Ep 52: Serious Social – How to drive MQLs and SQLs through social media
In this week’s Serious Social Live, Colin Jacobs will be exploring how to drive sales qualified leads through better marketing qualified leads on social media. Tune in to discover what a successful demand generation campaign looks like and why demand-gen is much more sophisticated than just selling on social.
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Full Transcript
Welcome to the Serious Social podcast, created by the straight-talking social media experts at immediate future.
Welcome along to serious social live. You’re here to hear about MQL and SQL. I’m assuming those of you who have joined have an understanding of what they are, but in case there’s anyone joining us this morning, they’re just starting out on their marketing careers. MQL is of course our marketing qualified leads and SQLs are sales qualified leads.
The ethos is that if we drive enough content and we put out enough content, Then we drive enough intrigue and we get enough people downloading reports or engaging with our brands, creating the marketing qualified leads. And if we get enough of those and the scoring. Very crudely. It depends on the actions of a customer, what they’ve consumed and where they visited and what they signed up to webinars and so on and so forth.
You get different lead scoring, the higher, the lead scoring, the better, the quality of the lead. And it becomes more of a priority for your salespeople to pick up the SQLs when they qualify those, the lowest scoring might be a poor lead or might be a bit more work for them to do, but that’s largely difference between MQL and SQL is.
The fellas being get more MQL, you get more opportunity to create SQLs. And if you get enough SQL, which you can convert some of them and get incremental revenue. That’s where he will boardrooms one. What will you learn today? Well, I’m hoping that you’re going to take away some tangible insight, um, that will allow you to go and actually better manage your stakeholders.
Um, it will help you to understand how to structure campaigns for success and hopefully outline what you need to do. Next. Let’s get started. Now I’d take about sort of 10, 12 minutes of your time this morning. So stick with me. If you go and give this a try hand on heart, I promise your B2B, particularly your B2B campaigns will be better for it.
I believe the absolute key to marketing is problem solving and I don’t mean waiting for a problem to arise and then fixing it. I mean being curious enough to create a comprehensive list of questions around the business need the required activity and its deliverables, and also how you’re going to prove success back to the business.
Yes. If we define and address enough questions, then you’ll be well on your way or promise you you’ll be well on your way to creating an impactful marketing campaign. However, If you cut corners and just acts on the direction that you’ll give them from above, like take this white paper and go and put it out on, on social.
If you just do that verbatim, you will likely cut innocent corners that will have the potential to penalize your campaign significantly. Those penalties increase. If you’re not also curious about the channel you’re deploying in social has changed dramatically over the years, but it’s also changed dramatically in the last year with significant algorithm changes.
To create the right programs that deliver against our internal requirements. We must understand how the external channels work, how the algorithms reward, content engagements, and also how they penalize reach and engagements. We were fortunate here at IFF that we’re marketing partners with Facebook, and we have brilliant relationships with the likes of Twitter and LinkedIn we’re on the phone with them.
Every single week. So we get to see these algorithm changes firsthand. So we don’t expect you all to be super geeky and sitting on the changes, but you need to have a part now or an Avenue to this information. Otherwise you’ll carry on doing what you’ve always done and innocently that will be, um, possibly contradicting how the algorithms wish you to, to deploy.
Being blind to those elements, not addressing the challenges posed by the platforms that results in us throwing mud against wolves. And in the case of B2B marketing, that much could be a white paper that took months to produce. It could be a high value report that’s flush with important insight. It could be a guest, an important blog that was guest authored.
For example, my point whilst our organizations might see high value collateral. We might see any costly collateral, I mean really GC stuff and send you another boardrooms. Definitely see the cost against those investments. If we don’t package it all correctly, if we don’t distribute those crown jewels correctly, then it all becomes mud that our prospects don’t value.
Ask yourself this. When was the last time you bought or engaged a service offering based on upon a series of salesy posts, ask yourself this. When was the last time you looked at something after a resonating question, landed with you, something, the picture interests, something that drove your curiosity.
And our job is to connect our brands with audiences who have the potential to be intrigued by offerings. All role is to show how we can both solve challenges they face, and also help them to unlock that business value from the very solutions we’re proposing. Our job is to create intrigue, boardrooms, want revenue.
They will say we need SQLs. The more inquiries we generate, the more MQL we get. So then the more opportunity our sales team has to create those sales conversions. And it’ll be words to that effect. The simplicity of that sequence is correct for boardroom vernacular, but when it comes to executing, it’s our role to put the business case forward about how we get the incremental MQ ELLs.
We have to appreciate the lens through which the boardroom loop, but we also have to appreciate the lens through which our potential customers look, the all important customer view. And we have to appreciate the demands of the social channels and how they work best to drive and reward increments and engagement and reach.
Allie job is to behave the wonderful puppet masters in the middle of appreciating everyone’s view. And then creating the solution that delivers what the boardroom wants, their incremental revenue, but delivers the content that our audience wants and will care about without leaving them, feeling spammed and delivering the content, which means the social channels are happy and they give us a boost and a reward on reach and engagement and immediate future.
We call this solution, nudge, nurture. We’ve done it for years. Done it for years. The business case you put forward to your boardroom with these, how, how you aim to deliver incremental results through a series of content that pulls apart your high value, collateral, creating a story of resonating industry challenges and the very solutions that you bring to the table.
The content will speak. So the achievable business, finding your customers boardrooms can unlock. If they’re using your solutions, the content will not speak to the product or service USP’s selling USP’s or talk to them about USP. That’s the job for your sales person to judge what unique selling points are relevant to the conversation, do not pick USP’s in marketing unique content that speaks to the success.
