Mediaboss Marketing

Cheryl Cook's Social Scene

Dell EMC partner marketing chief Cheryl Cook is keeping her foot firmly on the accelerator as she brings new tools and strategies designed to make partners' marketing efforts simple and seamless to a growing number of solution providers.

Cook launched Dell EMC's Partner Marketing Institute little more than a month ago, and so far it has attracted nearly 2,000 solution providers. The turnkey site gives partners access to a full suite of marketing resources and training and provides tools to seamlessly make their marketing efforts an extension of Dell EMC's. With that, Cook is building plans to help partners maximize the effectiveness of their MDF dollars and go-to-market strategies.

Ultimately, Dell EMC wants partner marketing to become self-service for solution providers who can turn to the vendor for collateral materials and resources to carry out unified, comprehensive social media marketing campaigns.

Having Dell EMC's social media acumen encapsulated for easy digestion by partners means those partners will come to rely less on Dell EMC for lead generation, instead becoming self-sufficient while using a standard, Dell EMC-sourced approach.

What follows is an edited excerpt from CRN's conversation with Cook.

Read more:
CRN Exclusive: Dell EMC's Cook On Partner Marketing Momentum, Social Media Traction And New MDF Initiatives - CRN

Lithium Social Media Management Now Supports the Most Social Ad Integrations in the Market, Adds New Listening and Competitive Benchmarking Capabilities

Lithium Technologies announced a series of significant enhancements to its social media management platform. Lithium Social Media Management will now integrate with ad automation tools Brand Networks, Nanigans, and Smartly.io to give marketers the ability to manage paid and organic content together. Additionally, the social media platform also announced integration with social listening platforms Netbase and Synthesio that empower marketers to make intelligent decisions; all-new competitive benchmarking; and sophisticated mobile publishing capabilities for Android and iOS.

Lithium was recently listed as a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Social Media Management Solutions, Q2 2017. Currently, Lithium is expanding its next-generation product to help brands centralize and scale their social marketing and engagement efforts.

Currently, Lithium has a massive digital footprint with approximately 480 million new digital interactions analyzed daily, 100 million monthly visitors across its online communities, and 850 million online profiles scored through Klout.

Rob Tarkoff, President, and CEO at Lithium, said, Marketers know they must provide better digital customer experiences, but its becoming more and more challenging with the multitude of digital channels, the fragmentation of tools to manage those channels, and increased noise from competitors. With this next generation of our social media management product, we want to make things simple for brands to manage digital at scale within one unified, integrated platform.

Integration with Paid Ad Automation Tools Offers Marketers More Choice

Lithium now supports the most ads integrations on the market, giving marketers more choice in their preferred ads partner and enabling them to schedule and analyze paid ads alongside organic content. Ads integrations with paid ad automation tools Brand Networks, Nanigans, and Smartly will make social media analytics more refined.

Todd Taplin, CEO of Brand Networks, mentioned, Our customers have longed for a partnership that replaces the siloed approach to data gathering with a holistic social media strategy. Interoperability like this is key to achieving next-level efficiency and performance. Our best-in-class social advertising platform, paired with Lithiums engagement platform, will streamline how marketers drive real business results through social.

Peter Caswell, CEO, NetBase, adds, Top brands and agencies deliver superior customer experiences by listening to their customersacross channels globallyand acting on it in real time. Our strategic partnership with Lithium marries leading intelligence capabilities with in-the-moment, strategic action, that drives immediate impact to the business.

By integrating with social listening and intelligence platforms, Netbase and Synthesio, Lithium allows marketers to sharpen their campaign strategies, act upon trends and intelligence, and better manage brand health. Moreover, marketers will be able to access the Social Impact Ranking a new competitive benchmarking capability, to measure how their campaigns stack up against competitors in areas like influence, sentiment, audience and more.

