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What Social media Techniques Can Increase B2B Sales?

This strategy delivers more visibility and exposure than anything you have ever attempted in the past, and costs pennies!

Social 444 Content Promotion Brochure

Social 444 - The Intelligent Decision

Why do most digital marketing strategies keep failing?  We explain why and show how to set up an automated content exposure and distribution strategy that will radically change B2B Digital Marketing, maintaining constant visibility with audiences. 

This strategy is about Auto-Posting pre-prepared adverts, over a period of twelve to eighteen months, paves the way to a new business model that can halve your sales and marketing costs and double your profitability.

Check out our other articles about exposure, adverts and visibility.


Contents

Introduction

  • What Businesses are doing now
    • Marketing Funnel Falsehood
    • Why Automation Fails
  • Too Much Blogging & Not Enough Teaching
    • How do I Promote My Business

Understanding the Google Rules

  • The Anatomy of a Page
  • The Role of Google Search
  • Is The Employee Searching
  • Writing for a 12-Year-Old
  • Are you Invisible to Google
  • Retiring Under-performing Content

The Content Strategy

  • Content Format
  • Content Classification (New)
  • Content Type
  • Content Stacks
  • Content Suggestions
  • Call to Action

The B2B Exposure Strategy

  • Engagement Kickstart
  • Traditional & AI Generated Images
  • How Social 444 Works
  • Auto Posting Every Day
  • Engage, Analyse, Edit, Repeat
  • Review your tone of voice
  • Provide Digital Access to your Business
  • Landing Pages & Segmentation
  • Social Policy and Advocates

Conclusion

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Introduction

It’s not rocket science; if people understand what’s in it for them when you’re talking about, or selling a product, they are more likely to engage with you.  The same applies to content, an article or blog image cannot replace an advert.

The invitation and awareness process begins with automated social media posts; we call it Social 444, and it stands for Four adverts, posted Four times a day over Four weeks to promote content and it works as follows:

  • Provide varied media content to educate prospects
  • Create 120 content adverts such as graphics, motion graphics and video, in advance
  • Auto post 4 adverts, 4 times a day, over 4 weeks and repeat for 12-18 months

You don’t want leads, you want sales, but processes have changed to the extent that many businesses have made marketing departments responsible for new business development.

Previously sales-driven organisations have become marketing-driven, relying on technology and pay-per-click to find new business, albeit unsuccessfully.

Leads were expected to come from online content or events, followed up by telesales or BDRs.  However, with the success rate being in the region of 400-1, and little value being placed on high quality content, combined with marketing automation platforms, a downward spiral has occurred to the detriment of all sales teams and vendors.

After much research and analysis, we realised that the approach to B2B marketing mirrored B2C strategies, i.e., posting blogs and using marketing automation platforms and associated tactics and it was not working.

We looked at business performance over the past twenty years and discovered the consistent failure rate and low, average turnover of businesses acutely illustrated that marketing technologies had not lived up to expectations.

Businesses cannot be expected to fly if their wings have been clipped.  Marketing automation software for B2B is a red herring, it does not deliver. 

The first stage requires a review of existing content and your website to ensure you are exploiting the maximum benefit from your online presence.  Once complete, you will be ready to activate Social 444. 

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What are businesses doing now

Overthe past twenty years businesses have been conditioned to invest in, and accept, marketing software technologies.  Through repetitive marketing campaigns by Big-Tech, they have been presented as the only solutions for new business generation. 

Today this has translated into most C-Suite members believing they are instinctively making the right decisions to use pay-per-click and marketing automation, in conjunction with their websites. 

This type of behaviour is referenced in the book Thinking, Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahneman: -

  • System 1 – Fast – intuitive and reactionary thinking and decision making
  • System 2 – Slow - considered and strategic decision making; now required
  • ‘Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.  A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.’   (Page 62)

daniel Kahneman thinking fast slow

Marketing automation was designed for the consumer market to increase mailing lists.  However, B2B C-Suite teams want to keep their strategies and plans secret.  They do not want to tell vendors who they are or what they are doing, which explains the reluctance to fill out forms and accounts for poor automation results.

