogue between your most valuable tools and platforms and ensuring a constant stream of social media insights is what we do best.
Don’t leave your team in the dark – utilize the best tools for B2B social media marketing and automation to get the very most out of your efforts.
