As CEO of a fast-growing sales and marketing contact database, I scan TweetDeck and other social media business platforms each morning to find what exactly digital marketers are saying about us, our competition and the industry. It has become impossible to imagine running a business without this level of access and transparency.
Tracking conversation through tools like TweetDeck is great, but finding the social activity of all target customers and prospects in one place is very difficult. All marketers actively maintain and grow databases of contact information on customers and prospects. Digital marketers need to be able to tie these contacts to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media profiles. They also need the ability to find who are the most socially connected among them.
Whether having a conversation with prospects or current customers, relevant content is a digital marketer’s best tool and enables them to effectively engage with prospects’ within and beyond social media. When you have a conversation, you’re not only exchanging content, you’re building a relationship and trust. And as any good marketer knows, relationships and trust are the keystones to a successful business development campaign. Not having this level of insight is a point of friction, and leads to lost sales opportunities for marketers, which is something that in this day and age they simply cannot afford.
Over the past year or two, skilled b-to-b marketers have figured out how to break through the clutter and engage audiences with webinars, podcasts, and other learning materials. Business people have given a big thumbs-up to these learning opportunities which help keep them up-to-date on the fast-moving world of business tools critical to building efficiency in their businesses.
We are entering a conversation economy that will transform business communication and efficiency. With the addition of social media, marketers’ ability to connect to prospects with relevant conversation opens up new realms of possibility for truly scalable electronic conversation for the first time in business history. Creative integration with social media will unleash enormous potential for digital marketers.