However, businesses - their owners and employees - do not want to engage with salespeople.

Marketing Falsehoods

Gartner logo

83% Research digitally before engaging with a salesman

McKinsey logo

53% want more video related interaction, up 41% since COVID

Bain & Co logo

94% want to self-educate before speaking to a salesperson

Inc. logo

< 1% of buyers who traverse a marketing funnel become revenue-paying customers

    If you’ve been around marketing for any length of time you will have heard of the expression the ‘marketing funnel’.  This ‘funnel’ illustrates and charts the path of a ‘browser-to-prospect-to-lead-to-customer’ and the associated flow of activity that helps them through it.

    Today there are two new terms being talked about: the ‘Dark Funnel’ and ‘Dark Social’.  These expressions simply explain that marketers don’t know what’s going on when a prospect looks at a website; the clicks on a social media post; or clicks on a PPC banner to view a page or document. 

    The reason it’s called ‘dark’ is because prospects don’t want vendors to know what they’re doing.  They don’t want to share their contact details, and prospects (i.e., People) are not predictable to the extent that a marketing software platform can map their next move.  We must never forget – people buy people. 

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    Digital Marketing Dark Funnel graphic
    LinkedIn logo
    Twitter logo
    Facebook logo
    Instagram logo

      Why Automation Fails

      Demand Gen, Lead Gen, ABM, Reverse IP & Gifting!

      Demand Generation: creating content to raise awareness of a brand and product(s) that engages potential prospects, drawing them to the so-called ‘top-of-the-funnel’, to deliver content that is restricted or gated by an automation form requiring contact details. 

      Lead Generation: creating content or an event that is gated and requires a form to be completed before providing access and states that the company may contact them etc.

      Account Based Marketing: accepting that more than one person is in the decision-making process and each person has different expectations and requirements from the new product.  A combination of demand gen and lead gen is required in addition to distributing multiple content items to each interested party.

      Reverse IP Lookup - De-Anonymizing: stalking you! Due to ABM not working, the main players have normalised stalking.  It is a practice whereby their system logs your visit via your IP address, then matches the data with consumer activity and if you have given your details elsewhere, it will give them your mobile number.

      Gifting:  an API methodology of instigating small bribes to hopefully lead to larger incentives they can give you to buy from them. 

      I rest my case.  Digital marketing automation has failed.

      Each of the above activities demands/requires a potential prospect to give up their contact details knowing they will be contacted by a BDR or salesperson.

      However, when it comes to B2B, businesses want to keep their plans secret.  Their plans are private, and businesses are acutely aware of privacy issues and do not want their contact details being held on servers.  They also do not want to enter dialogue with a salesperson until they’re ready.

      Despite this, most businesses know marketing automation fails to deliver the revenues they expected, yet pursue it as there appears to be no alternative even though it  makes their content invisible to all the search engines!

      Part of the fallout from this failure is that, for the past seven years, the average tenure of a CMO, and senior marketers, is between nine to eighteen months, which indicates that CEOs and Investors know there is a problem. 

      Newsletters

      Using marketing automation for the distribution of newsletters was one of the founding features of these platforms.  However, there are a few problems with this: -

      Many businesses do not produce sufficient content in the first place to create a newsletter.  The mere existence of a subscription email sign up is usually because the web designer made the decision, not a copywriter or content editor.

      Some newsletter subscriptions are automatically appended when someone fills out a form and downloads some content.  However, if the content is not up to scratch, and poor content arrives in the form of a newsletter, they simply unsubscribe.

      A buyer may think to themselves, “why keep on a newsletter subscription once I’ve bought from you!”  So, to keep their Inbox clear, again, they unsubscribe.

