Before Marketing Automation, You Must Have Effective Social Outreach

In the new age of digital marketing, every business needs to have some sort of knowledge when it comes to marketing automation. However, before you jump the boat and dive into this concept, sales and marketers need to understand that there’s a huge step before you can commit to a marketing software.

The key is having consistent proactive social outreach as your first touch.

Engaging one-on-one with a potential customer isn’t normally the ideal image when it comes to a marketing approach. But with the power of social media, it’s now more effective for marketing teams to use these platforms as a way to engage and connect to potential buyers.

Below we discuss why social outreach is an effective strategy when it comes to building a relationship with your prospects and lead to higher conversion rates.

What is Social Outreach?

Historically, traditional marketing has been focused on creating campaigns and formulating impressions on television, newspapers and billboards, to drive people towards your business.

This notion is a way to market to others, sending out information and publishing content, just as you would do on social media.

But though social media has a similarity to traditional marketing (build followers and schedule messages out to them), social media isn’t as traditional.

With social outreach, you’ll have a greater ability to reach out to a specific target audience and have a personal one-on-one conversation with individuals. You won’t just reach out and send content, but you’ll also engage and build relationships with those individuals. 

Be Social on Social

Social media was created as an outlet for people to connect, share and exchange information at the tip of your fingers. What makes social media so effective is that you’re now able to get to know your potential customer before you interact with them.

Social media outreach can start by:

• Following the prospect on Twitter
• Favoriting a tweet
• Looking at their feed and replying to a relevant tweet
• DMing with a personalized message
• Connecting on LinkedIn
• Favoriting a post on LinkedIn and sending a LinkedIn InMail
• Checking out their content/blog and commenting on the post

At Socedo, we use our product to make sure each direct message we send on Twitter is personalized and leads to a call to action. We use their name, talk about specifics of what they’ve been tweeting and ask qualifying questions for them to answer.

For example:

“Hi (Name), I’ve really enjoyed your Tweets on Social Media Marketing! What is your best performing channel on social?”

This way, if they respond, we’ll continue the conversation and send them towards a free trial, content or set up a phone call.

Recognize who your target audience is before you start interacting with them. By identifying specific customers based on their interest and needs, you’ll more likely reach a higher conversion rate than randomly talking to strangers on the internet.

Customer Bonding

Building a relationship with your customers is extremely important. With social media, it gives you the ability to do that online. Social outreach lets you take your customer relationship on the internet to off the internet and in person or on the phone.

The relationship you build with your customers allows them to trust and form a bond with your company. This personal attachment gives your customer a chance to become your brand advocate, promote your product and send referrals to new potential customers for the future.

Social before Marketing Automation

From the emergence of this new type of buyer, there are many marketing automation systems such as Marketo and Salesforce to come out with ways to contact customers who are already in your database.

However, the next question is “how do I get prospective customers into my database?” These kind of automation systems are great at contacting customers with the information you already have but doesn’t find potential clients on social for you.

The intense focus on SEO and PPC from marketing automation means that social being first touch is more likely to get overlooked. The buyer-to-sales relationship starts off with marketing automation, but the issue of where and how you’ll connect with your potential customers still prevails.

With proactive social media outreach, you’ll be able to add new warm leads into your system.

As a marketer, reaching out on social media is one of the quickest ways to start a conversation. If you compare the time it takes to make a cold call or send a personal email, you’ll find that social outreach can scale tremendously.

The prospects you connect with on social will become better leads once their information is sent into your marketing automation system for you to nurture.

This strategy will give you more time to focus on closing your sales, since you’ve already started your conversation and engagement on social.

So what are you waiting for? Successful relationships don’t just happen on it’s own. Take that initiative and start your strategy on reaching out to your customers with social outreach!