Michelle Krasniak - Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies

5 Line up the timelines for the various relevant activities and transactional (business) results.

6 Look for patterns in the data that suggest a relationship between business metrics and transactional precursors.

7 Prove those relationships.Try to predict results on the basis of the patterns you see, and monitor your data to see whether your predictions are accurate.

Improvement in performance metrics doesn’t necessarily produce better business results. The only two metrics that count toward ROI are whether your techniques reduce costs or improve revenue.

HCSS, a Texas-based firm that provides software to the heavy construction industry, allows companies to manage their entire job site from bid to completion on desktop, tablet, or mobile platforms. Over the past 30 years, HCSS has provided software to over 5,000 customers in the U.S. and Canada, and has grown to more than 220 employees.

Courtesy of HCSS

With its website well in place, HCSS started posting generic company-style content on standard social media platforms. Beginning around 2013, it took a more active strategic marketing approach to social media, looking for relevant information that its customers would want to read and repost. According to Skyler Moss, former director of digital marketing for HCSS, this effort turned its social focus from “‘Hey, look at me” to “Hey, here’s some helpful info you might like to know.’” By shifting its content from features to benefits, the company started building a trust relationship with its followers. It took some trial-and-error experiments. “Basically,” says Moss, “You have to deliver the content that your audience wants through the social platform they want it on.”

As an example, Moss points to the non-profit site I Build America, which HCSS developed to help the industry tell the story of the people, companies, and projects involved in construction. “We found through our social listening that the construction industry was segmented, with 100,000 social discussions going on daily, but on many different mediums, the most active of [which] was Instagram… . We found the most popular #s [hashtags] being used, and tagged our photos with them, while also including our own, e.g., #construction, #constructionlife, and #ibuildamerica.”

For the first month or two, Moss regularly posted photos on Instagram of real-world construction. From there, the message started to spread organically through the power of cross-tagging. In roughly nine months, the Instagram account for I Build America grew to over 16,000 followers with 100 percent user-generated content. Now more than 300 pieces of individual content are posted each month. “We have created our own conversation around #ibuildamerica by simply trying to tell the story of construction and the people who work in it, rather than making it all about us,” claims Moss.

Trying to figure out which platform is best for HCSS to use to achieve different marketing objectives has required a bit of research. Moss discovered the following:

LinkedIn-sponsored content placement worked best to generate qualified leads. Although expensive in terms of cost per click, LinkedIn allows the company to target specific buyers and positions at a low cost per lead and a high ROI. Moss recommends knowing much more about your buyer than just a job title. He argues that marketers really need to understand the buyer’s persona, from who they are to the types of customers they have and what drives them.

To increase site traffic and viral sharing, Facebook proved best. HCSS runs two major contests every year, the Construction Intern Awards and the Impact Awards. The awards mix an expert judging panel with live voting to increase social awareness and referral traffic. Facebook was the best platform for live voting.

Courtesy of HCSS

At this point, the company’s various marketing efforts produce hundreds of leads a month for sales staff to work on. Moss observes that “We’ve refined our funnel so well that our sales teams only work leads that we deem are qualified through our lead scoring.”

HCSS now manages numerous social media accounts split among its core business accounts, career topics, customer support, and the “I Build America” campaign. That’s a lot to manage with only two full-time employees, some part-time interns, and Moss leading the effort. To help, they rely on multiple tools. One of the social media interns, Jack Briscoe, had the responsibility of constantly monitoring notifications to see whether an urgent response is required. He used Google Alerts, Iconosquare to monitor Instagram, and Hootsuite to monitor Facebook and Twitter. Hootsuite is used also to repost construction photos on Instagram, and MeetEdgar is used to schedule cross-posts by category on Twitter and Facebook.

HCSS also uses a variety of tools to track the path from prospect to sale, starting with marketing automation software from HubSpot, which helps with lead scoring. Qualified prospects are then sent to sales using Salesforce. To follow customers’ paths through sales funnels, Moss also relies on Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, as well as Crazy Egg heat maps and video heat-mapping software. (A heat map is a color-coded display of data, such as where customers look on a web page or which links they click.) For social media, Moss uses data from Google Analytics and HubSpot to track leads and customer conversions.

“When you know … how much you are spending on each social media platform and the value of a customer, you [can] calculate your CPL, or cost per lead… . Find the source that produces the best CPL and lowest CPC, cost per customer,” says Moss. “That will help you refine your social media spending for ads, sponsored content, or retargeting.” However, from his point of view, SEO traffic still retains the lead in ROI.

Moss fervently recommends starting with a persona, so marketers know exactly which marketing techniques will work, and how, when, and where different personas like to engage with content. He pursues that approach by targeting content that specifically addresses different personas’ problems, needs, issues, and challenges. For HCSS, this method has led to a 300 percent growth in organic traffic versus branded traffic over the past three years.

Of course, a company this size has a robust marketing mix that also includes email, trade shows, print ads, newsletters, video-publishing platforms, and social media retargeting ads. Although Moss doesn’t think that having social media icons on a website matters much now, he does think it helps to cross-promote content among social media channels. For example, he cross-promotes user-generated images from I Build America to Twitter and Facebook. What makes a difference, he contends, is whether people on Facebook, for example, will share an interesting post with their own followers.

HCSS has also experimented with advertising on social media. It tried a three-month Facebook look-alike campaign and monitored the conversions and CPL. At the end, Moss decided that the CPL for its B2B market was way too high to sustain. On the other hand, a sponsored content campaign on LinkedIn drove more targeted customers at a lower CPL, even though the cost per click was five to ten times as high as on Facebook.