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      Too Much Blogging & Not Enough Teaching

      B2B is significantly different to B2C; you only need a certain amount of the ‘right content’ to provide to your prospects.  You don’t need to be ‘blogging’, and posting, multiple three or four paragraph blogs every other day of the week.

      In the consumer market, it’s all about keeping front-of-mind with the customer.  Producing attractive short clips, blogs and snazzy images is what B2C marketing is all about. 

      Another point to make is that ‘professional bloggers’ create content, both through their own experience and knowledge as well as writing to attract traffic, only.  They do this because the traffic will earn them money from Google Adsense.

      Part of their approach is to scour keyword platforms like Ahrefs, Niel Patel and Moz as well as Google Adwords, to find niche markets they can write for that has sufficient, exploitable traffic.  They will do their own research, copy, paste and edit articles to garner ‘worthiness’ from Google and hey-presto they are making money from visits from interested parties.

      Now merge that thinking into B2B marketing and you soon realise that many senior marketers are attempting to achieve the same and continually fail because the buyers have different motivation.

      You are selling highly technical or complex solutions, not jeans or sports trainers, so multiple short-form posts are not required.

      Unfortunately, poor copy writing is also prevalent in B2B because the objective is to obtain the prospect’s name and email and not to educate them - that is the perceived role of the salesperson!

      There is a difference between a four paragraph comment and a business article that is intended to educate an audience.   Unfortunately there is a proliferation of short form blog posts and not enough though-leadership articles.

      You can never have too much content.  But having too little will force browsers and prospects to click away from your site. 

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      How do I Promote My Business

      The most common questions we hear are “How do I get our company’s name out there?”, “We’ve got little or no social presence, so what do we do?” or “How do we get traction?”

      According to the American Marketing Association and Forbes Magazine, we are all subjected to between 4,000 and 10,000 marketing messages per day! 

      It is also a well-known fact that it takes seven to ten ‘touches’ before your business name or product becomes recognised and familiar with a buyer. 

      However, only 1-in-3 messages get through due to spam filters, they’re deleted, missed, ignored and so on, so you need to prepare a minimum of thirty messages in advance. 

      Most businesses give up after two or three attempts!

      Added to these statistics, is the fact we all consume content at different rates and by different methods.  Some prefer video, some podcasts, some long reads, some short, therefore a variety of media is required.

      As many businesses have come to experience, few prospects find your content on search engines or on social media.  I know it sounds counter-intuitive, however there are three factors to contend with: -

      Pay Per Click adverts attract more clicks from your competition and ‘bots’ than real people and linking to a landing page to demand contact details has become less then desirable by B2B prospects

      The sheer quantity of content on the Internet makes it difficult to attain a position on page one, because Google has its own parameters that determine what constitutes a good article

      Whether you use PPC or organic, it does not have any real value unless you have a greater strategy once a prospect is on your website

      Current thinking surrounding content, distribution and promotion is very different from this and goes a long way to explain why so many businesses fail. 

      Whilst this document is marketing orientated, it is important that sales departments are aware of existing problems if they want to achieve their targets and higher success in sales!

      If this resonates with you as a CEO, or if you’re a Chief Growth Officer, Chief Revenue Officer or VP of Sales, keep reading to see why Social 444 needs to be part of your new business development strategy.

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      Stage One

      Understanding the Google Rules

      If you are aware of the parameters set out by Google, you are then in a far better position to evaluate your existing content and ensure future content has the best possible chance of being read and indeed found on all the the search engines and not just Google, but Bing and any other that are still in use!.

      The Anatomy of a Page

      An article page should have a minimum of 1700 words, and include bullets, number lists, graphics, video, links (internal and external), H1, H2, H3 titles sizes, keywords used in the URL name, page title, article title and so on. 

      Google expects articles to be edited and improved over time. Website sitemaps have timing sections to tell Google to return and re crawl at a certain frequency. 

