End of last year US-based marketing automation specialist Marketo announced that it has integrated B2B social media capabilities, including Twitter, with its lead management solution.
In this post Jon Miller, VP Marketing and co-founder, shares his view on how Twitter and social media in general can and should be used for marketing purposes.
Below you can read Jon’s view on the subject.
Because the Internet has profoundly changed buying behavior and consequently how marketing gets done today, Twitter and Facebook have fast become a rich source of leads intended for customer acquisition (sales) or customer retention (service, up-sell).
This is especially important for subscription-based services like Marketo, where it is a top priority to maintain a trusted advisor relationship.
Twitter and Facebook provide invaluable real-time insight into the interests, likes/dislikes and preferences of existing and prospective customers at no charge. So it is no surprise that a revenue-focused marketing automation solution, like Marketo Lead Management, is keen to track and monitor this behavioral activity.
We accomplish this by leveraging our tight integration with salesforce.com and the Salesforce for Twitter application, which is available for free on the Force.com AppExchange.
Our advice is to respond in a collaborative way as appropriate, and otherwise to follow lead nurturing best practices and respond in a disciplined way that continues the conversation, or solves the problem, without interrupting it.
Marketo’s definition of lead nurturing is “the process of building relationships with qualified prospects regardless of their timing to buy, with the goal of earning their business when they are ready.”
We do so by creating or appending a lead profile comprised of social media, demographic (company, title, region, industry, company size) and behavioral data (frequency and content of web activity by known or anonymous web visitors).
With the benefit of social media, this lead insight can now be tracked independent of the prospective lead visiting our web site. And because this input is unfiltered, its lead score can dramatically impact how we nurture, prioritize and respond.
Finally, social media extends marketing’s role, reach and responsibility in overall lead lifecycle management – generating awareness and demand even before the earliest stages of traditional buying cycles.
Jon Miller is co-founder and VP Marketing at Marketo, he is also the author of the Modern B2B Marketing blog.
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