The Value Proposition, and its close cousin, the Unique Selling Proposition, are two time-honored tools that have been used for ages to help marketers crystallize a message that is relevant to customers. In the age of social media and social selling, they still represent the crucial core of good positioning and messaging. But marketers need some new ways to address the unique challenges of dialog.
Over the seven years we’ve been working with companies to incorporate social media into their marketing mix, we’ve seen a lot of changes in the way companies approach social marketing. Mostly for the better. But one area where we still see companies struggling is in deciding who should speak for the company in social media.
There’s a d
angerous? undercurrent we see developing among channel? marketing organizations? trying to deal with the? confusing landscape of social media options? that can? best be called “Checking Off the Social Media Box.” Everyone knows social media is important, but it’s hard to pin down exactly where it adds the most value, so business objectives get over-simplified to reduce the confusion.
For seven years now, we’ve been delivering social media intelligence to some of the world’s largest brands, and we’ve watched marketers struggle with the concept of segmentation in social media. Segmentation is one of the fundamental principals of good marketing–the idea of dividing customers with similar needs and attributes into groups for more targeted marketing. Demographics, psychographics and behavioral economics are all time-tested techniques for segmenting markets in meaningful ways, and marketers have done backflips trying to apply them to social media.
My post? blasting LinkedIn? last week was a long time in coming. I’ve been working with clients for several years, strongly advocating LinkedIn as a powerful tool for engaging customers and prospects. But time after time, I’ve watched marketers get burned by poor planning, poor communication, and poor decision-making at LinkedIn. Last week I focused on? LinkedIn’s seemingly arbitrary decision to wipe out Product Pages, after thousands of companies invested in creating them, only to replace them with “Showcase” pages, which seem like a really cheap imitation of GooglePlus. I now have customers for whom we built Product Pages and championed LinkedIn asking what they should do, and whether or not LinkedIn should still be a part of their content strategy.
Read moreOne Content Error That Will Get You Banned On LinkedIn
Good partners—especially growing partners—don’t just want to be fed leads, they want to learn how to drive leads themselves.
LinkedIn is the world’s largest social network for professionals. They’ve done a fantastic job of making themselves an essential part of business networking. Just about anyone who wants a job, or wants to connect with other professionals, has a LinkedIn account where they carefully curate their profile. LinkedIn has almost … Read more
The key to enabling your partners for social marketing is to provide a stream of relevant content that makes it easy for partners to select, personalize and share in a way that helps them authentically build their own voice and brand.
Your job is to give partners the tools, the content, and the support they need to generate leads more efficiently and effectively than they’re doing on their own—or with other vendors.
The most fundamental truth of ROI: It’s nearly impossible to measure for marketing, it’s the wrong place to start with social media, and it’s a virtual recipe for social marketing disaster.