      Ensure the content is meaningful to the reader and is educational, provides some form of thought leadership or is categorised as a white paper, business case etc. There are various formats, categories, and types of content which we’ll look at in a moment. 

      Opposite is an example of an article page, illustrating the various component parts:

      Copywriting SEO Template infographic

      The Role of Google Search

      Who gets to decide what constitutes a good article? Today, personal preference is not sufficient. Google crawls and analyses every page on the Internet. Therefore, every page must conform to their conventions. Doing so ensures higher rankings on organic search.

      However, as previously mentioned, do not base your performance on Google Rankings for B2B content. Use Google as a gauge to determine if your content is well written and stacks up against the competition.

      Achieving page one within a few hours of submitting to Google is commonplace and depends on your market and keywords. However, if no one knows your business or product even exists, then no one is going to be looking for you. However, you will know Google thinks your page is well written, which means it will retain the attention of your intended reader once they get to see it.

      Is The Employee Searching

      It is important to understand who the intended target audience is and, if it is a CEO or C-Suite member, will they really be looking for your content? If a subordinate is doing the searching on their behalf, your content needs to reflect you’re helping them to help their boss.

      You also need to ensure you provide a variety of content formats for those who are determined to find the answer, i.e., do you only provide written content, or would another format be better, such as video?

      Writing for a 12-Year-Old

      Another factor is to ensure articles are written so that a 12–14-year-old can understand them. You may have a technical or complex product but telling someone how adept you are is not helpful if you’re trying to teach a newcomer or prospect.

      Look at the Flesch Kincaid setting within Microsoft Word > Editor > Document Stats. The Flesch Kincaid Grade Level should be about ‘8’ which attributes to a 13-14 schooling age.

      Are you Invisible to Google

      Your content is invisible to Google if you use marketing automation forms to provide access to your content. If your prospect can’t read it without entering their email, nor can Google. 

      There are many other factors Google use when crawling and indexing, but if anything is hidden behind an email form as part of your marketing automation structure, you will never know if your content is deemed any good. Now is the time to un-gate your content.

      Retiring Under-performing Content

      If a salesperson failed to achieve target, they would be evaluated and perhaps given more training. In the same way, if content does not achieve its desired goal, i.e., appearing high on the search engines, 50% or more being read, or calls-to-action not being clicked, then the same principle should be applied to the content as to the salesperson. Shape up or get fired! 

      Google expects businesses to edit, update and improve all their web-based content, from changing titles to make them more relevant, to changing the content, images, and adding video, or changing on-page navigation.

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      Stage Two

      The Content Strategy

      As mentioned earlier, many businesses have been told to keep creating short-form, blog-type posts and to keep publishing this type of content as often as possible. However, you only need specific purposed content that will educate, and in part entertain, your prospects.

      Your prospects keep churning - to become customers we hope - therefore it is essential you perfect your content by doing some market research, ensuring your prospects like or want the content.

      Existing content should be edited where necessary to ensure the highest ranking on the search engines once the marketing automation restrictions are removed.  There are four elements to increase engagement, and they relate to:

      • Content Format
      • Content Classification
      • Content Type
      • Content Stacks
      • Content Format

      No one can second-guess what content format another person prefers or when they prefer to consume it.  No business should decide to create only written content if they want to achieve the best possible exposure, engagement and to communicate at scale. 

      For these reasons we recommend you exploit the following content formats.  It can make sense, for example, to produce a podcast about a written article and to mix and match content ideas.

      The Content Formats are as follows:

      • Written - Online & Downloads
      • Infographics
      • Video
      • Podcast
      • Live Streaming
      • Content Classification (New)

      You will have heard marketers talk about persona marketing and marketing automation in the same sentence.  This is misleading as persona-based marketing is a B2C strategy and can be very time consuming and is unproductive for B2B’s. 