And the value that your customer’s customer will experience this isn’t just about in technology. It’s not just about talking about the success of technology. We’ll bring our customers, but how’s that going to allow them to go and perform better and unlock value from their customers, customer and so on and so forth.
The content will not repeat will not be a series of posts, pushing for trials or demos or buy now messages. The content will take the guidance of thought leadership. It will showcase the high quality intellectual property, your collective staff, um, uh, as a result of that, the collective brand holds. It will evidence you as being a brand who understands the very challenges facing boardrooms and businesses today and showcase how you solve those very problems by unlocking business value, the content series will comprise multiple touch points.
Using multiple content types. And when you look at it as a collective, before you publish it, when you look at that content collective, there will be a contextual story that evolves throughout. It. Won’t be a series of spammy messages. The evolving story will continue to nudge, nurture your audience. So the belief that they need your organization’s assistance, the notch Natasha campaign will be loved more than the social channels.
This our algorithms have aligned to the customer journey, the varying ad goals, all those different ad goals. They all have different algorithms. There are our is optimize for reach that give us that initial brand awareness. There are algos optimized for engagement, which give us. The nudge nurture, um, from our audiences are going through the consideration phase.
And then there are the ad goals that are optimized for the conversion phase, whether that’s signing up for a download or signing up for a webinar, or even signing up to speak to a salesperson. The point here, the very important point here is social media is now optimized for the customer journey. Social media is not search.
It can’t jet you can’t just skip to those, wanting to boy today. That’s the job of your search marketing and your sales team’s task for today. Social media is about identifying prospects, high value prospects that have the potential to engage with and trade with your organization. You’re starting further up the funnel, but if you deliver the right storytell and not spam, spam, spam, you will nurture more.
through the funnel. That will ultimately become incremental volumes of SQLs. If all the LinkedIn account manager was on this live right now, they would be telling you themselves that’s successful demand generation campaigns need between five and nine touch points. Those touch points come from the varying ads and the varying steps of your customer journey.
You’ve taken your report and you’ve nudged the nurtured your audience from the resonating challenges that we show we know about to discovering how to solve set challenges. You’ve nudged them through an understanding of how you’ve learned about the business value and how you will actually help them moving forward.
That whole campaign will span a series of ad sets that will ultimately. Ending conversion. Our most successful campaigns in 2020, we’re not demand generation campaigns. They were nudge, nurture thought leadership campaigns that drove conversion through re-targeting. It was the social channels that told us we had sent the benchmark and I was on a live with LinkedIn three, four weeks ago.
Then now we’ve even adopting all of this language. They will tell you that nudge nurture campaigns is the success to technology and B2B marketing and that the varying. Elements of your nurture campaign has to span the customer journey and transcend the number of ads with it ultimately ended in conversion.
The interesting thing about this is LinkedIn will, if you ask them, they will sell you, um, single answers to drive immediate conversion. But if you actually sit them down and ask them best practice, they will tell you that single ad driving conversion. Doing what search is doing, trying to skip lots of steps and skip to conversion.
They will tell you that their social platform is not set up best practice. Isn’t set up to do that. They will talk to you about the five to nine touch points. Boardrooms. Want revenue. And they want to utilize the investments they’ve already made, whether it’s the reports, the white papers I get. So when they’re asking you to go and get the content out there and get more eyeballs on it and get more downloads and get us more money that’s okay.
Yeah. To appreciate their view and their need, and then put forward the business case that allows them to understand how we get that increment. So immature, even if that means they have to best a bit more to do the content creation, to get the suite. If collateral needed marketing is about problem solving, identifying, and solving enough problems to get a smash hit campaign.
And those problems start with. What’s the lens of boardrooms looking for, why are we being asked to push this content? What are the needs behind the campaign? What are the challenges behind the campaign? What are the challenges presented to me by the social teams? If you get all of those answers, you can then start coming up with the creative ideation that goes and exploits the opportunity because you’ve answered the questions.
You’ve got the context and understanding of what you now need to come up visually to go and exploit. All too often, marketers get budged as being the creators. If people come up with the campaigns and the colorful issue with that, go and take our GC content out to audiences and outside. Okay. But honestly, our job is so much more than that.
Our job is being needs, expert people in the middle. Managing multiple stakeholders understanding the view and the lens through which all of those different stakeholders are looking. And our job is to come up with the very solution that delivers what the boardroom wants that delivers what our marketing team needs, what delivers, what the cust the, the social channels are demanding from a best practice and a results perspective, and delivering.
What the business ultimately needs when you’re playing back value. If you do that, I promise you, the investments in your campaign will go up. You will get more campaign demand coming your way, and you will be seen as a genuine consultant rather than just to do the art to marketing starts with problem solving and figuring out all of the challenges.
You need to go forward and address anyone is if anyone’s got any questions about this, please, please, please get in contact with me. It’s a really passionate topic. This, um, there’s a lot of people that I believe I have a talent for aligning, um, commercial need with creative delivery. The honest truth is I don’t have a talent for it.
I’m just a really curious person that likes coming up with questions. And then I liked being a bit of a problem solver. Anyone can do this. Anyone can do this. Please give it a go stop. Doing those spammy demand. Gen campaigns go and create a nudge nurture campaign, and you will have a smash hit on your hands in 2021.
I promise. Let me know how you get on. Thank you for watching. Thank you for tuning in today. Go and enjoy your bank holiday weekend. We’re back next week, Katie, how has been shaping up a really interesting piece around a customer journey? I believe so. 10 30 next Friday for that one. Uh, otherwise go and have a great weekend and we’ll see you back on SSL library 36.
Thank you.
If you’re after more know how to break the social boring subscribe now and check out the show notes for links to our website and social profiles
If you’re after more know-how to break the social boring, subscribe now and check out the show notes for links to our website and social profiles.