#010 How To Use Social Media Data To Showcase Your Product's Competitive Edge.

Potential buyers want to know what makes your brand different, what you stand for, and what value you can add. Social media is where that narrative is built. It’s where people can get the most immediate sense of your company’s mission and truly understand what sets you apart from the rest.

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This episode features a presentation by Beth Trejo in Omaha. She covers:

How to build a distributor/retailer relationship for your brand through data-driven customer service.
How to mine social media data to maximize ROI and outperform your competitors.
What content can influence buyers and turn them into advocates on behalf of your brand?
The impact of online reviews and how to leverage them on social media.

Biggest Takeaways From This Episode

Company decision-makers spend 74% more time on Facebook than the average user. Read more from Facebook.
Align your digital data with your product data to leverage sales. Tag social messages with locations and interests, showcase the product excitement and validation online, tag vendors and supporters, use paid advertising target alternative buyers, and post often!
I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel
Leveraging social data can showcase customer service, local impact and sales relevance to buyers.
Reviews are key! Businesses with two negative reviews on the first page of search results risk losing 44% of its customers.

Want your question to be answered on the generation social media podcast? Tell us what it is here!

Transcript

This text below is a straight up audio transcript of the episode. In our humble opinion, we think the audio podcast sounds much better in its original form. We have not edited the transcription below so there are indeed some grammar errors (some quite funny, in-fact).

I know many of you in here, but I want to give you just a quick overview for those that may not know a lot about myself or Chatterkick. I started Chatterkick about seven years ago and my goal really was to do look at these social platforms at a way to make connections and relationships. I came from the chamber of commerce world, where I was watching business deals happen all the time. They're relationship driven businesses and I saw the opportunity with social media to say this is amazing. Let's take those exact same conversations that are happening around coffee tables and board rooms and let those happen online. So that's kind of always the way that we've approached social media and the way that these platforms work. I have two people on my team with me here today. Molly Kuehl and Chris Severn and they both work with me at Chatterkick.

So if you have any questions, feel free to ask them. And, we also have a couple of clients here today, so it's been, it's fun to have kind of a mix. I also do have a passion for supporting other females, specifically in this space of digital agencies. And entrepreneurship. I go to a lot of agencies, events and summits, and there's a lot of guys in the room. So I think that we need to have more females and ladies in this industry. So I'm proud that we have a lot of females. Chris is one of the two guys at our team. We have 22 employees and four different offices, throughout the US so a little bit about Chatterkick. I wanted to kind of start and look at like what is the landscape of the distributor model and social data.

So we're kind of going to be looking at a couple of different things here and having the assumption that most of us are B in the B2B sales world, right? Like the actual relationships that you're creating. And maybe in some exceptions, you're going direct to consumer, but how do we do social media and how do we make it effective when we have multiple audiences, right? Because most of us, regardless if you are B to C B2B, all those were words have kind of taken themselves and put it to a, it really is a person, a person game. And we are going to be looking at this model of like, okay, I sell to someone and they sell to the end user. How do we help really amplify that message and get the most bang for our buck? And so what we're really seeing right now in the social media and distributor model is first of all, many people who are thinking that they, like, let's say they're in agriculture, right?

Let's take a John Deere example. They sell a tractor. The tractor tells it, sells it to the distributor and the distributor sells it to the client, right? Many of you may have kind of parts of your business that are similar to that. Well, the trick with that is before most of those people that like the tractors, they just wanted to sell it to the distributors, right? But then they realized, you know what, we need to actually create more demand so that we can use that information to get into the distributors, to get into stores, to get good placements on their shelves. And so that's really what we're going to be looking at today as well as how you can use that data to take it back to your business and say, Hey, this is making an impact on what we're doing and can kind of tie all of those loose ends together.