      The classifications for B2B below are distinctive and are as follows:

      • Primary content educates
      • Secondary content reaffirms
      • General content communicates

      These classifications define the importance and relevance of content being written and posted on the website.  For example, too much General or Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) would not serve buyers looking for thought leadership content, i.e., Primary Content.

      The above classifications enable content administrators to easily monitor, via Open Graph tags and Google Tag Manager, what type of content the buyer is interested in, without needing the titles, Administrators will be able to understand exactly how long buyers stay on the page and if they follow the expected calls-to-action.

      As an example, if you sell one product, it is feasible you only need a fixed, small number of fully engaging content items for your buyers to look at or listen to. 

      Content Type

      Combining content classification and content types, you arrive at the following structure for all your content, in preparation to promote it via Social 444: -

      Primary Content - Educates

      • Thought Leadership
      • Business Case
      • Whitepapers
      • Professional Publications

      Secondary Content - Reaffirms

      • Social Proof
      • Case Studies
      • Infographics
      • Podcast/Video/Live

      General - Communicates

      • Blogs, New Hires
      • CSR, Awards, PR
      • Guest Activities

      Product Content

      • How it works
      • How to install it
      • Best Practices
      • Training
      • FAQs

      How to Buy

      • Show how to complete your order forms etc.
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      No one follows a linear path

      As much as we would like to think we can second guess website visitors, we can't.  Therefore we must allow for 'chaos' and accept that browsers will bounce all-over-the-place to satisfy their curiosity before they feel comfortable enough to contact us.

      Graphic showing prospects bouncing all over

      Content Stacks

      Content Stacks function in a similar way to an ABM strategy.  The stacks consist of carefully selected content items you believe will help educate a buyer.  By steering them towards collated content it will hold their attention far longer than anything else. 

      The Content Stacks can also include videos from the C-Suite team, as per ABM strategies, acknowledging that multiple people are involved in the decision-making process and to show your C-Suite team are accessible to their counterparts.

      Click here to take a look at our Content Stack page - Go Live!

      Buyers are driving this demand, not the vendors.  McKinsey & Co say that 71% of buyers want to remain anonymous and Gartner say 83% want to self-serve before they’ll engage with a salesman.

      It is important to note that preparing a Content Stack is a good exercise to identify if your website has all the right information and content to enable a prospect to decide to buy from your business.

      Take a look at our website under the Go Live! menu tab.  We have listed all the relevant content to help a business owner or CEO  to arrive at a decision to engage salesXchange.

      The bullet list along side is an example of a possible Content Stack for a Business Process Management Company.  If required, this can be replicated per solution or vertical market served:

      1. An Agile approach to digital transformation
      2. Book Reviews & Links, Content Links, Video Links, Podcast Links
      3. Case Studies – How other companies have used the software
      4. How to:  Booking Professional Services, Scoping, Execution & Training
      5. How to:  Create an inhouse Technology Teams to implement new systems
      6. How to:  Installation Procedure
      7. How to:  Place an order
      8. How to:  Videos:
      9. How to:  Writing an inhouse training course for digital transformation
      10. Introduction to company and operations
      11. Meet the Team: CEO, Tech Support, Customer Success, Professional Services
      12. Product Literature
      13. Worksheets & Checklists, Questionnaires
      14. Workshop Description & Content, Diary Dates
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      Content Suggestions

      In certain cases there is very little creativity when it comes to the type and scale of content that can be exploited within the B2B space.  Below are some suggestions. 

      Articles

      • News
      • Reviews
      • Interviews
      • Business Events
      • Infographics
      • Polls
      • Top Ten Tips
      • Business Advice
      • Case Studies
      • Press Releases
      • Events
      • Reports
      • Slide Presentations
      • eBooks

      Regarding Case Studies, buyers want customer stories.  They want to know who they are, how they started and the problems they have encountered.  They want to hear from the people that matter, e.g., the CEO, the buyers within that business and interviews with anyone who may have a counterpart watching. 

