Riches are a timeless motivator. From the wealth of the Egyptian pharaohs, to images of Scrooge McDuck swimming in money, to the fact that hundreds of millions play the lottery each year despite being far more likely to be struck by an asteroid, people desire riches.

The lottery, specifically, has a powerful draw. This is because people love the idea that they can win riches from the investment of very little. The first recorded lottery goes back to 200 BC, and the idea of randomly winning riches has continued virtually unchanged to this day.

Because of it’s timelessness, Riches has earned its place as one of our five subconscious buying motivators.

And, keep in mind, “riches” doesn’t have to mean literally winning money. It could mean winning something else of value to me, cashing in on my fortuitous timing, or just seeing unexpected savings on something I was planning to purchase. Any of these scenarios will pull on my subconscious motivation to take action.

If that’s the case, what if you could build the concept of riches into your B2B content marketing?

Of course, riches have been a part of consumer marketing since the early days of the craft. Sales, coupons, and rebates have motivated consumers to buy this dish soap over that one, pick one restaurant over another, and make car buying decisions.

But can riches have a place in your B2B marketing campaigns?

Absolutely. In fact, the Riches motivator is one that usually drives outsized social spread (i.e. “virality”) and helps to accelerate the early stages of the Buyer Journey. After all, when I can help my friends and social connections get rich, then I can take the karma points to the bank, along with whatever riches I’ve gotten myself.

Now, let’s take a look at the three ways that B2B marketers use Riches to motivate buyers.

1. Contests & Sweepstakes

The hypnotic allure of the lottery finds its closest marketing cousin in the contest and the sweepstakes. Incredibly powerful motivators, and easily leveraged in your content strategy.

As a quick reference, a Contest is generally defined as a skill-based competition, while a Sweepstakes is purely random (however, like the NBA Draft, more advanced sweepstakes will allow the participants to improve their odds or gain additional chances to win in exchange for more customer engagement, data, or purchases).

With the rise of social media and user-generated content, contests have become one of the most popular tactics that play on the Riches motivator. This is because they allow you to leverage your buyers’ stories and put your solutions at the center. This blend of owned and earned media usually equals big success for B2B marketers.

The small business owner is a coveted target audience, and Riches is their biggest motivator. B2B marketers know this, and they create contests for business owners to win funding.

FedEx holds an annual Small Business Grant Contest where business owners create video submissions for a chance to win both cash and FedEx Business services. The user-generated videos, of course, are then recycled as incredibly powerful content marketing assets for FedEx.

If Riches is the big motivator for your buyers, then you can even double down and combine tactics for maximum results.

The Lightfair Conference does this for its annual commercial lighting expo by combining sweepstakes content with promoting their early bird sale (our next tactic).

2. Sales, Coupons, & Rebates

There are an array of classic marketing tactics, like sales, coupons, and rebates, that feature prominently if you’re a B2B retailer. But they also come into play for marketers in other industries, like software, financial services, and manufacturers.

If you’re offering a SaaS license, then naturally you’d want to promote the fact that there are big savings if you sign up for a year, like Unbounce does for their landing page software.

Or if there’s a seasonal sale, you had better be creating content that promotes and reminds me about it, as does WooRank, an SEO tool.

And, as any good salesperson knows, by making me feel like I’m getting an exclusive deal, or that there’s a discount that I can take advantage of now (but that won’t be there tomorrow), I can create the final push that a buyer may need to make a decision, instead of putting it off until next quarter, or pushing the decision off to a team member.

This fact makes the Riches motivator also very powerful at the end of the Buyer Journey, during the Evaluation and Decision stages.

3. Trials, Samples, & Freebies

Getting something for free is another powerful use of the Riches motivator. Creating content around free trials, product samples, and free tools & resources is one of the strongest lead generation marketing tactics in your arsenal.

Penn Jersey Paper, a wholesale distributor, incorporates Riches as a motivator throughout their digital presence in the form of free product samples when you sign up as a customer.

And Simply Measured, a popular social media analytics platform, uses both free tools and free trials to activate the Riches motivator. They create marketing content compelling buyers to sign up for a free trial, and they also create valuable resources using their own free tools to show buyers the kind of value they’re getting for the small investment of their email address.

