We’ve made it! After 15 fantastic blogs, we’ve finally reached the end of our journey through inbound marketing. Since we started, we’ve looked at how to attract visitors to your website, how to convert them into leads, close those leads into sales and delight them with customised content to keep them coming back. In the final of our blog series, and the last to look at the ‘Delight’ segment, we’re going to look at social monitoring.
Social media has more than changed our lives, it has revolutionised them. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or even Google+, the way we connect with family, friends and colleagues, past and present, has changed enormously in recent years. It’s hard enough to keep up-to-date with your friends and family on social media, even with the ability to connect on the move. Once you factor business connections into the mix, it can seem like a gargantuan task to stay one step ahead. The good news is, when it comes to your marketing and sales efforts, it’s just got a whole lot easier.
Social media has not only taken on a whole new meaning when it comes to our relationships, it has redefined how we market, sell and promote our businesses, not to mention customer services. If you want to get noticed through internet searches, social media plays an important role in that too.
As a culture, we’ve come to rely more and more on being permanently connected, it has changed the paradigm by which businesses are judged. In a recent survey by Search Engine Watch, Twitter users said they expected a brand to respond to their question on Twitter and more than half (53%) of them expected a response within 60 minutes! With expectations like this, it is time to embrace social monitoring.
Within inbound marketing, Whitehat’s preferred partner, HubSpot, understands the need for social monitoring and has built all the tools you need into their platform. Social monitoring helps you keep track of the conversations that should matter the most to your business. It also enables you to control your posts on any number of social media platforms.
Keeping on top of your social media accounts can be a full-time job in itself. Being able to publish and schedule your messages to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ can save an incredible amount of time and effort. Controlling what, and when, you publish posts allows you to plan your strategy ahead of time and lets you work around important dates in your calendar. As useful as that is, social monitoring goes well beyond that.
Social media moves at such a pace that it would be very easy for situations, not to mention potential sales and leads, to pass you by. Social monitoring ensures that doesn’t happen. If customers (or even potential customers) are talking about you on Twitter or Facebook, being able to monitor those conversations and, where necessary, receive a notification so you can interact with them, is a vital tool in the constant battle to stay one step ahead. The HubSpot platform takes this notion and builds it seamlessly into the existing sales and marketing funnels you’ve already established and any competent inbound marketing agency can help you set this up.
If people on social media include an array of search terms, which you define, in their Facebook posts or Tweets, you can receive a notification about them. Depending on who they are, or the context of the message, you can reply to them seamlessly. You can also create social monitoring that includes things like hashtags that are relevant to you or your industry, including or disregard messages with links to articles and even photos. It is up to you.
Whether you want the notification to appear within the HubSpot platform itself, via your email inbox or through push notifications on your mobile device, you will be able to tame the beast of social media and finally begin to control the conversation where it relates to you and your industry. Whether people are asking questions about your business (or your competitors), talking about subjects that relate to the industry you’re in or discussing your latest product, you can be on top of them all.
Social monitoring is just one of the many features of the HubSpot platform that, once you see it in action, you’ll see the power it holds and understand why so many businesses are utilising it. You’ll also wonder how you ever lived and worked without it.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this walkthrough of the inbound marketing methodology. To become part of the Whitehat family, you don’t need to talk to us on Twitter (although you can, we’ll know), just give our team a call and they’d be delighted to discuss how you can implement, not only social monitoring, but the whole range of inbound marketing tools to help your business stand out from the crowd.