      Podcasts

      Listening ‘on-demand’ is growing enormously and podcasts are the medium people turn to.  There are over 750,000 podcasts stations and some 29 million episodes.  Not only that, but higher bracket income people also listen to podcasts. 

      Your podcast is your ability to have some one-to-one time with your prospects and customers.  Your delivery is all about having a conversation that compounds the whole process of genuine engagement. 

      Your podcasts can include the following ‘format’ to look something like this:

      • Your Personal Opinion
      • Interviews with customers
      • Interviews with suppliers
      • Interviews with industry thought leaders
      • Phone-ins
      • Q&A Sessions
      • Equipment Discussions
      • Upcoming Events and what to expect
      • Post event analysis
      • Audio from videos
      • Guest podcasts

      Live Streaming Shows

      This is our primary deliverable.  We recommend you replace your telesales and BDRs with live streaming for new business development to reach your total addressable market every week.  This will radically change your ratios of reaching active prospects and, at the same time, reduce costs. Here are some of the show segment ideas we recommend: -

      • Details in the description
      • How to… with ‘Your Company’
      • Viewers FAQs
      • About ‘Your Company’
      • About the Show Series
      • Customer Success
      • In the News
      • Tech Spot
      • Training Spot
      • Interviews
      • Your Company’ Core Products
      • Learning with ‘Your Company’
      • New Products or Software Releases
      • Professional Services Spot
      • On the show next week….
      • The ‘Your Company’ Specials
      • Adverts

      Videos

      Whether it’s professionally filmed or shot on a smartphone, use branded graphics at the beginning and end of the video clips.  Include a call-to-action linking to a landing or sales page.

      Your videos can include any of the following:

      • Product highlights
      • Recorded demonstrations
      • Interviews
      • CEO Comments
      • Funnies
      • Recorded Webinars
      • Recorded Events (Expo’s etc.)
      • Events
      • How to...
      • Advice
      • A day in the life of...

      Calls to Action

      Predetermined paths mean using single calls-to-action, intentionally placed, which will help guide buyers through your website, ensuring they arrive at a logical conclusion either to buy online or to be keen to start direct dialogue with sales.

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      Stage Three

      The B2B Visibility Growth Strategy

      Using LinkedIn as Your Primary Social Platform

      How to maximise your reach and not get penalised!

      As you know, LinkedIn is the primary B2B platform in the world.  LinkedIn is a commercial business and is expectant of achieving 'dwell time' from its visitors.  Placing a blog or any other link to drive traffic to your website will not be as effective as you would like to believe.

      When using automation platforms to post images or blogs/articles, LinkedIn will throttle the exposure as you are attempting to automate the redirection of their visitors, for free.

      Our Recommendation

      Copy your content from your website to LinkedIn and post them as articles under your Company Pages (Ensure your Company Page is complete, with an email and contact telephone number).  Once posted, use the URL from the LinkedIn post to use on your Social 444 campaign.  This will keep browsers on LinkedIn and drive traffic to your article.

      Remember, you want to attract businesses who are interested in your products or services.  You do not want drive traffic to your website - just yet - you want people to get to know what you're about.  Once they get to know like and trust you, then they will take the next step and visit your website.   

      A.I. Image used for salesXchange advert on LinkedIn
      Podcast advert

      Now you know our approach to what B2B content should look like and how it should be structured for maximum effect, this final stage explains how you can automate promotion and concentrate on getting sales.

      Engagement Kickstart

      Social 444© is your ‘go-to’ strategy to kickstart your engagement process using mixed media content. 

      Social 444© is the only strategy where all the content is prepared in advance, enabling you to make any last-minute adjustments to your overall ‘tone-of-voice’ before starting the campaign.

      To maintain buyer awareness, it is important to utilise an automated content promotion strategy to consistently reach out to your followers on ALL social media channels, i.e., on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, at the same time.