As history tell us, the Riches motivator is powerful for B2B marketers, especially very early in the Buyer Journey, and at the late stages, during Evaluation.

How might the Riches motivator help you achieve your content marketing goals? How would you incorporate tactics that play on this motivation into your content marketing strategy?

The post 3 Ways To Boost Content Conversions By Making Your Customers Rich appeared first on Socialight Media.

Fame has always motivated people. Whether you’re being driven by a Campbell-esque heroic quest, or pining after big name celebrities from entertainment and sports, hoping to be “discovered” in the aisles at the drugstore, or simply looking for your “15-minutes,” fame is a central part of today’s society.

Thanks to the rise of social media, live streaming, and other channels that lower the barriers (and expectations) to celebrity, Fame has earned its place as one of our five subconscious buying motivators.

If that’s the case, what if you could build the concept of becoming famous into your B2B content strategy?

As you know, fame has actually been a staple of consumer marketing for a long time.

We’ve seen marketers harness the idea of fame in talent shows like Star Search, The Voice, and Survivor. Marketers also make sure that they feature former winners of the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes in their TV commercials and direct mail campaigns. MTV was using fame 20 years ago to build an audience of consumers with their Wanna Be a VJ campaigns.

But can fame have a place in your B2B marketing campaigns?

Of course! In fact, content and social communities are the two best marketing channels to unleash the Fame motivator and accelerate the Buyer Journey.

Now, let’s talk about the different flavors of fame that B2B marketers can use to motivate buyers.

Customer Fame

What is Customer Fame? Using your marketing channels to feature and promote existing customers. Tactically, this can take the form of case studies, guest blog posts, customer success stories, testimonial videos, joint-speaking engagements, and having a customer as a guest on your corporate podcast.

Why do it? Customer Fame works really well in the middle of your Buyer Journey because seeing successful customer stories helps potential buyers see themselves having the same success with your product or solution.

The best place to start is by putting your advocates and/or power users at the center of the story. These customers are most likely to engage with your marketing and amplify your message. And when those customers amplify that branded content through their social networks on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, it is seen by a highly qualified audience, which then drives qualified traffic and quality leads.

Let’s take the real-world example of Marketo. They are always making their best customers famous. They write up case studies, create really high-quality video testimonials, and they invite these loyal Marketo users to their annual Marketing Nation Summit. If your advocates are featured in your case studies and speaking at your events, of course they’re going to amplify that content with their networks!

When it comes to customer loyalty, this tactic actually serves double duty. It also is really powerful during the Loyalty stage of the Buyer Journey. By making current brand advocates famous, it also generates even more advocacy among existing customers.

If I know that a product/service I use frequently features their customers, then I’m much more likely to engage in their social communities because, hey, why not make me famous, too?

Some of my decision might be a logical one (i.e. I know that a featured customer success story from a website like marketo.com comes with a high-quality backlink and a certain amount of qualified traffic to my site), or it might be an emotional one (i.e. I want some recognition!). Usually it’s a little of both.

Either way, by making customers famous, you accelerate the middle of your Buyer Journey, and you create an even stronger post-purchase Loyalty Loop.

How might the Fame motivator help you achieve your content marketing goals? How would you incorporate tactics that play on this motivation into your content marketing strategy?

The post How Making Your Customers Famous Can Create New Leads appeared first on Socialight Media.

You know the one:

Tactically, this funnel is fine for measuring individual campaigns (e.g. how’s this landing page doing?), but the concept no longer works for strategic B2B marketers. This is because the way that prospects purchase products and services from other businesses has fundamentally changed with the evolution of the web.

Bouncing Between Search, Social, Content

Search, social media, and the abundance of digital content that has become available to buyers online over the past ten years has resulted in new researching/purchasing behaviors. People use Google to search for solutions to their challenges; they ping their social networks for advice; and they look to evaluate potential products and vendors on their own, without talking to a salesperson.

Ask Forrester, CEB, SiriusDecisions, and the other research houses, and they’ll tell you that between 60% and 90% of the “buyer’s journey” is now self-guided.

And when buyers guide themselves, you’d better believe they’re not going in a straight line (down your ‘funnel’). They’re bouncing back and forth between buying stages (more of a ‘journey’). I might think this or that solution category is best suited for my challenge; however, once I get through the Comparison stage, I may realize I was wrong, and now I need to jump back to the Consideration stage.

I may hit the Evaluation stage (think of a free 30-day software trial), realize that the tool doesn’t have a feature that I require, and bounce back to the Comparison stage, or even all the way back to Consideration.

This doesn’t even touch on the fact that, more than ever before, B2B purchase decisions are made by teams, not by individuals. And teams have a way of getting off track, diverting the process even more from a clean, net one-way funnel.

This “bouncing” behavior has become incredibly common. Yet it breaks the Funnel construct. If marketers want to be successful today, we need to align on a Buyer Journey construct when designing our marketing strategies.

Is the role of Sales in B2B industries dead?

Of course not. It’s just taking on a new form. Once the buyer makes it through the early and middle stages of their Buyer Journey – and Marketing has done their job by educating and engaging them at each stage – the Sales team takes over somewhere during the Evaluation and Decision stages with their own Sales Funnel.

It usually looks something like this:

And Sales teams can attest to the fact that numbers are down, hitting cold call quotas is getting harder and harder, and they rely on Marketing to send them good quality leads more than ever before.

And so, when Sales says, “I need more leads!”, Marketing reacts. They adjust the MQL criteria to pump more new leads into the CRM and over to the Sales team.

But why doesn’t this work?

Because those new leads aren’t better leads; they’re the same leads as before, just being sent over to Sales earlier in their buying process, when they’re not yet ready to talk to a salesperson (they’re still doing their own research, remember?). So those leads don’t perform, and Sales says to Marketing “I need better leads!”

All the while, the Marketing team is trying to do more with less, as they deal with big changes to AdWords, cope with the ad blocker crisis, try to prevent fraud, and look for more affordable ways to generate good leads.

This all causes frustration.

Mapping The Buyer Journey

By switching over to a Buyer Journey model, marketers will be more attuned to actual customer-centric strategies (instead of shoehorning them into the old funnel mentality). Their marketing strategies will also be more aligned with the Sales team, which is mission-critical today.

If marketers build out more accurate Buyer Personas, map those personas to the stages of their Buyer Journey, document that Buyer Journey and circulate it with their teams, they will be poised for success.

This results in better communication; clearer goals and objectives; a more holistic strategy for inbound marketing through efficient and effective lead generating channels like Search, Social, and Content; and tactics that are designed specifically to accelerate each stage of the Buyer Journey.

Doesn’t that sound like a great world to be a marketer?

The post The B2B Buyer Journey Explained appeared first on Socialight Media.

At this point, you know you need Buyer Personas. The search term has been gaining steam the last few years, peaking at a Google Trends Score of 100 (out of 100) in May of 2016.

The problem? Most B2B buyer personas are terrible. Sorry to say, but yours probably do, too.

Why is this?

Well, buyer personas were originally created in the early 80s by software developers so that they could theorize how different types of users would play with the interfaces they designed. Not radically different from how we use them today in a Marketing and Sales sense.

But also, pretty unscientific.

Today, with the rise of social media, content marketing, the evolution of SEO, and advanced marketing automation tactics, having accurate and documented buyer personas has become critical for marketers.

They’re necessary for developing an effective B2B content marketing strategy, building traction across your digital marketing channels, helping the Marketing team stay focused, and creating tight alignment between Marketing and Sales. Buyer Personas tie the whole Sales & Marketing Machine together.