Okay. This statistic I pulled directly from Facebook and really what Facebook is telling us, and I love to put statistics out there that kind of break everybody's notion of where people are spending their time. We hear a lot of conversation about what platform is best for what audience. There is a lot of validity to that. But what I want you to think about is not so much of the demographics that are on these channels. The notion that young people are here, older people don't do this. Decision makers don't make decisions on these platforms. If we can just take that to the side and say, let's think about mindsets. What are people thinking about when they're on the platforms? So the reality is, is 70, um, decision makers spend 74% more time on Facebook than the average Facebook user. So what this means is they, they're not necessarily making business decisions at all those points.

They're probably looking at family photos, they're looking for, you know, their friends and their family. They're connecting. But what these platforms allow you to do is if you have the right content at the right time, you can slip in between those family photos and pet pictures and you know, causes that support their beliefs in interaction. And so you have to have that right messaging, otherwise you're really not going to be able to stand out. So the reason I use that statistic is really just to show that like, yes, you need to have a channel strategy, but maybe it's not what we always think it is. And maybe it's not just trying to reach, you know, young people on Instagram and older people on Snapchat and LinkedIn.

Oops.

So here is the biggest opportunity that I think most people miss. And what this really is, is going direct to the consumer, even if you're not actually selling to the consumer. So showing your products advantage, validity, the power of people wanting your product, even if that's not the actual person you're selling to, if it is the person you're selling to, you get double bang for your buck. And the strategy just really ties itself in a bow. But even if it's not the person you're selling to, maybe you're selling to the retailer that's selling to your end user. Having that product demand is so important because it allows you to take that data and say, here is our proof. We people want us, they want our product, they want to, they want us in your stores. So like I'm not selling this, you let the data sell this too.

And they have a couple of examples here. So let's start with a couple of food retailers. So I'm not retailers, distributors. So this particular instance, I'm in the food game, this probably directly applies to you. You could 100% apply this to you know, the pet food category as well. But people are in discovery mode when they're in social media, they're looking for new things, they're trying to find recipes and they love a new product. So if you have a product that you haven't like re-pitched in a while, find a way to make it cool, sexy, appealing again. So, and that from a content perspective, it could be the exact same product. You're just kind of making it fresh and new. So there is a ton of hashtags that are going on these platforms and that's how people are using discovery on specifically on Instagram.

So don't just think of the primary category that you're in. Think of, this is a funny one because food porn is one of the top hashtags on Instagram. Businesses are not using it because they're scared or scared of the word. So if your business is somewhat okay of you using that word, you have the opportunity to get into that primary feed. There is a lot of other hashtags that people are using but businesses are afraid to use. So just be aware of that. Even if you don't use it, realize that this is something that you're saying no to, right. Like it's out there. We have the opportunity to use it, but at this point we're going to say no.

Yeah, no, you're fine. I've heard true rumors that you're not supposed to use the same hashtags over and over again, but that might've changed. I'd love your insights on that because like for us, we'll always use hashtag state hashtag whatever and then also, so something that has that many images. I've also heard that for someone like us where we only have 35,000, right? So it's harder for us to show up in discoverability when it's such a large hashtag. So it was, would you actually encourage,

no, I would encourage you to use hashtags. I wouldn't mix up the order of the hashtags, but I have not seen we manage, Oh, I don't even know how many different assets, like more than probably, I don't know how many Instagram assets, but I would say more than 60 and big and small and no effect of negativity with hashtags. Actually there's been research to show that the more hashtags that you use, I think it's a minimum of, what is it, 30 I think whatever the minimum or the maximum is, use those. And the other thing with those hashtags is vary it up. So sometimes you can put it as within the body of the content and then the other, you can post a comment after there's been research that shows one of them kind of moves the needle on exposure and the other moves the needle on engagement.

So test it, do a couple in the body with like three dot. Dot. Dots. Do the next in the first comment. The more that you can just keep swipe, switching that stuff up, they'll let the more opportunity you'll have to get into the different algorithms. I wouldn't use the exact same, like I would tailor a handful of the hashtags based on whatever context it is. So like grilling season or summer 2019 recipes. But I would highly rec recipes are huge on Instagram hashtags, so, find the ones that are relevant, but you can also start searching and see the top post. So, and one thing to do specifically if you're on your phone and you have like a very like mobile posting strategy is take those hashtags, put them in a notes on your phone and then copy and paste and then just edit from there.

