SUMMARY:
To create a new B2B social media strategy that delivers business results for the enterprise division.
1. PROBLEM
As the business transitioned from two separate companies to one distinct company, there were multiple opportunities to unify the approach, collaborate across teams, integrate the work and bring intelligence and attribution to the process.
2. CONTEXT
During the discovery period, the following challenge areas were identified since social began in 2012. Starting in 2015, our team’s new charter was to enhance these areas as part of a bigger strategy that meets the needs of the business.
- Collaboration: Initiated workflows across product, vertical, PR, media, content, social, digital, CRM internal teams and external agencies.
- Intelligence: Institutionalized social listening intelligence across teams internally and externally.
- Integration: Integrated all marketing platforms from an operational standpoint beyond campaigns to have more of a holistic approach.
- Content: Expanded editorial practices by bringing in external subject matter experts, influencers to create thought leadership content to go beyond branded content.
- Experimentation: Through a series of test & learn cycles, opportunities were created where engagements were made to become more relevant in industries, relationships gained and new business was earned.
- Attribution: Goals were established around audience growth, engagement and user acquisition. To support these goals, supporting diagnostic KPIs were used to forecast and management the goals.
3. SOLUTION
It was clear that a complete restart of the governance, management structure and ownership was needed in order to develop a new strategic vision that aligned to business goals.
The social media strategy conceived, was designed around setting up direct attribution reporting framework to support business goals using all aspects of the buyer decision journey through the marketing funnel beginning audience growth, engagement and user acquisition.
- Listening – Initiated a social listening system that is designed around the traits of customers across industries that the business needed to be relevant in.
- Platforms – Launched the insights blog to drive a content hub & spoke approach to thought leadership across industries that integrates rich media content from Slideshare, YouTube and other platforms. Took other platforms such as Linkedin & Twitter to expand into verticals and more relevant areas while also integrating these platforms into an employee engagement program for content distribution. Automated platforms to acquire users at scale to nurture them using a CRM system.
- Content – Restructured content strategy to be more relevant in industry verticals focusing on the solution and relevancy to each industry vs. being product focused.
- Engagement – Defined KPIs for primary and secondary engagements, levels of relevance and set up automated tracking systems to measure these across platforms. Included less of a 1 to many conversion but instead, a 1:1 conversational approach to build relationships at a subject matter expert level across industries. Included influencers to amplify and engage with topics relevant to the solutions being offered to make the brand a whole, more relevant to each specific audience.
- Measurement – Designed a measurement approach that simplified the tracking of audience growth, user engagement and customer acquisition.
4. RETURN
- Reach (Community) – Grew social audiences from 23,000 to 140,000 across blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube & Slideshare.
- Engagement (Relevancy) – increasing average weekly engagements across owned platforms from 2,639, to 40,952 YoY.
- Acquisition (Business Pipeline) – Acquired 700 new active C-Suite & Manager level customers in the enterprise segment.