At a strategic level, a social intelligence practice is built to provide valuable insights to marketers and, in turn, to drive smarter business decisions and business impact. It then stands to reason that your social listening data needs to be talking to, and integrated with, other parts of the business.
A while back, I wrote a piece looking at social projects versus programs and the maturity model that drives use case development to evolve your social strategies. The final step in this model is optimizing, and it is based upon integrating technology to share data across teams and systems.
In a nutshell, this means getting social data out of the social silo and allowing collaboration and optimization across all teams, initiatives and programs throughout your organization.
As Charles Darwin said: “In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too), those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”
Social data should be integrated with and fueling your customer-facing initiatives and the technology that drives them. Marketers must focus on an open ecosystem and on getting data between the wide array of sales, business intelligence and marketing platforms in order to create customer experiences built upon more sophisticated customer understanding and need.
As a social chief marketing officer, I certainly understand the pain of the everyday marketer, constantly looking to improve the relationship we have with our customers from beginning to end and prove value back to our CEO and the business.
This means wanting to understand and combine all of the different data groups we have in order to get a complete view of our customer, better understand how to target our prospects, provide them with valuable information when and where they want it and, at the end of the process, measure the return on investment of our activities.
The evolved social to marketing stack: How it works for the business
Listening to your customers across all channels where they are voicing their opinions and interacting with your brand is of course essential. However, you must also make sure you are properly equipped to use and act on that data in the most effective way for your strategy and programs.
When done right, you can better understand your audience, be more targeted in your messages to them, build stronger and more qualified pipelines and, at the end of the day, tie your results back to business metrics that resonate with your executives.
What are some use cases for social marketing integrations?
- Data-driven social campaigns: Brands can use social listening and intelligence platforms to listen to and analyze the data, and then, through seamless integration, push smarter, better informed campaigns through publishing and engagement platforms, like Spredfast. A great example of this in action would be brand advocacy. You can pinpoint your brand advocates across the different channels and communities, strategically track and monitor them and strengthen your brand by highlighting their positive experiences through strategic campaigns.
- Data-driven customer care: Businesses can proactively track conversations and issues and address them before they escalate. They can get more sophisticated while analyzing issue trends, as well as prioritizing issues based on criteria such as social influence. With connected technology, you can make sure you know who your brand influencers are, make sure you are tracking them and, in turn, identify in-the-moment services issues and conversations critical to the brand and resolve the most important issues first. Connecting your social listening to your customer-care platforms, such as Conversocial, moves you closer to smarter, faster, more targeted and human customer service.
- Data-driven lead generation: Social to sales is another great use case in which you can essentially use social listening for lead generation. While there are many ways to take advantage of this, a great example would be listening for people speaking about your industry or competitors and funneling these people into your marketing automation tool for strategic campaigns and nurturing. In other words, a social intelligence platform that integrates with platforms like Marketo enables marketers to better personalize their engagement, leverage a complete view of their customers online and deliver more targeted messages at the point of need.
- Data-driven business intelligence: The social marketing stack does not just live within social media and marketing platforms–it can extend to your overall business intelligence tools. When social and marketing platforms integrate seamlessly into your BI tools like Domo or Datorama, customers can pull key performance indicators across the business into one platform for benchmarking, insights and decisioning. They can then measure results across channels, course correct campaigns and educate the business internally on programs and ROI.
What should businesses be doing?
The best way to maximize your marketing efforts is to break down your organizational and data silos. This is how we run our business and develop our product, but it is also the best marketing and social program plan for any company. Use all the tools that are available to you and make sure that you are analyzing, comparing and using data to drive smarter decisioning, messaging and programs, while enabling every team to take advantage of valuable data and insights.
With a complete view of behavior, interests and engagement, you can better converse with your audience, drive smarter campaigns and decisions across the business and get a step closer to connecting all of your social and marketing programs to business impact.
Continuing to build out the data ecosystem will arm marketers with an even greater understanding of their audience and their customers and drive messaging, targeting and programs.
This article first appeared in www.adweek.com
Author: Leah Pope
Leah Pope is chief marketing officer of social insights provider Synthesio.
