Wow! February went by in a blur. I know it was a short month, but that seemed ridiculous! Ok, let's see where we left off. Last month was my "inaugural" month as the Social Media Manager. Overall, I think it went pretty well and I tasked myself with 3 activities for February:
:: Do more listening and monitoring on our social channels - especially LinkedIn and Twitter.
:: Research other monitoring tools (suggestions are welcome)
:: Continue to expand my use of HubSpot - next up: look into Lead Scoring and how it might help our company.
A quick summary on how I did on those three tasks - One - I don't think I did much more listening and monitoringâEUR¦ more on that later. Two - I did do some research on monitoring tools which is why my listening/monitoring didn't necessarily increase. Three - I did continue to use HubSpot, but didn't get into lead scoring. That's definitely going on the March to-do list.
OK, let's take a deeper dive.
Monitoring and Listening
I do struggle a bit with this simply because there is SO MUCH content out there. I know, I knowâEUR¦I need to quit whining. As I reported last month, I did a 30-day free trial of Mention which I really liked because all it did was monitor. You set up your keywords and off it goes monitoring the major social platforms, news blogs, images, videos, etc. You could even "train" it to learn the kinds of posts it can ignore. It produced a lot of information, but I found if I took an hour or so to go through the daily emails over my morning coffee, I found some good stuff! My free trial ended in February and I quickly hit my quota for the free tool so I was flying blind for a good part of the month.
Naturally, once my free trial was up, I went on a search for other monitoring tools to see what was out there. Here's what I found:
:: HubSpot has a Social Prospects tool but quite honestly, I don't like it. It only searches in Twitter, Yahoo and YouTube. You can't "train" it like you can with Mention and it didn't send you daily emails or give you any notifications.
:: Google Alerts - I did set up some alerts, but again, these were not robust. I set one up for "CRM Training" and have gotten a handful of alerts over the past few weeks (none of them were valuable to me). Compared to easily 3 dozen daily alerts from Mention - this wasn't cutting it.
:: I also checked out Sprout Social, Social Motus, Netvibes and Hootsuite. None of them did what I wanted - just monitor and listen for my keywords. Yes, these tools did that, but they did plenty of other things, too, which leads me to my next point.
:: There are a TON of social tools out there. For all aspects of social media - social listening, social analytics, social posting, etc. It's dizzying! And naturally, they all overlap, do similar things, etc. I still insist that I do not want to have to use 5 different tools to do my job. HubSpot still comes the closest to doing what I needâEUR¦ it does about 90% of what I need. Which is why I was only looking for a monitoring/listening tool (like Mention). I decided that I will sign up with Mention and spend $20/month on their tool.
HubSpot Use and Website updates
I continue to use HubSpot religiously (I am totally drinking the Kool-Aid). We maintain our website through HubSpot so making changes is easy. There have been lots of odds and ends that I've been wanting to fix and this seemed like the month to tackle some of them.
I added Calls-To-Actions (CTA's) to my blog footer. This really couldn't have been any easier (go to Blog Options and add your CTA to the footer). I added two. Guess what? It actually pulled in some leads. I'm always shocked when website visitors do what I want them to! So just from the simple task of adding those 2 CTA's to the blog footer, I converted 3-4 more leads. I know - 3-4 doesn't seem like a ton of leads (and it's not), but our website is NOT a lead generation machine like HubSpot's website. We don't produce hundreds of leads a month. So I was happy with just the 3 or 4 leads. Especially since that was just in a 2 week time span.
The question I have about HubSpot is if I have the same CTA on a bunch of pages, how can I tell which page the lead originated from? I have to think there has got to be a way; I just haven't found it yet. It's probably staring at me right in the face. I think I will post to a HubSpot group in LinkedIn and see if I get any answers. If any of you know, I'd love to know, tooâEUR¦ sound off in the comments please!
I also did a fair amount of work on lead nurturingâEUR¦ now called Workflows in HubSpot3. I had a couple of lead nurturing campaigns running, but they were just not adequate. So I jazzed those up with links back to our website, to our landing pages, etc. Based on my lead visit notifications in HubSpot, it's starting to work. I can see that a lead converted and then a few days later, they visit the site again - to the pages I directed them to! I love that! People are doing what I wantâEUR¦ finally!
Since we get Lead Visit Notifications from HubSpot, I like to "stalk" the lead, see where they've been on our site, etc. If they have visited several pages or downloaded another offer, I get one of my sales people involved. This is exactly where Lead Scoring will come in handy. I just need to take some time to figure out how I want to score the leads, etc. It looks easy to set up, it's just the thought process up front that will take some time. It'd be nice to have it automatically send out and email to a member on our sales team saying, "Hey, this lead seems to like usâEUR¦ call them!"
By the wayâEUR¦ for all you non-HubSpot users - HubSpot produces emails that tells you when a lead (someone who has submitted a form on your site) is visiting on your site again. Then you can go into HubSpot and see exactly where they have been thus allowing you to see their interest in your product/services.
Miscellanous
Since the remainder of my points are just a mish-mash of random thoughts, here goes:
:: Pinterest - This social channel is growing on me, but honestly, I have not figured out how to harness it to generate leads. I'm considering adding new boards for each of my co-workers where we can post our own interests. For example, if I had a "Cathy" board, I'd post about Boston sports, Spartan Race, chocolate, vacation ideas, margaritasâEUR¦ I digress. It might be a good idea to make us a bit more human/personable. Will it draw in new leads? Probably not, but at least it will show some personality.
:: I am really tired of hearing "the experts" telling everyone to create more content. Yes, I know content is king and it helps to generate visits and leads. But there's already so much content out there. Maybe we could put a caveat on it: "only produce content if it's worth reading, you're interesting or you'll make me laugh". Oh waitâEUR¦ it's not all about me. But can it be?
:: I struggle with how long to spend on Social Media each day. I know I obviously need to spend time on the channels, but I also have other job responsibilities to do! How long are you all spending on social mediaâEUR¦ what's the breakdown of time for how long you monitor, schedule posts, create content (content!) and analyze your results?
:: Pet peeve - Everyone tweeting the same thing. Do any of you find it annoying that when you're on a webinar, for example, and there's an event hashtag and EVERYONE tweets the same thing? Even worse when the presenter tells you a comment is "tweetable". How useful is it for everyone to tweet the same thing? To me, it's boring. I get why people do it, but you figure that people in the same circles all follow each other, etc.
:: We have a YouTube Channel with about 13 or so videos on there. I love our videos! They've been up for a good 18 months at least and they are still generating new views. It's a little crazy (in a good way)! What I need to figure outâEUR¦ how to generate leads from those viewers. Any ideas?
:: We have a lot of different focus areas - CRM, Social CRM, Business Analytics, Social Media strategy, sales & marketing strategy, etc. Right now I post about all of those topics throughout the week. Any advice on whether I should stick with one topic for an entire week or should I continue to mix it up?
My goals in March:
:: More listening, I should be back on the Mention app making life a bit easier.
:: Figure out a lead scoring plan. I have to remember that it doesn't need to be "perfect" right off the bat. It's ok to try something and tweak it after figuring out what's working or not!
:: Create at least one new website offer.
So, that wraps up my February summary. It started off as a slow month and took off like a bullet in the end. How did everything work out for you in February?