Informa is a leading business intelligence, academic publishing, knowledge and events business, operating in the knowledge and information economy.
In other words, its marketing is unlikely to set the world on fire. So how can a B2B company like Informa have success with digital marketing? I recently had a chat with Katie Canton of Informa Business Intelligence to get informed.
Listen to the interview on SoundCloud, iTunes or keep reading for a summary of our conversation.
What are the objectives with your social and content marketing strategy?
"The main objective for us - and it's a really nice position to be in, actually, because our senior management completely agrees - isn't about community size. So we're not really measured on followers and fans, although it's a nice metric. Our main objective is to create really engaging communities around some of these interest topics that we support, so around some quite niche areas in the pharmaceutical industry and, again, with agriculture, etc., and to create these communities where our customers and prospects want to engage with us but also want to engage and share information with each other. So that is what we are trying, have been trying to create."
You operate in a B2B space, what particular marketing challenges are you faced with?
"It's a bit of a challenge on social because people aren't as open wearing their business hat as they are wearing their sort of non-business hat. So it's harder I think to get people to engage in a business-to-business environment on social, which is kind of a challenge. It's been a challenge through my career doing social media and B2B, and it's especially a challenge in my current role. But the nice thing about where I am now is that business intelligence is a content business, essentially, so we have loads and loads of really good quality content. And the easiest way to get someone to engage on social media is to give them something of value that they actually want to engage with. So it's a challenge, but I think we've got a good solution for it."
What's your step-by-step guide to social and content success?
"We're very much in a process to get to where we want to be, but we started about a year ago and did a lot of research - so we did a lot of auditing about our current social media state, competitor landscape obviously. We also conducted a lot of customer surveys and customer research and a lot of customer visits to find out what people want from us. And then we had the joy of distilling all that information down. Well, first thing is deciding what we actually then wanted to get out of our social media activity because, like most businesses, we don't have loads and loads of people on our social media marketing team, so we can't just do everything for the sake of doing everything and being on every platform for the sake of being on every platform.
Everything we do needs to be quite strategic and quite planned to ensure we've got a good effort to return ratio. So we took all that research, we had a lot of thought internalizing the marketing teams and the marketing teams and our product teams and the senior management team to come up with our overall objectives, which is that community focus. And then we had to come up with a plan of how we were going to do that and who was going to be involved. And a lot of that planning was done within the marketing team and the product teams. And then it was about implementing, for getting the right tools and to help us implement was a big part of that and training was a big part of that. So training the whole marketing team so that everybody knows about the importance of social media and content marketing, not just the social media and content marketers. And then another big part is training anyone in the wider business who wants to get involved in social. So that's something that we're currently starting to roll out is making sure that our analysts and journalists and sales and client services are as upscale as they want to be on social media."
How do you go about measuring ROI on social and content marketing?
"Essentially, we can distil our social media metrics into three buckets. One is community growth, one is engagement - and that includes lots of different things - and then the other one is moving those people from engagement through the funnels, so whether it's visits to the site or whether it's context or whatever that next step is. So all of our metrics fit into those three buckets. And then any time anyone within the business comes up with a suggestion of a piece of content we should be creating or different social network we should be joining, we need everything to come back to, A, the objective and if we can measure it. We need to have return for that effort, so everything needs to come back to those three buckets or the overall objective."
Follow Katie on Twitter @katiecanton and read the full article on the Link Humans blog.