4 Ways Social Media Insights Increases  ABM Success

Several years ago, I worked for a CRO. I suggested we use Facebook as a channel to go after people looking to join clinical trials. My suggestion was laughed at. It was explained to me that social media was not a viable source to target trial participants because the platform attracted like-minded people.

Sadly, they didn’t have the insight that if you have multiple audiences with varying needs (weight-loss, hair growth)—it will ensure that individuals could receive a more personalized experience from you.

Well, the times have changed. Today if you want to learn more about your customers’ preferences, concerns, challenges, and motivations you can follow them across social platforms, and by doing this you will increase your results because social media reaches a lot of people that you can easily tap into to uncover specific interests and needs that could be a perfect fit for your business.

Four ways social media purchasing intel can boost your ABM strategies:

• Target and identify the most relevant audiences for your marketing campaigns or product on the right social platforms.
  • The insights you gather can help you measure the effectiveness of ABM programs by providing a clear view of which channels are working the best for specific personas.
• Use customer insights to segment existing customers and identify prospects interested in your solutions.
  • Create a marketing campaign addressing the most pressing problems for prospects and current customers, and position your product as the solution of choice.
• Target individuals with highly customer-centric messaging and content that resonates with them.
  • Create content focused on specific topics that your audience is interested in. Like, “”how marketers can use data analytics more effectively””, then distribute it on social platforms where this audience engages with similar content regularly.
• Social media insights can help you better understand the relationships your customers may have with your competitors.
  • If you monitor the conversations across social media where your competitors are active, you can learn how customers feel about them and use that knowledge to develop a competitive advantage.

Expand your ABM strategy

I think we can all agree that social media is a listening tool. If your idea is to use it to push ads at people and cross your fingers that someone clicks, it will not be a sustainable way to generate brand respect or to get quality leads.

A key point of using social media successfully is to listen to what people are saying, and then respond appropriately—engage with them by liking or commenting on their posts.

It might require some work on your end and include some training for other team members in sales, marketing, and customer success, but it is worth it because once you get the hang of it, you can start using social media for ABM campaigns.

Here are four ways to get started:

• Watch for opportunities in comments on blog posts or other content.
• Use tools like Trender.ai to get up-to-date notifications so you can quickly respond to a post or comment.
• Look at #hashtags related to your brand, solution, industry, and competitors, and check out what people are saying about them.
• Connect with highly-regarded thought leaders/influencers in your market who could increase awareness and share knowledge about your brand and product.

It’s all about the data 

Look, we get it. Social media has been everywhere for some time—most of us use multiple platforms on a daily basis, both professionally and personally. However, today’s marketing teams are realizing just how much valuable data can be collected from customers on social such as preferences, business challenges, behaviors, etc. Seriously, it’s like finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Not all of us are experts in social media analytics or data science. The good thing is you don’t have to be an expert to use social media insights for your ABM campaign. But it could be helpful to have a tool that pulls social media data into one place to make it easy to analyze and use.

Data is king, especially when it comes to marketing—and one of the most valuable kinds of data is social media purchasing insights, with these insights both marketing and sales teams can work together to target accounts and prospects, which can increase engagement and improve overall sales performance for your business.