Here are 9 resources for building better B2B Buyer Personas for your team:

1. Current Customer Surveys: This is, by far, the easiest way to build out really strong buyer personas. Send out a survey to a segment of your email list that’s most engaged with your newsletter, your store, etc. Ensure that the survey covers off on how they came to be a customer, why they chose to become a customer, and what would ensure that they remain.
2. Former Customer Surveys: These surveys will usually see lower response rates, naturally, but sometimes your former customers may surprise you. And when they do, you’ll get the real gems. How did you lose their business? Are they happy with the partner/vendor/supplier/software they chose instead? What would make them switch back?
3. Lost Customer Interviews: With surveys, you may be looking at more straightforward intel, but when you set up interviews, this is where you can dig up some really great qualitative insights. And while a survey size of 1,000 may be small, an interview set of only 5 might be enough (depending on how many industries and segments you serve).
4. Advocate Interviews: Naturally, if you’re interviewing your former customers, then you’ll want to also interview your absolute best customers. Find those customers who flew through the Buyer Journey and Sales Funnel; find the customers who purchase the most from you annually; the customers who have been with you the longest; the customers who refer you the most business. What makes them tick?
5. Sales Manager Interviews: Yes, the Sales team probably knows what motivates your buyer as well as you do (probably better than you do). Set up time and sit down with your team’s most experienced AND least experienced sales reps. You’ll find that both will surprise you.
6. Customer Support Interviews: These folks are a gold mine for pain points. Why are customers hard to track down? Why do they contact you? Why do they reschedule? What are they asking for? Your customer success team will be able to teach you a thing or two about your firm’s Loyalty Loop.
7. Leadership Team Interviews: Your leadership team likely knows your buyer incredibly well. They might also be able to provide a few pearls of wisdom that may not have made it into the last iteration of your strategy documentation. This is also a great time to get alignment and buy-in on your new content marketing strategy or social marketing strategy – likely the reason that you’re re-evaluating buyer personas in the first place.
8. Mining CRM Data: Your customer relationship management platform will be especially helpful with buyer persona segmentation. What are the most common demographics for our best buyers, or for our most frequently lost customers? Many times, your CRM will actually house recorded calls, notes from the Sales team, and other contextual gems that can be layered into your buyer personas.
9. Mining Social Media Data: By far the least understood, and therefore most the infrequently or ineffectually used, is using social listening data to pull insights about your buyers. Using social listening and monitoring tools, which range from Free to Enterprise level, you can sort, filter, and comb through unprompted opinions, sentiment, and interactions between your customers, your social profiles, and your competitors. This is a must for generating accurate buyer personas today.

Buyer personas are depictions of your most important customer segments, with sample data of their demographics, psychographics, and digital habits. What motivates them? How do they make purchasing decisions? Where do they go to conduct research? Which peers do they lean on for advice?

Once you’ve created 3-5 buyer personas per vertical or industry that you target, you can begin to map out your Buyer Journey, build out a strong B2B Content Strategy, and more.

Questions about creating strong B2B buyer personas? Contact us today.

The post 9 Resources To Create Better B2B Buyer Personas appeared first on Socialight Media.

Instead of dreading it, though, just picture that feeling you get every year as soon as your spring cleaning is done.

Relief! Refreshment! Reinvigoration!

Not only does your home feel new again, but you’ve broken the spell of the winter status quo. You feel renewed motivation to take on new projects – landscaping, patio refinishing, kitchen redesigning – that both bring the family closer together and increase the value of your home.

What an inspiring, albeit thinly-veiled, metaphor for your firm’s sales content!

Now is the time to do some spring cleaning for your Sales Asset Library – an effort that both brings Marketing and Sales closer together, and increases the value of your deals.

Once you have begrudgingly accepted that your sales collateral is in need of some dusting and organizing, the first thing to do is conduct a thorough analysis of your Sales Asset Library. This includes all of the content assets that your Sales team uses to educate, engage, and close a deal, from research reports and infographics, to data sheets and case studies, to capabilities decks and proposal templates.

The best B2B content marketing firms not only help you create great sales collateral, but they also help your team with this first stage of taking inventory, providing you with strengths, opportunities, and actionable insights.

What you’ll undoubtedly find, once you assess your Sales Asset Library:

• Zombie Assets: Your firm’s designs, messaging, and branding will have changed over the years, either subtly or drastically, but your Sales team will somehow still have access to older, inconsistent zombie assets, bringing them back into the field, emailing them out to prospects, or linking to them from their social media profiles. Inconsistency is actually the easiest problem to solve during your Sales Asset Library spring cleaning.

• Dust Bunnies: In a 2016 report on Sales Asset Management, SiriusDecisions found that “at enterprise-level organizations, an average of 65 percent of content is never used by sales reps.” Without question, a tragic statistic. Unfound and unused content gathering digital dust doesn’t help close deals – even worse, it’s a drain on Marketing resources.

• R.A.C. Assets: Some assets that you find, while visually engaging, may not match up with any stage of your Buyer Journey or Sales Cycle. These “Random Acts of Content” need to be scored for their value and relevance to the prospect, either to be massaged into the strategic sales story, or archived and removed from the Sales Asset Library.

Once you assess, score, and map your Sales Content, here are some next steps:

• Realign to Buyer Journey: With your an inventory or scorecard in-hand, now you can take all of the relevant sales assets and map them to the distinct stages of your Buyer Journey – from Awareness, to Consideration, to Comparison, to Evaluation, to Decision, and finally to Loyalty.If you find yourself trying to shoehorn sales content into certain stages where they don’t seem to quite fit, it means that you need to adjust the asset’s messaging.If you don’t have your Buyer Journey documented, this exercise is best done through a collaboration of Marketing and Sales leadership, with guidance from an experienced 3rd party.

• Realign to Sales Cycle: The Buyer Journey isn’t the only path to consider. Your Sales Cycle is also unique, and it requires assets specifically mapped to each phase – from Interest, to Qualification, to Solution Building, to Buy-In, to Closing, your assets need to be aligned to your specific sales conversions.At this point, also consider how seasonality of purchase and duration of contract and renewal impact the Sales Cycle, and what that means for your sales content messaging today, and for tomorrow.

• Update Design & Messaging: At this point, you should have a great understanding of which sales assets need updated design and messaging, based on the Buyer Journey, Sales Cycle, and the evolution of your branding and messaging over time.Depending on how much of the Sales Asset Library needs to be redesigned, this process could take anywhere from a few days to a few months. Generally, the more assets that are being redesigned, the more cascading efficiencies are created. If you’re redesigning the capabilities deck, it reduces the production time of other asset templates, like data sheets, case studies, etc.

• Measurability & Tools: There are many sales enablement tools that help salespeople, managers, and marketers to understand what assets are working, what assets are going unused, and what assets are ineffective. In our own backyard of Philadelphia, there are several great startups that enable sales content measurement in different ways, from Journey Sales (disclosure: client), to PeopleLinx, to SETVI.

And of course, once you have gone through your Sales Asset Library spring cleaning, there are also an array of technologies out there to help you not only manage the Sales Asset Library, but also enable your inside and outside sales reps to educate and engage prospects throughout their Buyer Journey and Sales Cycle.

This article originally appears on Salesforce.com.

About The Author:

As the President of Socialight Media, Jed Singer has been keeping his clients at the forefront of social marketing for over a decade. Over the years, he has been lucky enough to work with the world’s largest and most social brands, including P&G, MasterCard, Ebay, HBO, and Facebook. He and his team help B2B firms map their online Buyer Journey and support their inbound marketing and sales enablement efforts with content, community building, and lead generation.

The post Spring Cleaning For Your Sales Asset Library appeared first on Socialight Media.

What causes teams to wait on Content Marketing?

Sales & Marketing teams today have so many internal initiatives kicking around, that they sometimes lose sight of which initiatives really drive revenue. If you didn’t get enough inbound leads last quarter, then it’s time to take a step back and assess what’s working, and where you need to reallocate time and resources.

If you’re not already investing in inbound channels – like Content Marketing, SEO, and Community Marketing – then it’s time to get going. Any marketing partner worth their salt will tell you that it can take anywhere from 6-12 months (sometimes longer) to see real, predictable inbound results, regardless of industry. So now is the time to document your strategy and launch a pilot program.

What’s the real Content Marketing opportunity?

Once you’ve launched a strategic Content Marketing program, then the opportunity scales with your content production and distribution. The more strategic content you create, and the more targeted distribution you secure, the more qualified leads you’ll be able to generate, and the more revenue you’ll be able to drive each month.

How much revenue?

Introducing the Content Marketing Revenue Calculator

We created a simple calculator that, with a few metrics from your Marketing team, will generate a projected monthly revenue that could be generated from Content Marketing.

Considering launching a Content Marketing program and want to quantify the opportunity? Want to compare your past performance to our calculator’s projections? Give the Content Marketing Revenue Calculator a whirl:

Then, when you’re ready to recapture some of that revenue, give us a call or shoot us an email to talk inbound marketing- the first hour is always on us.

The post Still Waiting on Content Marketing? Here’s Your Lost Revenue appeared first on Socialight Media.

Here, you’ll find the most shared posts from industry influencers around trending topics like content marketing, social media marketing, marketing automation, social selling, social recruiting, and more. Get excited, grab another coffee, and read on to explore the week’s very best.

Not yet a subscriber of the Socialight Insights Blog? Enter your email address in the sidebar on the right or in the footer to become a member today.

The B2B Social Marketing Roundup

1. A New Scorecard to Demystify the Buyer Journey
2. 4 Simple Ways To Jumpstart Your Social Selling
3. How To Document Your Content Marketing Workflow
4. Steps To Maximize ROI In A New Era Of Content

Upcoming & Recorded Webinars

• How to Optimize Your Webinar Strategy recorded via Uberflip

Social Tech Of The Week

• Tool: Speechpad
• Type: Voice-to-Text
• Department(s): Marketing
• Description: Great for content marketers with lots of audio or video that requires transcribing. Upload your audio and video files from wherever they are stored. You’re alerted as soon as files are done, delivery happens via email, FTP, and other secure methods.

The post #B2Bsocial Marketing Roundup – April 5th 2016 appeared first on Socialight Media.

The most interesting discussions we have while out at conferences or visiting with clients are always about the same thing – the new Buyer Journey. All the major research firms are eager to publish new research and best-selling books around this idea, but it’s still seems to be a concept shrouded in some mystery for B2B Sales and Marketing executives on the front lines.

The relationship between buyer and seller has changed dramatically over the past five or ten years – the buyer now has more access to product/service/industry information than ever before thanks to the amount of searchable content on the web, even more so than the seller, in some cases. This fact means that the relationship between Marketing and Sales, too, must change.

Marketing and Sales need to work even more closely together, not just in alignment of purpose, but also in a transparent exchange of market insights, content performance, and buyer data. Marketing and Sales both need to understand how the buyer evolves, what questions are being asked as the buyer self-educates, and what online communities are important to the buyer as they research. They need to share information more readily than ever so as to have the most accurate picture possible of that Buyer Journey, which ultimately will result in more effective Marketing and Sales activities, larger pipelines, and accelerated growth.

This newer model of Marketing-Sales collaboration required for Buyer Journey acceleration is a fire that sometimes needs a spark to get going, so our team has created a tool to help start the process.

The Buyer Journey Scorecard is step 1A. It’s a means of grounding the team in what you know and what you wish you knew about your Buyer Journey. A kickstart to help Marketing and Sales get aligned on key buyer information, enabling the machine to run smoother and faster.

With the Buyer Journey Scorecard in hand, Marketing and Sales leadership will be more in-tune to their strengths and their knowledge gaps, and then will be able to plot out actionable next steps for their teams to fill those gaps. The next step, a full Buyer Journey Map, then enables them to realize the goal of becoming a more customer-centric organization.

Here’s how to get your Buyer Journey Scorecard.

The post A New Scorecard to Demystify the Buyer Journey appeared first on Socialight Media.

Here, you’ll find the most shared posts from industry influencers around trending topics like content marketing, social media marketing, marketing automation, social selling, social recruiting, and more. Get excited, grab another coffee, and read on to explore the week’s very best.

Not yet a subscriber of the Socialight Insights Blog? Enter your email address in the sidebar on the right or in the footer to become a member today.

The B2B Social Marketing Roundup

1. “Social Media” Needs A Rebranding
2. How marketers generate great content ideas
3. Making the leap from Product Marketing to Content Marketing
4. What to tell Legal about social media risks

Upcoming & Recorded Webinars

• Optimizing Your Webinar Strategy via Kissmetrics

Social Tech Of The Week

• Tool: SimpleReach
• Type: Social Analytics
• Department(s): Marketing
• Description: Provides content creators with universal measurement and optimized distribution for content campaigns. Enables real-time visibility and detailed historical reporting into how content performs across a number of metrics like reach, engagement, and social activity.