Comprising social media management and communities, the Lithium engagement platform enables brands to manage multiple digital touch-points, facilitate millions of conversations, and drive smarter decisions through data connecting customers, content, nd conversations at the right digital moment.

See the original post:
Lithium Unifies Paid, Earned and Owned Social On a Single Marketing Platform - MarTech Series (press release) (blog)

Every organization needs a social presence, right? Yet, because a significant number of SME owners struggle to glean quantifiable results or sales from their social media efforts, it must be asked if it is really worth the effort for them.

While many spend significant time and money to have staff or outside agencies maintain their social media accounts hoping to lure new clients, theyre missing the fact that selling on social media channels doesnt work. Only about 10 per cent of the clients of my digital-marketing firm actually manage to convert leads into sales through social media.

The exception is large brands that have huge media followings (Apple, Coke), companies that started, target and thrive on social media (Luxyhair.com is another of many examples), and specialized service providers such as consultants or event organizers. In the latter case, they might use social media channels to promote a speaking engagement or a new book.

Unless your business falls into one of those categories, stop trying to sell. Yes, SMEs need to maintain a social media presence because that is now the go-to communication platform for clients across age demographics. But social media as a tool for building brand recognition is only one tool. Use it that way but broaden your wider marketing strategy to include such other tactics as advertising, public relations, content marketing, speaking engagements and other initiatives that can help boost your bottom line.

Remember that its also highly transactional, in the sense that no organization owns the followers they maintain on their preferred social media channels they rent them. Whether paying for Facebook ads to promote your business or sharing links to articles, youre paying people in some way to engage with your brand. Those rented followers will come and go, and theyll only go faster if you try to work a hard sales pitch.

Why? We know there are four stages of a customer life cycle:

Social media is best utilized during the contact and care stages, but SME owners and their CFOs still want to use social to convert a follower to a sale. Thats like painting with a hammer. You can do it sort of but it obviously makes far more sense to use a brush. This is particularly true when attempting to engage cynical Generation X clients or advertising-weary Millennials and Generation Zs.

They dont want to be sold to. They want to hear your story. They want to know whether you share the same values and have a solution to a challenge they may be experiencing. They want to know how you can improve their lives in some way.

No matter their age, virtually anyone who engages with your brand on social media wants to get to know you. So, dont expect them to buy expect to build a relationship over time.

For existing customers, surprise and delight them with exclusive access to your products, promotions or information they may find relevant.

If youre an actuary, for example, tell stories of how quitting smoking will lengthen your life expectancy. Explain how your job is crucial in deciding pension benefits. Talk about trends in the industry and how they might impact your target audience. But never try to sell.

In addition, if your organization gives back to the community or supports initiatives that align with your brand objectives, tell your followers about all the wonderful things youre doing for others.

Just dont expect them to buy. That will only happen when you establish a level of trust with them. Sometimes that happens right away. Or it can take months, even years.

The hard sell has (thankfully) fallen on hard times. This is the hard truth of marketing in the social media era.

Dave Burnett is CEO of AOK Marketing, a Toronto-based firm that helps traditional offline businesses get discovered online.

Twitter.com/aokmarketing

Original post:
Stop selling: The hard truth of social media marketing - Financial Post

The following is the second article in a three-part series from IBM. Click here to read part 1.

Step 2: Integrate.

The lessons learned from our early days of social media marketing couldn't be more relevant: treat chat and messaging as you would any strategic channel for engaging with your customers. That integration can mean many things, of course, but it should start with two integrations in particular:

Journey integration: More than ever, customers demand consistent brand experiences that are personalized to their specific needs. That means taking their specific channels (and their behaviors on those channels) into consideration when designing great customer experiences for them.

Data integration: However, journey integration isn't enough. You have to connect chat to your social interaction data strategy: collecting, cleansing, and analyzing, ideally in real- or near-real-time, in order to continuously learn and improve. A siloed channel will only interfere with creating coherent omni-channel customer experiences.

