3 Ways Brands are Using Social Analytics to Sell Smarter

Through social listening, and ligning customer service with marketing, and digital experiences with products, brands like Mattel and Warby Parker have mastered social analytics.

B2B Selling these days has been muddled by the explosion of online marketing and social media marketing. The lines between digital marketing units and sales teams have become blurred. But many companies with global sales and marketing teams have figured out how to use the social marketing movement to help them sell smarter.

Do you want to use social data to sell smarter? Here are three ways brands are doing it:

1. Following Prospects Along the Buyer Path

A lifetime customer example of a big brand selling along the buyer path is Mattel, the toy company behind Barbie dolls and Matchbox cars. Mattel is utilizing tools such as Salesforce Market Automation cloud, which allows the brand to listen to customers and engage with them across every channel: email, social, web, and mobile.

Mattel has owned digital marketing in its sales efforts by creating digital environments that support offline products. A great example, I learned at last week’s Salesforce Connections conference, is how Mattel created a racing game and app where Hot Wheels cars can be used in the game through the use of a QR code.

Through marketing analytics, Mattel has learned that the Fisher-Price customer is the same customer who purchases the brand’s teen and tween products. Mattel is now building digital experiences to align with their popular offline products across the customer lifetime buying cycle and it is working. The company has grown both its product line and customer base exponentially since it started listening to social analytics to change sales tactics.

2. Taking Cues From Customer Service

Warby Parker has grown and retained its customer base by building more engaging social content. The eyeglasses brand realized quickly that its customers needed guidance on how to care for their glasses. Serving customers the content they digest the most, individual employees started creating videos like, “How to clean your eyeglasses” on YouTube.

The idea took off , flooding the company’s YouTube channel with new subscribers. Not only does this engage retained customers, but more importantly, it demonstrates how social selling occurs when companies align customer service with marketing to sales.

3. Listening Better in Social

Cisco, the world leader in Internet hardware and networking, established a social media listening center early on. The social listening team listens to at least 5,000 mentions a day on its social channels. By actively listening, and training its B2B sales team to respond, to customers, Cisco was able to attain a 281 percent ROI in digital marketing spend over five months.

Coupled with smart marketing automation systems and a staff of dedicated social listeners, social media analytics is essential for brands, both now and in the future. Selling in today’s B2B environment has become a digital marketing effort. The closer you can align your marketing and sales teams – and give your sales team better insight about how and where your prospects digest content – the more automated sales your organization will benefit from in the future.

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