Otherwise you're literally typing them out all the time. And we've found that works really well for events or for recruitment job fairs that works really well. Or if you're just in the moment and you don't want to have to post type in, you know, 30 different hashtags that definitely helps. You can also see, don't forget, you can see if you get featured in the hashtag story, like that is a feature that you have to go within Instagram to see. But local hashtags, I tell you what, you can get in them just by using Omaha, Sioux City these small towns cause there's not a lot of people using those local hashtags. So it's much easier to get into those mixes and the feeds.

Um, the other thing, we're talking a lot about the Facebook family of apps. So really what that is, it's Facebook and Instagram are the two main players. And then you have the audience network, which is an entire ad network that feeds off of Facebook advertising. So it typically is on by default if you're just placing an ad, you have all of the placements available. But there is some really great opportunities to get in front of people on the audience network and they don't have to be on Facebook. They could be on another app that they're playing a game on and your ad in message could come and appear within that app. So very powerful, doesn't cost any extra money. For some categories that works really well, but I would just say test and see what works best for your brand.

Okay. So how do you align that online data with your product data to leverage sales? First and foremost, if you don't have a where to buy and you are in that parent child relationship with a distributor to a retailer, first biggest opportunity, and you could do this from multiple categories of businesses, but it's the easiest to explain of the where to buy. So the reason why this works is because you then can go directly to consumers and market to them. Even though they, you don't sell the product. Maybe you're not selling, you know that restaurant quality meat or maybe you're not, you know, directly providing it to your end consumer. But you have the data. We've done this with clients in the ag space and they sell specific products, but they don't sell them direct. They sell them to the retailers and guess how they get into new markets.

Guess how'd they get into new stores? They take that data from people looking where to buy. They go into the store and say, we've had 3,500 people say they want this product in your market. You want to be the first X, Y, Z retailer and they're going into home Depot, Menards, big retailers. And they're like, yes, you have the data and their sales team is completely armed with that social data. And in many of our companies, those live in silos, right? Sales is over here, marketing's over here, results. But if you can get away, find a way to tie all of that together and this is one step to do that, a huge opportunity to be able to leverage the information.

Another thing, a huge opportunity is tagging within the context. So I'm going to try to explain this in a very broad way, but, so many people use social media management softwares, right? Raise your hand if you're using a form of social media management softwares to post. Okay. No, you guys aren't. Okay. So there is, this, this functionality is really only available if you have a third party that you're able to do it. But one of the things that most of you are missing in your general social media data that Facebook just gives you, right, is the ability to see the context on a macro scale. So you may, your social media management software may be able to tell you if it's positive or negative, but they can't tell you how many times a candidate came in asking for employment. Like you'd have to go through your comments, you'd have to go through your post by others, your Instagram comments, your direct messages.

One of the biggest opportunities people have isn't it? And it is a manual process, but you can go in and tag manually when you're responding back to that person when they're asking a question, Hey, this is a prospect, this is a lead, this is a candidate. Okay. So that's like one, like tagging the people. But the other thing is tagging what they're talking about. So if you're trying to get into a new market or maybe you're trying to get into a new placement on the shelf, right? Like we have a client and they have pre-packaged, it's fully cooked meat. But, they are in the raw hamburger section, right? Most people would think they would be in the pre-packaged kind of refrigerated section, but their placement in their stores right now is in the raw next to the raw hamburger. Well, they're trying to move that shelf placement, which is really tricky in the world of grocery stores.

So every single time someone can't find their product and they're asking people on social media, where can you know, where's your product? I can't find it. Or within this grocery store we're having these dialogues all the time and you're probably as well, but we just make a note, we tag it on the backend and then we can take that data and say, we've had 35 people looking for our product in your store. They can't find it. We need to get our placement moved. Huge opportunity. It's manual, but it's a big play for trying to understand what is, what's the quality, what's really happening on the floor level of conversations and relationships. In the trucking industry. I think one of the biggest opportunities is really on the, you know, if you're using it for recruitment because most of the time, like people are asking questions that could lead to a prospect.

