Using Marketing Automation With Social Media: Part II

As I mentioned in part I of this article, social media can be a powerful tool in automating your marketing–a tool that I think it is underused by most companies.

Since we’re all spending more time on social media, it is a great way to reach the leads you are already targeting and acquire new leads regardless of your industry. To restate the point, “social” is now the top Internet activity: Americans spend more time on social media than any other major Internet activity, including email.

Marketing automation is all about scale.

To extend your existing marketing automation campaigns to social media, see the advanced retargeting tactics covered in part I. Now let’s dive into a couple of ways to acquire new leads via social media.

Lead Generation

In addition to touching and warming the leads you already have, social media can be effective at adding additional leads to your database. Since its earliest days, Twitter has been used to get premium content in front of new users. When you require a short lead form or registration to access this content, you’ve got leads! Twitter is even experimenting with how to let marketers conduct this entire transaction without leaving its site with Lead Generation Cards.
This same approach is useful on all social media sites, but I single out Twitter because users are actively seeking out new educational content there and expecting to discover new solutions.

Once you know which content is working, advertising is how you amplify your best messages on social media. Twitter and Facebook now promote “Lookalike Audiences” to their advertisers. You can use the demographics of: your best customers; respondents to a successful ad; or your fan page, to attract more users just like them. In a nutshell, their advertising algorithms will do the targeting for you based on past success. This is another great way to attract more qualified leads into your marketing automation program.

Facebook offers are an exciting new tool to generate leads as well. Originally designed to help local businesses with physical locations, marketers have quickly figured out how to use the ads to offer digital or informational goods. Ebooks, webinars, consultations and services can all be offered at a discount or with some added value on Facebook. Facebook even sends automatic emails to the user each week reminding them to use the offer, which brings us to the next approach…

Drip Campaigns

Drip campaigns might just be the godfather of Internet marketing. Of course, until recently drip campaigns were only delivered via email. The proliferation of social media, however, gives us marketers a second way to drip, drip, drip our way into your life.

Consecutive posts are exactly like a drip campaign—it’s just that most companies don’t take the time to think through the story they are telling their followers. Add in the custom audience targeting mentioned in part I of this article and you’ve got a really interesting way to stay in front of your best prospects.

This infographic lists out the various ways to use drip campaigns.

Just like social media (and all marketing for that matter), the idea is to tell a story over time that builds a mental relationship between you—or your product/brand/service—and the reader.

Unlike email though, you can get others involved in the story with social media.

Summary

To recap a few points made in part I:

• Great marketing automation programs will transcend the inbox to include several mediums to reach your best prospects everywhere online.
• Since we’re all spending more time on social media, it’s a great way to reach the leads you are already targeting regardless of your industry.
• Marketing automation is all about scale. By automatically identifying targeted leads, and nurturing them over time with multiple touchpoints you can expand your marketing presence and generate a higher volume of quality leads.

And remember to use Juicy Results’ REX framework for measuring your social media efforts.

Hope these ideas inspired you to expand your marketing automation campaigns to social media and beyond. Feel free to add your ideas in the comments section.

Get more insight on Marketing Automation from Juicy Results.