Tuesday 12 January 2016

Don't Just Have Social-Media Conversations, Design Them

All design has three legs: form, function and intention. Form is achieved through the personality you embed in the written tone and the style of your visual language. The function is the intended message delivered to an audience. social media marketing 2014 Intention is to identify why you are having the conversation. Hint: selling something isn’t a great intention to starting a conversation.Design of a conversation, if done right, offers thoughtful consideration for how the recipient of a message feels.Success in most businesses is built around sales, typically including either an inside or outside sales force -- or a combination of both.Inside sales typically include communicating with customers remotely, whether via telephone, email or any of the many other remote sales tools. Outside sales are executed in person, usually outside the company's office.Since I've never built a business that required an inside sales force, I've enlisted the help of Mark Roberge, chief revenue officer at HubSpot, a Cambridge, Mass.-based inbound marketing software company that has rewritten the rules on inside sales.Over a period of six years, Roberge increased HubSpot revenue more than 6,000 percent and expanded the team from one to 450 employees in multiple countries -- so yes, he knows what he’s doing, and HubSpot, which recently closed 2013 with over $77 million in revenue, has become wildly successful as a result.Upon talking with Roberge, it was immediately apparent how organized his processes at HubSpot had been. There are four very defined tenets that he has built the inside marketing team around and he rattled them off like he’d done it a million times before -- which I’d be willing to bet is pretty close to accurate. best social media marketing It was clear that the following attributes aren’t just talking points, but considered doctrine at HubSpot. I’m confident that you could ask any inside sales rep about them and receive a nearly identical, yet equally fluid response.This is a thought that would typically go against that of an outside sales force.
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Social and emotional awareness

Social media is a bombardment of billions of tiny cannons when managed in the wrong way. When conversations in social media are designed, the message arrives at the right time and makes an emotional connection with the recipient. marketing by social media To better connect with your audiences, you must first find your voice to give your messages form. Find confidence in your perspective and make it simplified, real and digestible.Social is not only about followers, likes, sales, marketing or advertising. Although these things make us feel affirmed in our social standing, it is the outcome, not the origin. The core of social is in the conversations you design. Great conversations happen between people who are interested in the emotions of each other.What does this mean in planning for social media? Find new ways to connect with your audiences to form how they will feel when interacting with your brand. For example, create personal Twitter lists such as “People: Hilarious,” “People: Magical” and “People: Authentic” to design an emotional response.After all, it is a numbers game and the more attempts you have the more likely you are to have a sale or at least that’s the thought.But the reality is consumers don’t consume like they used to and, according to Roberge, “buyers are less receptive to interruptive marketing.”Rather than cold call 20 hours per week, try investing a few of those hours in social media where your target prospects are conversing," Roberge says. "Read the same blogs, follow the same people on Twitter, join the same LinkedIn Groups and actively comment, re-tweet and participate. Make your comments smart and add value. These efforts will get you noticed by your target buyers better than cold calls social media marketing and will position you as a trusted advisor in the industry.Whether you believe it or not, the days of the "Glengarry Glenn Ross" sales approach are over.You can’t just pick a list of targeted customers to call with your elevator pitch,” Roberge says. “That doesn’t work anymore because consumers are too educated and rarely appreciate or respond positively to a hard close.

Find pools of passionate audiences

When considering the emotional state of audiences, some see love as the goal and anger as the emotion to avoid. Instead, the goal is for the audience to be highly emotional, avoiding indifference. social media marketing strategy Anger is merely a highly emotional state and can often be turned into love if handled appropriately.Once you’ve come to accept the importance of emotion, it’s then a matter of seeking audience pools with highly emotional engagement.These audiences may not fit your typical psychographic or demographic profiles, but they should be active and engaged in a related subject matter. As a business owner, defining the five most essential audience pools will help to elevate engagement, purchases and loyalty.The reality is that you must become an absolute expert in your given space so that you can answer any question or adapt to changing circumstances, while taking the approach that you are there to provide the potential consumer with the help they require so they can make the best decision for them -- which isn’t always the best decision for you. We are constantly bombarded with new technologies that are built to cure pain points and overcome inefficiencies.Roberge attests that you must “absolutely crave new technologies in order to constantly streamline your business,” as it’s these technologies that can play a huge role in the innovation required to “make your selling more efficient, whether that's the Signals product, social-media management tools, data modeling, etc.Part of the benefit of the constant pursuit of new technologies is that they often provide us with new ways to analyze or look at data. social media marketing plan There are amazing benefits that come from understanding the data that developed through both technology and sales channels,” Roberge says.If you want to create a team that excels at inside sales, they must absolutely love digging through the numbers to understand where they’re at, and as a result, where they can improve.

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