Last week we covered Social CRM strategies for customer service. This week will be about marketing. There are many benefits marketing can gain from social media, and on our Virtuous Cycle, we list the following:

• Branding / Word of Mouth: The community can help spread the word about your brand. Brand involves much more than just names and logos – it’s a set of values that customers can rely on
• Voice of the Customer: Social media will quickly tell you what your customers and others are saying about your brand. What do they like or dislike?
• Ideation:  Ideation is all about asking the community for their suggestions (“idea storms”) about how you can improve the customer experience
• Education: Marketing spends a lot of time educating all sorts of folks about all sorts of subjects. Enroll the community in helping you to get this valuable word out
• Lead Generation: Use the community as a source of leads
• Lead Nurturing: Use the community to nurture leads until they’re ready to be contacted

Many of these topics have been covered elsewhere. For example, there is a widespread discussion about the use of social monitoring and ideation to understand the voice of the customer. For this post, I want to focus on lead generation and nurturing, which have not been talked about so much.

Lead generation is the art of finding people who are interested in your story. Old School marketing relied on PR and Advertising to do the job in various guises, whereas the Social School can bring a couple new tools to bear:  Social SEO and social monitoring.

First up is Social SEO, or social search engine optimization. The goal is to find people who want to hear your story based on what they are searching for. As such, you will want to put up as much content as possible in a format that is susceptible to indexing by the search engines. Content can consist of both article-types (videos, white papers, Wikis and so on) and community-types (discussion threads about your topics of interest).

Try to avoid being too “slick” in your content. Social media is all about authenticity, transparency and honesty. In fact, given where credibility lies, try to draw on your customers and other well-wishers to provide as much content as possible.  The best way to attract them is to start with a customer service community. It’s hard to be a social marketer until your own customers are happy and social too. The purpose of your content should be to inform and educate, not to sell. Early leads are not ready to be sold to yet. Use all of your traditional analysis tools to tell what sorts of content are attracting the most incoming search traffic and produce more content along those lines.

The goal of Social SEO is to get folks to read enough content in the public portion of your community that they request a full log-on to gain access to even more content. When they request a log-on, you can have them fill out a questionnaire similar to what many marketers currently use before giving folks a white paper or webinar access. Be sure it’s obvious that they will need to request access and tell them how to go about doing that. Popup messages that aren’t too annoying are one approach – as is messaging in the public part of the community. Give away a significant critical mass of content without requiring sign-up. Remember: This is the content driving the SEO traffic to your site!

You’ll quickly find, as we have, how powerful of an inducement it is to join a community of your peers where you can ask questions about the topic you wish to learn about. The offer is simply more potent – you’ll see a much higher conversion rate from people requesting access versus the typical white paper.

OK, that’s Social SEO. Now let’s look at another approach: Using social monitoring to drive lead generation. Social monitoring is all about finding people who will be interested in your story based on what they are already talking about through social media. Look for keywords with which to search for conversations that will reveal those who are compatible with your story. For example, Helpstream could use “Social CRM”, “social marketing” and “customer service.”  Cast your net broadly in terms of which feeds you will monitor. Twitter is a great starting point, but you’re missing out if you stop there.

Having created a series of keyword-filtered feeds to ensure a target rich environment (sounds like TopGun!), it’s time to start converting them to leads. Your goal is to expose the leads to your community content, and hopefully this will serve to invite them back to your community for deeper nurturing. Using Twitter as an example, you could send people whose tweets look promising a response with an invitation to take a look at related content within your community. Also consider sending them an invitation to join the community.

Beware of spam!  There will be a temptation to overly bombard individuals, whether in an encouraging effort for them to visit your community or in an effort to send them non-community marketing messages. Resist the urge!  If your Social CRM strategy is too “spammy,” it will immediately be noticed and you’ll be marginalized. You need to be offering valued content on a user-metered basis, not spam. It’s all about self-service in terms of content consumption. Allow your leads to graze your social content buffet at their own pace. Initially, only they know if their projects are near-term, or whether their interest is simply curiosity.

I say “initially” because there is a way for you to know too, and it is crucial to successful social marketing. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and in this case, the “pudding” is the lead’s propensity to seek more information. Marketing automation experts will tell you that a typical lead needs to touch between 20 and 25 pieces of content before they’re ready to become an opportunity. That’s a lot more than most people suspect.

With Helpstream’s Social Marketing Module, it’s possible to send this activity stream of content touches to your marketing automation software. Using the reports in that software, you will receive a holistic view of every bit of contact your leads have with your content – whether the content is by virtue of marketing landing pages, corporate website or the Helpstream Community. Marketing automation software applies a concept called “lead scoring” to these content touches. Different content receives different lead scores. For example, looking at a price list shows a greater propensity towards buying than simply looking at a particular feature description. You can even apply negative scores, for example, to reduce the scores if the individual goes away for 2 weeks without looking at anything.

Your ideal candidates will absorb a lot of content in a very short time, indicating they feel a sense of urgency for getting up-to-speed on your offerings. Ideally they will ask questions of your community that will also give you insights into their individual interests. Once their Lead Score reaches critical mass (you’ll determine this level over-time based on who buys and who doesn’t), it’s time to step away from self-service and reach out to the lead. There are many ways to do this, including sending them an email or calling on the phone. One particularly smooth, available option is to use the community itself.

Imagine a community that monitors Lead Scores based on content consumption. When the scores reach critical mass (as determined by real-closed sales cycles), the lead is automatically assigned to a sales rep. That rep subscribes to the lead’s activity stream. Think of the activity stream as being like the Facebook wall – it tells the rep what the person is doing in the community. The idea then is to look for a chance to jump into a community discussion where the lead is involved in, where the rep will have considerable insights into the interests and motivations of the individual by looking at their past history. It will be very natural to answer a question, identify themselves as being from sales and ask whether a deeper discussion would be helpful.

That’s the full Social Marketing Lead Generation Cycle: