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Fishing Where The Fish Are: Mapping Social Media to the Buying Cycle

Chris Brogan / chrisbrogan.com

We know that buying cycles are basically some variation on this theme:

People become (or are made) aware of something. They take interest. They research their buying decisions. If youʼre lucky, they purchase the product or service. Afterwards, itʼs a matter of keeping them a customer as long as you can.

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Awareness

Research

Interest

Purchase

Retention

Disillusion

IntroductionSocial media offers tools like blogging, podcasts, and social networks as ways to reach into this buying cycle. It doesn’t operate as an island. It ties into your traditional marketing plans.

There are many differences in the execution, but the strategies tie in nicely to your traditional goals. What follows is a brief summary of six approaches to using social media to influence these transactions.

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Fish Where The Fish Are- Six Social Media Approaches

1.) Find the Customer2.) Be There Before the Sale3.) Be (or Empower) the Influencer4.) Shift Behavior5.) Warm Up the Funnel6.) Measure

You’ll note that these approaches don’t seem too different than typical marketing and sales methods, in name. It’s in the execution and the tools where things move differently.

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1.) Find the Customer

Frank Eliason from Comcast didn’t wait for his customers to approach him. He used Twitter to seek out people having service issues, and then he helped solve their problems.

What if you blogged about the area your potential customers might come from, like DigitalNomads.com from Dell did? Social media lets you find your customers first.

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2.) Be There Before the Sale

Long before you need a loan for your kid’s education, you should know about the Financial Aid Podast and Christopher S. Penn.

Chris works hard to deliver trusted information to people without asking for your money. In fact, Chris does the opposite: he shows you have to save your money, day in and day out. By giving it all away, Chris ensures that you’ll think of him first when buying.

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3.) Be (or empower)the Influencer

Luis Suarez is a voice inside of IBM’s effort to power social computing. He shares his views, encourages others, and builds relationships that don’t immediately impact IBM, except that they do. We know Luis, and we form an opinion on IBM.

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4.) Shift Behavior

Scott Monty has his job cut out for him. His role is to head social media for Ford. What does blogging and Twitter have to do with selling cars? Scott’s going to find out.

One way Scott moved to shift behavior was to start offering bloggers rides in the Ford Flex. Will it work? Will we blog about the car? This is perhaps the hardest step.

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5.) Warm Up the Funnel

Mike Dunn has lots of experience in making relationships. He is one of the top cool hunters at Hearst Interactive. He wouldn’t put it this way, but he probably has to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince in that realm.

Social media offers lots of ways to create “multi-touch” contact with prospects and buyers.

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6.) Measure

If there were a patron saint of measurement, it would be K.D. Paine. There’s a reason she speaks at all the hot conferences. K.D. is one of the few who can easily talk about how social media is measured. But there are ways to add gauges to what we propose when we talk about social media. They just take a bit more thinking than traditional methods.

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Tools for the Approach

For each of these six approaches to the buying process, let’s look at some examples of tools. Then, we’ll talk about their use.

1.) Find the Customer - listening tools, search.2.) Be There Before the Sale - profiles, presence.3.) Be (or Empower) the Influencer - blogs, platforms.4.) Shift Behavior - (this isn’t tool specific. More below.)5.) Warm Up the Funnel - Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn6.) Measure - Hubspot, Radian6, BuzzLogic, More.

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Find the Customer- Tools / Application

Here are some listening and search tools:

* http://blogsearch.google.com* http://www.technorati.com* http://search.twitter.com

Use these tools to build searches on your company’s name, your products’ names, your competitors, but MOST importantly, think of what someone would type into Google at the moment they needed you most. Search for that.

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Be There Before the Sale- Tools / Application

Build profiles on social networks and websites, and update them. Have an account on:* http://www.twitter.com* http://www.facebook.com* http://www.linkedin.com* http://www.flickr.com* http://www.upcoming.org(You might have some other recommendations here.)

Put up YOUR picture, not a corporate logo. Represent by being you, and by being a good employee.

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Be (or empower) the Influencer - Tools / Application

Have a blog, a lively blog, a place where you talk not just about your company and product, but instead, you talk about the space your customers inhabit. Luis Suarez talks about social computing - not just IBM products, but the ways in which companies use social computing.

Make sure your blog is nicely designed, is professional, and that you’ve pointed your online points of presence to it so you can encourage conversation. Make it easy for people to share your material off-site, too.

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Shift Behavior - Applications

This is more of a “how” you should do it section. To shift behavior, be helpful. Starbucks became our “third place” because it was inviting, because transactions were easy, because the place was configured for our business.

Be helpful. If you’re trying to sell more product, how can you reduce friction to the purchase? What else can you do that isn’t directly tied to a sale but that still helps? Can you point to other people’s services when it makes a difference? Shift behaviors by being online and by being helpful.

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Warm Up the Funnel - Tools /Application

Use LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and commenting on people’s blogs as a way to keep relationships “warm.” Never underestimate the value of comments and general, non-sales-minded conversations. Some tools to help you stay on top of this:

* http://www.backtype.com - commenting tracking.* http://www.friendfeed.com - lifestream hub.* http://search.twitter.com - search for your name, company’s name, product’s name, etc, and subscribe to it via RSS.

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Measure - Tools /Application

There are many ways to measure social media’s impact. You probably already think of pageviews, unique visitors, comments. Here are some more:

* http://www.radian6.com , http://www.buzzlogic.com , http://www.crimsonhexagon , http://www.vibemetrix.com - sentiment and comments.* http://www.hubspot.com - site search quality, value of links, more.

Simple point: there’s more than numbers to consider.

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A Starting Strategy for Social Media

Using the six approaches above, here’s a quick rundown of your potential starting points to building out a social media project for your organization.

1.) Find the Customer - Assign two people in the organization to build listening queries, populate an RSS reader as a command center, and conduct regular reporting cycles on the fruits of listening.

2.) Be There Before the Sale - Create a quick, one page document to outline company guidelines for building employee profiles on social platforms like Facebook. Work with IT on firewall concerns. Work with management to lay out fair use policies during work hours (again, no more than a page). Work with sales/marketing/engineering on ideas for using the platforms.

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3.) Be (or Empower) the Influencer - Have a one page blogging policy in place (usually no more strict than the email policy). Have policies on comments (including how to handle negative comments). Build strategy on types of posts, ideas for outreach, promotion, and finding similar blogs and people in the space.

4.) Shift Behavior - Demonstrate through case studies and pilot efforts how to empower employees to be helpful. Share examples and ideas on how these efforts can positively impact marketing/sales efforts.

5.) Warm Up the Funnel - Determine a method for internally annotating the social aspects of CRM, or build a way to report the multi-touch approach of using social tools to reach out and maintain relationships with prospects and customers.

6.) Measurement - Improve current reporting to include the social elements such as comments, inbound links, search term value, etc.

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Wrapping Up

The playing field changes daily, and the tools mentioned above are just a fraction of the hundreds of different choices that exist. The strategies are general and the approach just starting points. The difficult work is in customizing advice like this for your specific needs. That said, hopefully, this is a starting point for how you might approach integrating social media into your existing marketing and sales efforts.

Not unlike Approach 4, my goal is to be helpful. If you have further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Thank you for your attention.

-- Chris Brogan | chris@chrisbrogan.com |617.759.3639 | http://www.chrisbrogan.com

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Everything in this document was intended for sharing. Please forward liberally. If you use any material in presentations of your own, simply give credit to http://www.chrisbrogan.com . If you have any questions, check this page first, and if you still have questions, contact me: chris@chrisbrogan.com

Cover photo credit: Manatari.

About the AuthorChris Brogan is a ten year veteran of using social media and technology to build digital relationships for businesses, organizations, and individuals. Chris speaks, blogs, writes articles, and makes media of all kinds at [chrisbrogan.com], a blog in the top 20 of the Advertising Age Power150, and in the top 100 on Technorati.

Connect with Chris on LinkedIn.Subscribe to his Free Newsletter.Contact Chris about Speaking.

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