Furthermore, youd want to integrate the chat content with everything else you know about the customer, and their micro segment: their preferences, behavior, and what triggers spur them into the right action. That will allow you to personalize and optimize the chat to better support your customer objectives.

A great example of both is what 1-800-Flowers is doing to integrate a Facebook Messenger chatbot experience with your order management process. You can see the chatbot in more detail below:

For both journey and data integration, your marketing stack matters. Look for campaign automation and other marketing technology that make social engagement -- including chat and messaging -- an easy addition to your multi-touch, multi-channel marketing efforts. Download this whitepaper to learn more.

Originally posted here:
Chat: the gaping hole in your social media strategy (Part 2) - Marketing Dive

Social media marketing, broadly speaking, is made up of two distinct strategies brand pages (organic) and advertising (paid).

While past advice in this area has focused mostly on the organic area, the truth is that most brands find it very difficult to perform well in this area. Organic social media marketing is harder than it ever has been before, and in that type of climate, most brands still get it wrong.

At the same time, the paid side of social marketing has grown up and established itself as an effective way to reach customers in many different industries. And so, its time for marketers to ensure that they are getting the most out of social media advertising.

Facebook

Facebook is the largest social network and a well-established advertising channel. With a wide array of self-service options, brands can target Facebook users both on and off the Facebook website and app, in their newsfeeds and the right-rail. Target advertising based on demographics, interests, page likes and more, with different formats, like video, carousel, lead generation, and click to convert.

For more information, check out these tips for advertising on Facebook.

Instagram

Instagram is owned by Facebook, and all advertising is controlled directly through Facebooks ad platform. Options continue to be built out to support brands who want to target users of the photo sharing app. And all Facebook advertisers have the option of sharing their ads on Instagram as well.

If you are interested in advertising on Instagram, you should read more here.

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Twitter

Twitter advertising is less about direct conversions or lead generation, and more about branding and awareness. Brands are able to promote topics or tweets in order to gain exposure, followers, and clicks. These promotions can be targeted based on location and other demographics, as well as interests and follower data.

LinkedIn

LinkedIns audience is there for reasons that are more specific than some of the broader networks like Facebook and Twitter, and due to that its advertising potential is limited to certain types of companies and reasons. Many B2B businesses have been able to use LinkedIn for lead generation campaigns as the targeting options are robust for company type, size, industry and job roles. You can target people with ads in someones feed, banners on an individual page, and sponsored In-mail.

Pinterest

Just like LinkedIn, Pinterests users are using the service for a specific reason. Most commonly, these are shoppers looking for products and ideas, in spaces like home design, fashion, and event planning. Its heavily-female audience is an interesting place for brands looking to reach more of this creative-minded consumer. Brands can pay to promote pins and target them to users based on interests and activity on the site. Learn more about Pinterest ads here.

YouTube

Some people consider Youtube a social network, others put it into another category. But for brands looking to reach a larger audience online, Youtube has become a go-to spot for advertising. Brands can create and promote their own channels, create video ads that run before other content, and show banners alongside videos to people watching on the website. Because these ads are delivered by Google, the platform and targeting options are quite robust. While generally more expensive than Google search ads, Youtube is a great place to engage people with more dynamic content.

Snapchat

Snapchat has made a number of moves recently in an effort to court more advertisers. Their options are still changing and most of them are not self-service, unlike most of the others mentioned above. Currently, brands can sponsor stories, geofilters, and lenses, as well as create full screen ads that appear in between the regular snaps users view from friends. Its early days for Snapchat advertising and most smaller companies should wait to see whether or not this channel is an effective one before trying it out.

My name is Zach Heller. I am a marketing professional with years of experience in branding, digital marketing, direct response and marketing communications. I have entrepreneurial and consulting experience, and love working with small and medium sized companies to help direct marketing efforts toward growth. I am the sole operator Viewfullprofile

Continued here:
The State of Social Media Advertising - Business 2 Community