It almost goes without saying that marketers must generate leads. Interactions in social media pose a challenge because their connection to lead nurture isn’t always easy to see.
Marketing automation (MA) software can help marketers manage their lead generation efforts and leverage the power of social media.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation software provides a comprehensive overview of marketing campaigns. Marketing automation platforms host creative assets and automatically launch campaigns based on CRM segmentation or prospects’ digital behavior.
They record the traffic from various communications channels, including social media, and also score leads. ROI reporting is a key benefit — MA tools provide statistics on marcom’s contribution to closed deals.
How Marketing Automation Vendors Are Incorporating Social Media
What does that look like, exactly?
Marketing automation solutions incorporating social media may do one or more of the following:
- Capture information shared in social channels and add it to a contact’s profile
- Use social sign-in for quick response on landing pages
- Enhance your email marketing strategy: Use “social sharing” features in emails to encourage recipients to share content
- Embed social feeds or videos into landing pages
- Track the contribution of social sites to website traffic
- Monitor conversations by prospects on key social channels
- Manage updates to major social channels (automated posting)
- Adjust lead scoring to reflect social conversations
Integrating Social Media in MA Isn’t Just Trendy – It’s Smart
Now let’s get to the point – why should we focus on effectively using social media features in MA tools? Because …
Integrating social media into marketing automation improves demand generation effectiveness.
Consider these benefits:
- Improved data to measure social media ROI. MA reports provide insight into social media’s influence on campaign performance.
- Deeper information on prospects and customers. Social profiles help Sales understand prospects as individuals and help Marketing identify key influencers in the social space.
- A more complete view of prospects’ digital behavior. Data about which web pages a prospect visited, or which emails he opened, is more accurate when coupled with information about which social sites he used while considering your product.
- Greater awareness of your published content. The personal nature of social sharing complements the more impersonal distribution through search optimization.
- Greater brand awareness through enhancing your digital business card
- Reach more buyers and engage more prospects. Social sharing features allow you to leverage the power of viral marketing to reach contacts outside your CRM.
- Be able to predict a social media reputation crisis or a malware attack. Social media automation is one of the fundamentals to pro-active and intelligent safety.
I hope we’ll see the day when virtually all marketers use automation tools. These platforms provide marketers with ways to work smarter and do a better job. Plus, we’ll dodge a few headaches. That’s a win in everyone’s book!
Takeaways
- Marketing automation (MA) software helps marketers track and nurture leads by integrating data from various channels like email, website, and social media. This provides a more complete view of prospects and helps calculate campaign ROI.
- Major MA platforms are incorporating social media by capturing social data to enrich contact profiles, using social sharing features in emails, tracking social site contributions to website traffic, and monitoring prospect conversations on social channels.
- Integrating social media data into MA improves demand generation by providing a better measurement of social ROI, deeper prospect information, a more comprehensive view of digital behavior, increased content awareness through sharing, and expanded reach and engagement.
