Social Media Data Helping to Target & Extend Demand Gen Campaigns

“There has been an increase in requests from the sales and marketing decision makers in our community for social media data,” said Gary Halliwell, CEO, Netprospex. “They are looking closely at social media as a viable platform for prospecting, lead generation, and customer relationship nurturing. We knew adding social media profiles to the NetProspex database would help our clients integrate social profiles into sales prospecting, and we are also seeing more and more requests to match social profiles to client lists and prospect databases. Businesses want to map their social connections and better understand their network.” Halliwell said clients that use NetProspex primarily to discover new contacts in their target market are now using social profiles for added intelligence on prospects and importing links to social profiles into CRM systems, so sales team can extend channel engagement beyond phone and email.

Targeting Tools
Vendors are enhancing the functionalities of automation systems with features designed to help marketers leverage the power of social data. Act-On Software’s Twitter Prospector offers marketers an alternative way to approach Twitter for audience search. The tool uses advanced search technology to help marketers find an audience most likely to respond to specific marketing message. Using the Twitter API to find relevant prospects, Act-On emphasizes the number of conversions versus the number of followers. The Prospector application include a setup tab, designed to help marketers build templates for publishing content; a search function to monitor Twitter activity around keywords, competitors or industries; and a dialogue tab that can transfer Twitter messages into an email inbox or a marketing database.

“Social media is not only about thought leadership and accruing followers/ subscribers,” said Shawn Naggiar, VP Sales & Business Development, Act-On Software. “It has proven to be a tactical lead generation tool similar to other marketing channels.”

In July Pardot rolled out Social Insight, a social media integration package for marketers designed to aggregates data from multiple public sources, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and displays the information within a prospect's Pardot profile. Pardot also recently added automatic bit.ly link shortener integration, making it easy for users to share links to Pardot-hosted content through social media channels. Pardot CEO David Cummings said customers are utilizing social tools to better understand prospect behavior and track impact and ROI of campaigns. “Everyone is doing some level of social media marketing and wants to understand the results,“ he said.

While social tools are offering marketers new channels, Cummings said integrating and measuring social is still an obstacle. “Marketers still debate whether giving partial credit for touch points makes more sense than mainly focusing on the originating touch point,” he said. “We believe there’s no right answer as it is dependent on the type of business and marketing. Regardless, it is valuable to report on deal opportunities and resulting deal value from prospects that interacted with social.” Pardot has done internal social media marketing to close dozens of deals, according to Cummings. “[Our sucecess with social media] has really reinforced the power of the medium and the need to track it in demand gen/marketing automation systems,” he said.

Genius.com’s URL shortener ("gURL") is specifically designed to track both structured marketing campaigns and ad-hoc social-media "conversations." As more BtoB marketers turn to social media, gURLs are designed to enable any social media participant in a Genius customer organization to include trackable links in their Twitter, LinkedIn, or other social media posts. Marketers can then track web traffic and resulting ROI from social media. Genius also offers personalization capabilites for marketers to customize messages for visitors that click through gURLs.

"Marketers understand the power of social media for extending reach and engagement with prospects, but they’re hungry for a way to apply hard metrics to social activity," said Scott Mersy, VP Marketing & Products, Genius.com. "The key integration point for social is on the web, extending the life of your blog, free resources, webinar invitations, and any other published content via social, and having the ability to track it effectively, is where the impact will come. For the marketing automation space, this presents an opportunity to expand beyond email-based nurturing and towards a web/social-driven engagement with prospects."

“We anticipate social to be integrated into multiple areas of organizational communication, from prospecting to lead nurturing to client success and retention,” Netprospex’s Halliwell said. It’s a very public and concise forum for conversation, and marketers are getting very creative in how they integrate social into their overall marketing strategy.