      Your organisation must sell its content first; sell the education; sell the videos and podcasts and sell the live shows. It’s about selling the self-serve content and the anonymous learning experience.  People are always too busy and don’t want to feel they’re being ‘sold’ to.

      We both know, it’s called “selling the sizzle, not the sausage” or “selling holes not power drills.” Once the sale of the content is complete, now you can sell the product. 

      Traditional & AI Generated Images

      We have used a combination of both stock and AI generated images, inserting panels on both via photoshop to demonstrate creativity and differentiation form all the other images businesses tend to see online.

      Check out www.midjourney.com, www.stability.ai and https://openai.com/dall-e-2/ and now Adobe's Firefly.

      The fact your business is expressed by your content (and of course your products) means AI can express your company’s individuality unlike anything that has come before.  

      You want visibility in a world full of noise which means you need to stand out.  Live streaming is another element of defining your individuality against a backdrop of uneventful and boring marketing initiatives.

      Below is an illustration of sixty of our adverts we use for Social 444.  Note that we have multiple adverts for the same piece of content.

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      Collage of 60 advert by salesXchange for our own Social 444 campaign

      How Social 444 Works

      In ‘Thinking Fast & Thinking Slow’ Kahneman mentioned the marketing tactic of repetition.  With this in mind, first create 120 adverts: these are in the form of graphics, memes, video clips, and motion graphics.  These adverts link to, and sell, all your content, from articles, to downloads, infographics to live streams and finally to content stacks.

      The 120 adverts can be created inhouse if you already have copywriters, graphic, and motion graphic designers. 

      Four adverts are automatically posted to social media four times a day, over four weeks – i.e., 444 - which equals 120 adverts in total.   The sequence is then repeated every month for 12-18-24 months or until you want to change an advert or add a new piece of content. 

      That is Social 444.

      Auto Posting Every Day

      By using a platform like Buffer, Hootsuite or Recurpost (we use this platform), all the adverts are uploaded in advance and then drip released to the social platforms of your choice, i.e., LinkedIn, Facebook Pages, and Twitter.

      Auto-posting platforms cost approx. £50 per month. Apart from the initial work, a significant element of your marketing is put on auto-pilot, reducing error and required human resources. 

      Our strategy helps you maintain a consistent presence on the main social networks, especially LinkedIn, allowing you and your staff to post new content as and when you feel it is relevant.

      You may already have several actively engaged employees ‘on-side’, but there’s no harm including everyone else in the company.  Also, encourage your advocates to find external content they can curate and share on the company page.  This increases advocacy.

      Engage, Analyse, Edit, Repeat

      The reason for creating 120 adverts is to ensure the social media platforms allow the monthly frequency and more importantly, it is unlikely your prospects will ever see the same advert twice.

      The overall strategy enables you to review and edit your approach to ensure maximum effect and if an advert is not performing, then it can be changed.  Likewise, if new content is created then new, corresponding adverts will be created.

      Review your tone of voice

      By looking at each of the images being used on a social feed like on LinkedIn, you can immediately recognise any anomalies or errors and importantly garner a feel for your company’s ‘tone-of-voice’ presented via your colour grading, branding and content.

      For example, we were unhappy with the video graphic shown on Day 1 and so changed the title graphics to make the headings easier and quicker to read. 

      Instruct your marketing people to provide you with a document to include all the images and banners you are using.  Sales teams need to know how the company is being portrayed.

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      Provide Digital Access to your Business

      Finally, it is imperative your organisation offers a wide selection of communication options dependent on the activity of the buyer/browser: -

      Via the website

      • Contact Us Page
      • FAQs + Email Comment
      • Chat (Zendesk)
      • Email to Sales
      • WhatsApp
      • Telephone Number
      • FB Messenger

      During the Live Stream

      • Live Messaging via LinkedIn, Facebook, or YouTube
      • WhatsApp
      • Messenger

      On Content PDFs

      Edit PDFs via Adobe to insert pages on external documents, e.g., if offering a Gartner report, insert a page in front of the first page and a last page with your organization’s branding and contact details as follows: -

      • Email
      • Telephone Number
      • Join us Live

      Landing Pages & Segmentation

      Every page is a Landing Page, which can give you the opportunity to ask simple or complex questions depending on the value of the content you are offering, and the response helps determine your next step.

      An essential factor is to ensure that your new browser can ‘self-segment’.  This is done by asking specific questions on the landing page itself.

      If you plan to connect with influencers, then write for influencers and if you’re planning to sell to CEOs, then write for CEOs and so on.  One would not have the same conversation with a CEO as one would with a manager or new employee.

      Self-segmentation on a landing page helps your browsers by leading them to the content you want them to see.

      The Landing Page is your opportunity to include relevant questions and perhaps a Registration Box if you intend to provide ongoing content in the form of a newsletter as previously mentioned.

      Social Policy and Advocates

      Make sure you have a Company LinkedIn Policy along the following lines: -

      • Make sure every post has a question. The feed algorithm seems to heavily weight comments, so you don’t just want people to passively ‘like’. 
      • If staff are just posting a link and moving on, they’re doing it wrong. Make sure their content is set up to act as the start of a conversation, not as a mere signpost to an article you wrote elsewhere.  Also, when you are sharing, provide a short intro to the article so that others can both see that you read it and decide if they want too as well.
      • Use the summary section of LinkedIn to drive a CTA (call-to-action). Include a proper email or link to the “learn more” or “buy now” page on your website. Make sure people who see your content on your LinkedIn are directed towards one easy action.
      • Make your employees your brand ambassadors and the ‘face’ of your company as people are 10x more likely to engage with employee profiles than with company pages.
      • Invest in a mini ‘employee advocacy boot camp’: Get your 5-10 most engaged and representative employees a personal branding strategist and content writer. This expert team will polish the LinkedIn profiles of your employees, make them fit for the digital age and develop high quality, value adding and relevant content, which your employees will post from their profiles.

      You could also download your contacts from LinkedIn and upload them to Facebook Business Manager as a custom audience retargeting them on Facebook and Instagram. This helps build a strong trust factor with your audience.

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      Conclusion

      Sales teams have been disconnected from entrepreneurialism because marketing has been given the responsibility to seek out new business.  For many salespeople the whole point of seeking a career in sales was that the harder you worked, the more you earned. 

      Now, due to marketing automation and the fact that most marketers have never sold direct, the process of finding and closing new business has deteriorated into an ongoing argument; salespeople say the leads are no good and marketing infer that salespeople can’t sell.

      Are we back to Alec Baldwin in Glengarry, Glen Ross?  No!  It’s not about leads for those who are worthy.  It’s about the ability of a business to garner the greatest exposure to prospects for the least cost, to ensure future success and profitability.

      Combining Social 444 with live streaming, to generate new business, is now the only low cost, high exposure strategy that does not require input from marketing.

      Compared to existing models, you could never employ enough BDRs or salespeople to generate the same level of exposure or engagement.

      The Social 444 model will reduce your sales and marketing costs by approximately 50% - 70% and at least double your profitability. 

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      Author

      The author and founder of salesXchange, Nigel Maine is a B2B marketing and sales expert with a proven track record in scaling up growth for Technology, SaaS, and Professional Services organisations. With 30 years hands-on experience and unique approach, Nigel has developed an effective strategy that dramatically increases exposure and profitability for B2B organizations.

      Nigel has founded multiple start-ups, is a published author, public speaker and hosts both a podcast and business live streaming show, broadcast on LinkedIn Live, YouTube & Facebook. He also has extensive knowledge of MarTech software, creative hardware and software, and A.I. prompting tools.  Contact: 0800 970 9751 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 


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