In a day and age of fragmented media consumption, brands increasingly compete not with other brands but for customers' attention. How do we grab people's attention if we don't know them well? How do we engage them meaningfully, over time, when what we know about them is mostly purchase history coupled with demographic data? Enter Social CRM.
Let's start with some definitions. Paul Greenberg (follow him on Twitter), the author of CRM at the Speed of Light, defines Social CRM as a "philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes and social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation." Collaborative conversations are tough to pull off when what we know about our prospects and customers is limited. Fortunately, technology has evolved to offer a new platform where consumers choosing freely to engage and share deep connections with brands. By harnessing deep preference insights found on social media platforms, we can tailor content and offers to the specific likes of our audience. Enter the Awareness Facebook Campaign Manager.
Awareness Social Marketing Hub customers can now implement a variety of promotions on Facebook while capturing and integrating deep social profile data with leading CRM and marketing automation platforms, such as Salesforce.com, Marketo and Eloqua. The Facebook Campaign Manager enables deep social profile data collection that includes email address, other Facebook "likes", birthday, relationship status, and education. This information is then augmented with other social profile data collected and stored in the Awareness Hub and in turn integrated with leading CRM and marketing automation systems such as Salesforce.com and Marketo. Equipped with these insights, marketers can then build the business rules, workflow and processes to engage in collaborative conversations.
To help the brands using our social media management platform to kick start some of these conversations, we have enabled the creation and management of custom Facebook tabs from the Hub at no additional charge. Brands and agencies managing social marketing activities on behalf of brands can choose from a set of templates for frequently used promotional elements such welcome tabs, coupon offerings, and YouTube channel integration (we plan to add new templates regularly). Or they can create and design their own Facebook tabs using simple HTML. The key benefit of the new Facebook Campaign Manager is that brands can now track conversations and build social profile databases to better understand and engage their followers.
With 60 percent of brands planning to increase content market spending in 2012, as reported by "B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends", marketers will be looking at ways to maximize their content efforts. If you think social marketing is better suited for B2C brands, consider this: on average, B2B marketers spend over a quarter of their marketing budget on content marketing and employ 8 different content marketing tactics to achieve their goals. B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report also shows the percentage of social media platforms used by B2B marketers - Twitter and Facebook are two of their top choices, as shown in the graph above.
So if you are looking for ways to maximize your social marketing and content efforts, consider trying out the Social Marketing Hub and the Facebook Campaign Manager. To learn more about it, please attend our Facebook Campaign Manager Webinar or request a demo.