Christa Tuttle February 19, 2021

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram—the number of social media networks in the past few years has increased and will continue to do so in years to come. As these continue to gain popularity and usage, social media marketing is becoming essential to include in marketing strategies.

For many B2B organizations, some of these platforms are included in marketing campaigns. Managing several social media accounts, including creating content, tracking content and data and scheduling, can be a much more difficult task than you might expect.

For organizations with limited resources and time, this can become a challenge to manage effectively. However, there are ways to use your time and efforts more efficiently. Here are four tips that are useful for managing social media marketing.

1. Keep Your Ideas and Posts Organized

Being organized can oftentimes make challenging tasks easier. A social media marketing calendar is the ideal place to keep ideas and posts outlined and organized. Having a single location for your social media schedule that includes what platform something will be posted on, what time it will be published, what the content is, the link and any additional notes. For an effective social strategy, you do not want to publish several posts at once but rather schedule them throughout the week.

This way, it doesn’t overwhelm your audience with everything be posted at one time. Having an organized schedule allows you to visualize when everything will be posted which can prevent pushing too many pieces of content out at once. When you go back to create new posts or log new ideas, this can be the single location to go to.

Ensuring consistent messaging across posts can be easy to see in this view as well. There are a variety of ways to create a social media calendar, but to get you started, check out these ideas. It can be as simple or as detailed as you would like it. Making sure it works for your team is what matters the most.

2. Track Your Data

Tracking data from social media marketing efforts is key to ensuring that your content is performing and achieving the goals set in your strategy. Utilize a simple spreadsheet to keep up with your account statistics and set aside time to update it when needed. This allows you to keep up to date with trends in your accounts and make necessary changes. What data should your team be documenting?

Platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook have insights on post and account performance that can be useful to track, but data points such as impressions, engagements, followers and shares can help show how your social posts are performing.

These are not the only metrics to account for, but be sure to include those that help determine the success of posting strategy and content. Over time, you will then be able to see patterns and trends for overall posts and make decisions on future strategy.

3. Set Aside Time to Find New Content

With the vast amount of information available, it can seem overwhelming to try and find content relevant to your audience. Planning posts and finding content can be time consuming but setting aside time in advance to browse Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or whatever social media platform you use can help this process and make your social media marketing efforts more successful.

Search for industry keywords, hashtags or in groups can be useful as they will oftentimes post and share content accordingly. Along with this, it can be useful to create a list of resources that you oftentimes use for social post content.

For example, if you find articles on the Forbes, Fast Company or Entrepreneur websites, include the link to the website, or specific page on the website, in a list. When you are planning posts, you can refer back to this list so you are not pressed to find content with nothing to start from.

Another easy way to find content is by subscribing to industry email newsletters. These newsletters are constantly delivering fresh and relevant industry content. It is worth looking through these to see if anything stands out to you and would be something your audience would want to read as well.

4. Utilize a Social Media Marketing Management Tool

Social media management tools can simplify all things social media. For example, tools such as Hootsuite, Sprout Social and Buffer can do a wide range of activities. With these tools, you can automate posting, schedule posts in advance, control accounts and analyze data.

Choose a tool that best fits your organization’s needs. With a tool implemented, you can easily schedule posts in advance, use the analytics capabilities to track progress and success and monitor when posts will be published.

Social media marketing has established itself in the B2B marketing space. With these four tips, you give your organization the opportunity to manage your social media efforts effectively and efficiently.

This content was originally published here.

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Has data-driven marketing personalisation lost its way?

Some organisations are being lazy in their approach by relying on data alone. Jil Maassen, Lead Strategy Consultant at Optimizely, looks at how businesses can re-introduce old fashioned creativity in their approach, and why customer insight isn’t just driven by technology and data, but real experiences.

“Customer-centricity” has become a board level concern for businesses. This was highlighted in Optimizely’s 2019 Digital Experience Economy Report, which found that 82% of decision making executives in the UK talk about having a customer-first focus.

As a marketer’s way of addressing this trend, data-driven personalisation has risen. By embedding every decision in data, marketers are able to target customers like never before. Users now get more relevant experiences and recommendations for them, and marketers have an unprecedented amount of insight at their fingertips. In the same way teleshopping revolutionised retail in the 1980s, social media users are now being served up tailored product recommendations in the comfort of their home.

However, as with most things in this day and age, users have become desensitised to this — and brands are at risk of fading into the noise.

Don’t become the needle in the haystack

It is impossible to stand out amongst a sea of competitors if you aren’t doing anything new. Ultimately, businesses who are vying for the same audience’s attention have near-identical data at their fingertips, and slightly modifying your approach based on the same insight is no longer enough. Customers can see through the pseudo-personalised banner ads, based on recent search history, so businesses need to evolve to stay ahead of the game.

Currently, the only prevalent approach to personalised advertising is: “you clicked on this previously, so now we think you might like this similar product”. Yet, there is so much more potential for meta-analysis of our behaviours and predictions for what we may be looking for next.

For example, imagine that I have been searching for swimwear on ASOS, and looked at sandals on Zalando. From this, advertisers should know I am summer-ready. They could then target me with ads for beach holiday destinations or taxi services to and from the airports, rather than showing me another shade of the shorts I’ve already bought.

Whilst data is becoming the centre of all decision-making for businesses, we still have not reached the point where these companies use customer data effectively. For example, if a media company has up to 30 different ads on a single article, the first indicator of success is how many clicks it has, or how much revenue it has generated.

This is just the start of what businesses can learn. Understanding which ad works in which area of the site, and how users navigate and behave on the page, should be the next step to better understand how advertising could target the user. This ultimately relies on the marketing team having the autonomy to try different tactics, assess the results, and scale up or down accordingly.

Go out on a limb, that is where the fruit is

Risk-taking is essential to creative marketing. After all, challenging the way things have always been done, brings as much potential failure, as it does reward. But this is the only way to unlock innovation. There is currently a negative attitude towards failure within corporate structures, which is stifling marketing’s ability to innovate.

Our report revealed a quarter (25%) of UK business decision makers have a culture where failure is not an option. This is a problem businesses must address as they look to foster creativity in their approach. It isn’t just an issue that sits in the marketing team. Businesses can benefit from giving everyone in the business autonomy to have an impact on customer facing touchpoints.

Insights and ideas from customer-facing staff are an untapped resource senior executives rarely use effectively. These workers are at the forefront of what makes the company tick and are an invaluable resource when it comes to understanding the customer. They understand when something is wrong and often how to fix it.

While customer-facing staff are occasionally given a mouthpiece, it is rare for their insight to turn into action. This is not from a lack of intent from individuals involved, it is purely a symptom of a wider cultural issue. Businesses need to address their attitude to failure if they are going to unlock the creativity sitting within their very walls. Ultimately, to take personalisation to the next level, a combination of data, real customer insight and good old fashioned common sense is key. This is how we win at reaching the customer.

By Jil Maassen
Lead Strategy Consultant
Optimizely