The post #B2Bsocial Marketing Roundup – March 29th 2016 appeared first on Socialight Media.

From RedBull’s virtuoso social activations, highlighted by Felix Baumgartner’s 2012 Space Jump, to Oreo’s agile Dunk In The Dark and nimble Daily Twist campaign, to six years (and counting) of brilliance and bizarre from Old Spice, it really didn’t matter what you were selling.

If it was a consumer product or service, there was a way to harness the power of social media, and a select few mega brands will vie each and every year to have the campaign that everyone talks about for the next 12 months.

But for some reason on the B2B side, the social marketing hits are fewer and farther between, and the pitch is harder to make – both internally to Marketing leadership, and from the outside as an agency, vendor, or consultant.

I’ve been on every side of that equation; I built social media products and services in-house from scratch, in the early days; I helped build social marketing practice areas at traditional media companies and large marketing agencies; I’ve grown huge accounts as a social media software vendor with a client list as big as P&G and Facebook, itself; and now, of course, my team at Socialight Media helps, from the outside in, as consultants, and as tactical delivery partners.

So, when it comes to social media, why are B2B marketers not ringing the bell as much? As with anything, there are actually a host of factors, from B2C vs B2B expectations, to the pace of communication technology, to what “content marketing” means today, to the cataclysmic shift that B2B selling is undergoing, all of which I’m eager to unpack in a few upcoming posts.

For this one, though, let’s stick with the simple concept of semantics; “Social Media” is a vehicle, but the phrase is used to mean any number of different things, and without some context, nobody is sure which way you mean it. When nobody is sure exactly what you mean, it leads to head-nodding, but not much actual listening. This makes championing it difficult, whether you’re an in-house marketer, an agency, or a software product.

With a semantics challenge, any marketer can get on board with this solution – a good old fashioned rebranding. They’re as tried and true as the Bible and as fresh as this US election season. This concept has even been discussed recently by Simply Measured, a great tool for social analytics, albeit in a different way and from a different angle.

This issue is just semantics; “Social Media” is a vehicle, but the phrase is used to mean any number of different things, and without some context, nobody is sure which way you mean it. When nobody is sure exactly what you mean, it leads to head-nodding, but not much else. This makes championing it difficult, whether you’re an in-house marketer, an agency, or a software product.

Instead of one convoluted term, let’s break “social media” into three that are each more substantial and representative of the aspects that matter to us as marketers.

Social Media: the road

This is used for the social platforms you know and love. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Snapchat, the corporate blog, and more. If you have a profile and there’s a way to comment, post, or share, you’re on the highway of “social media.”

Community Marketing: the drive

This is the big schism – no more “social media marketing.” That’s where your listeners stop listening and fill in the rest of your words with “Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, yeah I get it.”

Successfully harnessing relevant social communities for your brand and your buyers is more akin to being a great driver, not having a fast car. Community Marketers (the drivers) understand not only the social media roads, but also which ones their buyers are on, and which ones get them to their destination faster.

Good community marketing has a destination – specific goals and measurable objectives. Are you leveraging social media for customer service? As a recruiting tool? As a sales tool? For product insights? To build awareness? Without strategic goals that tie back to real company stuff (nod to one of Wil Reynold’s most passionate topics), your community marketing initiative (or pitch) will be lost.

Social Insights: the signs

This is another one – no more “social media data.” Nobody needs or wants more data, especially oceans of social media data. Social Insights are the nuggets your Community Marketers pick up on the way, which help to achieve your business goals and get where you’re going. You may discover through social listening, for example, that buyers are shifting the way that they talk about your industry – that messaging shift is actionable social insight. Through social monitoring, you may find that your competitors just launched a wildly successful campaign – whatever made it succeed is actionable social insight.

Semantics Matter

At the end of the day, we understand that this is semantics, not epiphany.

But semantics matter.

And if we start separating the social media platforms, themselves, from the actual practice of community marketing, and discovery of actual business insights within those social communities, maybe your CMO or SVP of Sales & Marketing will have a clearer picture of exactly what you’re talking about when you tell them how you’re going to change the firm’s marketing forever.

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