So like, what are the, what's the mileage rates? You know, what do you pay? All of those questions that are like pre applicant should be calculated so that, you know, where's our bottlenecks, right? Like we know that we're getting to a hundred people a month asking questions, but only getting 10 applicants. Maybe there's, that's a problem with our ease of application process or maybe, you know, they're getting the answers but they're not liking them and we need to reevaluate our benefits. The way that we're positioning things within the market. So being able to just Mark those and really it's a count in many regards is, is a huge opportunity.

The next is social proof. So really showing the excitement around your product. When you look at ROI on social, it's very difficult to calculate it. But if you have a brand where people are generating content on your behalf, in other words, they're taking pictures of themselves with your product, of your product or anything in the community that is being a champion or a cheerleader of you. Guess what? They just saved you a ton of money to try to create that content yourself. So the more that you can leverage that user generated content, it will save you money on content development and people respond to it so much better. So when you're looking at how do I understand, you know, what my ROI is of social and how do I leverage the data? Like the data is how many pieces of content did we have created for us, not by us.

We didn't have to pay anybody else to create that content. That one can show value of like savings, cost savings, and too there is just a great social story to be had with that to say, man, like these people, not only they want people want us in their market, but they also are so excited about our product that we have lots of engagement, lots of fans. That means a lot to what buyers are trying to discover before they actually say yes to having you know, your product in their store or selling it to their audience as a retailer.

Um, another thing, again, I'm talking about the tag side of it on the community support so you can tag additional vendors or supporters or influencers. Um, and I think the word influencer gets thrown around a lot, right? But don't forget that sometimes influencers can be employees, sometimes influencers and they should be your best influence. Honest honestly, because the people that love you and really enjoy working for you, like they're going to tell your story better than you can or anybody else. So really giving them that opportunity. And then where are other people having conversations with us? Who are the other supporters in our network? And maybe it's just your online champions and if you have somebody that every single time you post and you're doing the moderation, right, they are like, come to your defense. Like we love you. Thank you. Why not just send them a note, a thank you note or maybe a little gift or maybe send them your product that online cheerleading is just as important and maybe they don't have 100,000 fans. But guess what? If you do that one little thing, they will consistently be your champion. They will respond to you, they will fight for you when someone says something bad. And again, that's worth a lot of money because they are your cheerleader.

Um, social advertising. So we have a couple people that want to know more about that. That's awesome. Who in here is to mean social activism? Are you guys doing any ads or recruiting drivers? Okay. A little bit. And are you getting into the ad manager and kind of pulling all the lovers and a little bit. Okay. Very, very minimal. Both. A little bit. Okay. Awesome. How about you? Have you done social media ads? Well, not so much. If you have someone on your team that does. Okay. Awesome. I know you guys have done that. We do. Here's the on your behalf. So there's a lot of ads going on. I know you do ours on our behalf. I think that's something that we're looking into was how would you do that? Like what, what it looks like on the back end you go, okay great. Now we can definitely give you some insight into that. And you guys said you have a third party that kind of runs yours and you're kind of the same way. You want to understand how they work and the the information that you could pull from it, right?

Because the strategy are getting funds from us. Capitalize on that.

Yes. So I think the biggest opportunity that you have to help, whether it's director agency or learn about it on your own, is the, what's happening in your business and how can you learn like learn from the audience what they like. Because the one thing that we can guarantee every single person that runs social or does social social advertising is that they will get data from it. They will get metrics and information back from the ads even if they don't perform well, quote unquote you still get information. So a couple of the things that you can do. So one thing is creative testing. So let's say you, your target core demographic is females age 35 to 65 and you know that they are the primary decision makers, they are your largest target and they make most of the decisions in the household about your product.

So now how do you go from there? Well you take that audience, you get it as ideal as possible and then you basically have ads that will run and Facebook if you set them at, at the optimization level where Facebook just kind of goes and does its optimization thing in layman's terms, it will tell you what ad is performing best. And so why? Why is that ad performing best? We've ran ads for the chamber of commerce for five years. They have one ad that is consistently, we could put any photo with it, but the words what it says something like connect with us to be the first to know about new businesses that come to town. That is the thing that people care about. And that is a great business insight because everything else that they're trying to sell, yeah, it might work every once in a while and maybe relevant, timely, but there's that one message that people are hungry for.

So if I was that business at the chamber, I would just completely lean into, that's what people want. Let's set up a newsletter subscription form for that. Let's like nurture these leads of people that just want to know new businesses coming to town and then ask them to be a chamber member, right? And it gives you that information straight from the ads. Another thing that you can gain from a advertising specifically is click through rates. So when you look at is this ad working right? There's obviously a conversion at the end of the font end of the rainbow, which is fine, but some of organizations don't have that ready to go or maybe their buying process is really long or it's not just about the sale. So when you have that, when you don't have that conversion, you need to find other points in there that you are going to be able to find information on. And click through a is a really great one because it shows you how relevant is your content, right? You show this to a hundred people and 50 people click. No, that's pretty relevant, right? That's a high click through rate. So that's a really good metric to measure those ads as click through rates. Another really great one. So different ad objectives. There's like seven different ad objectives or maybe even more than that. Now they all have different areas that you can measure.

So some of it just completely depends on what you're trying to do. If you're trying to sell e-commerce products as opposed to trying to drive them to a website or maybe you're trying to get direct leads, all of that stuff can completely depend on the ad objectives. But when you're looking at advertising strategy, you want to look at, you know, is are we reaching the right audience and do they like what we're saying? Is there, are they taking action on our behalf and even if it's not action of sale, is there intent? Is there engagement when we're not trying to get engagement, are they connecting with us? And liking our page. Are they are they going to our website and spending some time on our website? Those are all like data points that you can use to understand what creative works, what pictures work.

Do they like real pictures or stock photos? That's a great testing. Should we use targeting that is exactly the interests. So for example should you use like for, uh, leadership and, and strategy and management? Should you go into Facebook and say, I want to find people who like management resources, HR leadership development and put all those in? Or should you say, maybe I should actually target people who like inc magazine, Forbes, HBR. Because you know that those people are these people, right? But your targeting is just very different. So I encourage you when you're looking at the ad strategy, not to just think of, you know, we need to hire nurses, so we're going to put people who like nursing or should we hire or should we look at targeting that? People who like scrubs or people who like this kind of schedules or means humor accounts are awesome if you're trying to target the trucking community or specific hiring niches using humor works really, really well.

Um, another thing on that same note for advertising, you can use humor to weed people out. So if you have a product that only lets, I'm gonna use the trucking community, only truck drivers get trucking jokes, right? Like there is like no one else thinks it's funny cause they can't relate. And humor is a very great way to connect with people who are like in your tribe, right? You could do the same thing on the food side of things or even with management where only those type of people understand that. So what you could do is you show an ad to that group and it's a wide group, just people in this geographic range, this somewhat demographic, we're going to keep a lot of people in the mix, let's say a million people in the mix. And then the people that engage with that piece of content, they get the next set of ads. So all because you can target people who have engaged with your first group of ads to see your second and that's how you kind of build that funnel down the road. But it's a really good way to start weeding people out without having all the targeting.

So a lot of the questions we get on here is just how much should I be posting? What channels should I be posting? Three to five times a week is really minimum, which we would like to see. If you start getting under that range of whatever channel you're on, you become kind of so quiet that it's hard to even start inching your way up there. Now, some brands, I mean post a lot and that's okay. If as long as your contents relevant, I wouldn't worry about it. But if you start to see your reach or engagement per post start dipping that's really where you need to kind of rethink your strategy. I was listening to a podcast about the CMO of John Deere. And she, she was very open about their strategy and she said they kind of got a slow start in social media, big company, lots of moving pieces, lots of different audiences they were selling to.

And she was saying that there they were pushing so much content every time a sale went on posted on Facebook. Every time, you know, they had a campaign run of any type they would post on their social accounts and they were just overloading their channels and they saw it because their reach was 0.001% of their audience and their engagement was extremely low. So that is a good indicator if you, if your engagement per post is that low, definitely something you want to pull back. Now if it's one to 2%, that's probably about average without doing paid spend these days you start getting higher than that and you really are above average and that means your content is really um, connecting well with the audience. O kay. So let's look at your customers specifically. And again, this is kind of on that.. Your B2B customers. So maybe they're not the end users and I put people who buy from you because everybody's customers in this group is a little bit different and you may have multiple customers in your business alone.

So, let's look at, if you're selling to people that again sell to someone else, how many of you have that model in your business that you're actually, you guys do? I know, are you guys all selling directly to your customers? You guys are on the trucking side. Do you have direct customer or do you do one hop? You direct customer, you guys have direct customers, you guys, you guys do restaurant sales stuff at all? Okay. That's not you guys. Okay, gotcha. So I'm going to actually just touch on that. I can connect with you separately because it is a very different strategy but I'm figuring out the balance between LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram is probably where a lot of conversations should be happening right now because they are all valid channels and if you have the bandwidth to support all three of those, awesome. Twitter is different.

YouTube is different there. And Pinterest is different. Those are those three have kind of this other strategy that we'll kind of set to the side. But LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook, if you were in the B2B world I think is one of the strongest suite of tools that you have available. Some of you may lean more so to the Facebook and Instagram tools, but I, or I'm sorry, Facebook and LinkedIn, but I would include the Instagram because I think Instagram has so much power right now that really using that tool to build an audience so that you can use it next year and the following year I think is going to be really important to consider. When we look at the difference between the two, really it's the content strategy and the ad strategy follows that. But LinkedIn people are in that business mindset. So if you're saying something on LinkedIn, you can get a little bit more technical, personal branding of your executives.

Even if you are a massive brand or you are a small brand, your executives should be branded on their LinkedIn pages and they should be putting out or even sharing some sort of relevant content because people are looking up to them, your customers are looking up to them, your employees are looking up to them and they need some sort of presence to be able to say, Hey, I know what I'm talking about and I'm here. Okay. So LinkedIn, personal branding, important LinkedIn company page, also important. So I would definitely use that tool. LinkedIn is seeing some awesome organic reach right now. So if you're in the B2B space and your, your audience is really a business professional this is the perfect hat for you to wear on LinkedIn because you talk about business, it fits. You don't have to worry about crafting the message and changing it.

Facebook, on the other hand, remember those decision makers are, are on Facebook, but they're in a different mindset. So they're either discovery mode, they're looking for entertainment, they're looking for some sort of utility. How can I use this? And it better be a strong enough message to kind of get me off the couch. If you really want someone to take action, you got offer a good deal get their attention, make it funny, say something wild and crazy. That's really what is getting the attention now and you can easily align that to your brand. It's just a matter of kind of mixing that art with the science. Instagram, um, is another really great tool for businesses to use, especially even if you're in the B2B space. We have some of our clients using Instagram for recruitment and employee engagement. That works really well. Instagram stories are amazing opportunities to showcase your products and tell what you do behind the scenes sneak peaks, how to choose just even taking your blog posts and breaking those up into small doses and Instagram stories is a great way to get more leverage out of the content you're already creating. And kind of breaking that into smaller pieces so people don't forget about your hero posts.

Okay. Other questions on that stuff? No. Good.

So how can you take these strategies which seem like big pie in the sky things, they're sometimes confusing, different for every businesses. And how can you bring that into a tangible feel? Good moment. One of the things is attention. So if you have enough volume of messages that you can't get to everybody, just making sure that you're responding to the messages being human and giving people legit attention sometimes surfaces secondarily, like give them something, take a swag bag, go creep on their social profiles and see what they like to, they like hunting. Do they like fishing? Um, what do they care about? Because if they care about something specific and you send them, let's say a box of your products plus a fishing lure or you send them the tools that they need to be successful at their big conference and it's a notebook and you just write a little note, you can source all that information from social.

Who are your champions on your page, your top fans, who's commenting, interacting your customers that are on there, right? Your customers are probably worth a lot of money cause they're big customers. So send them something special and guess what? They're going to remember it. And not only that, they might even share it online and now you've got that sale cycle going again. And don't be afraid of a free t-shirt. We've gotten people to do so many things for t-shirts, t-shirts on social work and it seems so crazy and silly, but contest, tee shirts, all of that stuff, there's still a thing on these channels. And um, you know, we saw a lot more of them five years ago, but as long as you kind of play within the rules, those things still work. And you just kinda gotta be careful of what you give away.

And what I'm saying on that is I've seen a lot of businesses give away things that are completely irrelevant to their business. An example that I use oftentimes is we had a new station in town and they gave away a snowblower, right? Really not relevant to the new station. People just wanted to like their page because they wanted a snowblower. Well, they did this contest and don't have people like your page to be entered, right? That you don't want to do that anyways. But they did that. And so they had this huge influx of likes on their page because people wanted to like, like to enter, right? And so they went from like, I dunno, a couple thousand fans, like 20,000 fans. So they had all these people liking their page and then guess what happens after the giveaway, unlike people actually thought about unliking the page or they saw the content and that wasn't their local news station.

Right? That's something you don't want to follow if you're not connected locally. And then it tells Facebook, Oh man, like, well, you just had this huge like purge of people on your page. It's giving you negative social signals and actually doing the opposite of helping, which is what they wanted to do. So contests are great. Just be careful. The best contests are those that are the most aligned with your brand. So a fun t-shirt that like talks about being an influencer or like a funny thing that's connected to your brand. I've seen like cooler giveaways or like we were talking to a rodeo. They had this big rodeo and they have camping there and we're like, you should give away a camping pack, right? Like a Yeti cooler and some fun t-shirts and it's a grassroots event. So it's a great way to kind of take that and expand on it. It's still relevant. So definitely way more connected to what they were actually trying to get in front of and do.

And sometimes you can just give your employees tee shirts that are fun and funny and say, go take pictures of yourselves within the tee shirts that also can work. So, I really like this quote because, uh, Gartner did a lot of research on B2B companies specifically, and they were talking about decision-making in, especially for consumers that had long processes, right? So if it's going to take me a long time to decide, you know, what company I want to go with or the decision making process as long what they really found is it wasn't actually what they knew, but it's what they feel about what they know. So they want to feel like they're empowered to make all the information or to make the decision with the information. And what this means is if I Google your company, right, especially if you're playing on Amazon, people are still gonna come back and see you're credible and that you have a solid brand that your products are good.

They're going to look at your reviews, they're going to look at all the assets, right? They don't want just one credible site. They want 20, especially if you're at a higher price point too, that makes a big difference. And they want to feel like that information is in their hands so that the power and decision making is in their hands. Very different than just the clicking the button that sometimes we assume people do. They're doing their research and it plays a critical role in how you play on social because if you haven't updated your Twitter profile or your big pushes innovation and technology and you have nothing about innovation and technology on your channels, you're going to get missed or that one little misalignment could make a big impact, um, on behalf of your brand. So definitely something to keep in mind.

I always tell people when they look at their core values, I should be able to easily pull that those core values based on their content or the initiatives they're trying to do. Or you know, what they're, the stories that they're trying to tell. Those should be directly aligned with your business goals. Otherwise you're never going to be able to pull that circle and see that true ROI loop that everybody I know craves. And especially executives crave that don't get social media. It's really important for them to understand like business schools, this is how I'm tracking them and this is how you know, it will spit out the information that we need.

That's it for this episode of Generation Social Media Podcast. If you had an aha moment or just a haha moment, I would be so grateful if you'd leave a review with the moment you loved most. If you have a question you'd like us to answer on the next episode, fill out the form on generationsocialmediapodcast.com.

Social MediaChatterkickDecember 3, 2019Data, Distribution