Losing weight is not easy, and those who have tried it will agree that it requires a lot of resources, patience and commitment to achieve any meaningful results. There is no magic pill that helps us shed pounds overnight. The same can be said for content marketing. It takes research, hard work and dedication to consistently churn out high-quality content that brings leads and sales. There is no magic bullet. And just as pedometers, weight-loss programs, and healthy foods are pieces to the weight loss puzzle, there are a variety of tools to help your content marketing efforts.
"There's no shortcut to creating great content, but with Oktopost, the distribution and measurement of the content is simple and insightful," says Daniel Kushner, co-founder and CEO of Israel-based Oktopost, the only social media marketing platform built for B2B marketers and professionals.
Kushner says the biggest benefit of Oktopost to marketers is the full control they have on social media, and being able to manage the channels as they would manage emails with marketing automation and ads with Google Adwords. "It's super easy to create 'drip social campaigns,' and at the end of the day, the marketer is focusing on content and not administrative work to get content to their readers."
The "ah-ha" moment for Oktopost came to Kushner in 2012 when he was VP WW marketing at B2B Enterprise Technology startup, Nolio. "We used to do a lot of content marketing, such as monthly webinars, whitepapers, blogs, case studies, surveys and infographics," he says. "Social media was the main distribution channel for our content and also ended up as the channel that provided the most qualified leads. We needed a platform that helped us efficiently distribute and manage a ton of content on social media, focusing on LinkedIn and LinkedIn Groups, and measure how social media affected the top of the funnel in regards to leads and sales."
A perfect example of how Oktopost fulfills these B2B needs is with one of its clients. A big data company in San Francisco discovered Oktopost when they were in search of a B2B social media marketing platform. They checked all the big names like Hootsuite and Sprout Social, but the decision to go with Oktopost was based on their live pilot that was developed to promote a webinar.
"With Oktopost, it took just 40 minutes to setup the webinar social campaign that included LinkedIn and LinkedIn Groups, Facebook and Twitter," says Kushner. "After the initial 40 minutes of work everything was essentially on auto pilot. Messages were posted to the social networks with an array of social profiles that were in the platform."
The campaign concluded with more than 170 registrants to the webinar that resulted from social media. The company was able to report on exactly where each individual lead came from, which LinkedIn groups contributed the most clicks and conversions, and follow the leads, together with their social media source, through the sales pipeline.
"On the measurement side, Hootsuite and others provide the social metrics such as re-tweets, followers, shares and likes," says Kushner. "In B2B, these types of metrics are less important than the leads and sales generated from social media marketing. Oktopost provides the numbers that are important for B2B marketers. We find that Oktopost customers might still use Hootsuite for their listening component, a feature that Oktopost doesn't have as a part of the platform."
Although Oktopost enables the management and measurement of social media, "It does not automate responses and conversations," Kushner says. "In fact, here at Oktopost we are against automated posting and actually provide ways for our customers to stay connected to the conversations."
Oktopost's social inbox monitors for comments from posts that you schedule through the platform, so you can engage with the conversations you started. "We believe that using social media should be done with respect to its consumers, and as such the Oktopost platform does not and will not support features like automated postings from RSS feeds and using the same message across different social networks. Each network has a tone and voice of its own, and marketers should respect that when creating their social media campaigns."
Recently, Oktopost added Google+ Pages to its suite of tools. Right now, Oktopost's marketing automation and CRM integrations are going to become deeper and wider.
"Learning to use Oktopost is easy, but it's important to remember that just as social media isn't a magic bullet for B2B lead generation, neither is Oktopost," Kushner says. "It's important that B2B businesses are using social media as a component in the larger strategy of content marketing."
-
Social Startups is a weekly Social Media Today column written by Shay Moser about the newest and most innovative social companies. Look for the next installment next Wednesday morning. Logos by Jesse Wells.