Social media is a key component of any up-to-date digital marketing strategy. It’s no wonder, since we all know the importance of generating leads across our multi-channel marketing efforts and going beyond email campaigns.
Whether it’s for brand awareness or for lead generation, social media gives marketers an expanded audience and reaches leads on their own turf, so to speak. It’s an easy channel for conversations to take place and for building trust between your leads and your marketing team, with no pressure on leads to commit time (or cash!) to your company – until they are ready to do so.
In fact, here are a few stats to highlight just how important social media is to a successful digital marketing strategy:
However, while we all agree on how important social networks are, many of us aren’t tracking social media engagement data, and most of us could do a better job of integrating these key analytics into our campaigns and our strategy.
Case in point: lead activity currently being tracked by platforms like Marketo, Eloqua, and Act-On generally comes from just three major data sources: website, email, and data synced with your CRM platform (for example, Salesforce).
If we overlook key social media data, we can easily get a skewed view of our lead management efforts – and of the ROI of our marketing strategy.
This wealth of data is why it’s so important to integrate your social media platforms and your marketing automation. Translating behavior into actionable data will let you see the true worth of your efforts by providing accurate marketing attribution and showing you which sources or touchpoints converted your lead and landed a sale.
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It can be tricky to make sure your social media data is being captured into your marketing automation platform, but there are tools that you can use to make the task easier! Here at JTF Marketing, we’ve partnered with Oktopost and use Oktopost for our social media data management and tracking.
Oktopost makes day-to-day campaigns easy (making marketing tasks easier by allowing marketers to post across all their social media platforms simultaneously and to set up separate social media campaigns within the platform) and provides key analytics, from the global level (showcasing the results of your overall publishing campaigns) to the granular (providing data on engagement per individual posts and content).
And, most importantly, Oktopost integrates easily with all major marketing automation platforms (including Marketo) – no need for complicated data transfers or endless csv files.
We’d like to thank our partners at Oktopost for providing background and context for this blog post and for partnering with us to provide a social media engagement platform. All opinions on this post are our own.