AI can transform how your team operates for the better, but only through the thoughtful implementation of tools and resources. This workbook is designed to help you map out an AI social media strategy that makes the most of this emerging opportunity. It will help you:

• Recognize the pain points in your current processes and transform them into strategic goals for your AI social marketing strategy.
• Chart the opportunities and gaps in your existing tech stack.
• Identify the unique ethical considerations that must be addressed to promote the responsible use of AI.
• Prepare for AI vendor discovery and evaluation

Download the workbook and start saving your team valuable time today. 

The post [Workbook] How to design your AI social media marketing strategy appeared first on Sprout Social.

Fortunately, there are tons of free and inexpensive marketing resources available online to help you stay ahead. Whether you’re looking to advance your skills for a particular project or simply for professional development, the information you need is right at your fingertips. You just need to know where to look.

To help start your search, we rounded up some of the best marketing resources that have helped us make an impact. Share them with your team to help them elevate their skills, hone their expertise and set them up for career growth.

Note: The majority of these are free online marketing resources but some paid options did make the cut. To help you quickly differentiate between the two, we’ve marked all paid resources with an asterisk (*).

What are marketing resources?

Marketing resources are no longer limited to industry conferences, books or certification programs.

Today, some of the best news and practical marketing advice comes from a variety of sources like creator-driven newsletters, private communities and YouTube channels.

And as the world of marketing fragments into dozens of sub-disciplines, the breadth of available resources is equally vast. From social media marketing to creative strategy, digital marketing to analytics and AI, there are resources to help teams sharpen a range of marketing skills. Let’s get into some of our favorites:

• Social media marketing resources
• Digital marketing resources
• Copywriting resources
• Search engine optimization (SEO) resources
• