2015-04-21

When it comes to Social Intelligence and how it provides value to marketers and in turn drives business impact, our philosophy is that platforms like ours and other social and marketing platforms should work together to provide a broader value to their customers. In essence, driving towards an open ecosystem, and focusing on getting data between the wide array of sales and marketing platforms helps our customers then provide better journeys to their customers.

At this point I should stop and provide full disclosure: I run marketing for Synthesio, a leading global Social Intelligence platform. This of course makes me biased to our platform, but also means I understand the pain of the everyday marketer, constantly looking to improve the relationship we have with our customers from beginning to end, and prove value back to our CEO and the business. This means wanting to understand and combine all the different data groups we have, to get a complete view of our customer, to better understand how to target our prospects, provide them with valuable information and at the end of the process measure the ROI of our activities.  This article is timely to an exciting partnership we recently announced with Marketo, Inc. (NASDAQ: MKTO), introducing an integration allowing us to enable marketers to better personalize their engagement, leverage a complete view of their customers online, and above all, bring social closer to the sales and marketing funnel.

We think that this partnership is a great example of the open and available ecosystem that marketers need to live in, in order to leverage their social data in all of their other marketing and customer programs, as well as bring that data back to their business metrics and performance.

What Can Marketers Do?

Using all the available data you have on your customers, be that social or marketing engagement, for your strategy and programs will allow you to better understand your audience, be more targeted in your messages to your audience and build better, more qualified pipelines. With a complete view of behavior, interests and engagement, you can better converse with your audience and get a step closer to connecting all of your social and marketing programs to business impact.

If you are a social marketer, or really any kind of marketer in today’s world, the best way to provide your customers with the right experience from you and your business is to continue to listen to them where they are voicing their opinions, and make sure that information is disseminated to all relevant parts of your organization. One part of this is of course making sure all your marketing tools are talking to each other and working together!

How Can Marketers Use This?

Too often, we silo all of the different organizations within our businesses, and we also are too quick to want to do everything ourselves without asking for help, or partnering with others. As it turns out, the best way to maximize your marketing work is to take those silos and break them down. This is our philosophy for the way we run our business and develop our product, but it is also the best type of social media (or marketing in general) plan for any business. Use all the tools that are available to you, make sure that you are representing and utilizing every organization within your company and make sure that you are able to tie your data back to the metrics that matter to you.

Our Marketo partnership is the perfect example of this. It is the obvious next phase in our pursuit to offer marketers the ability to gain a complete view of their customer, a complete picture of their online presence and tie social data back to business metrics and performance. This new capability will provide marketers with an even greater understanding of the role social media and online presence plays in customer lifecycle and will bring social even closer to marketing and sales funnels.

That’s what we’re doing to break down our silos in order to help our customers get the best value that they can. What are you and your business doing?

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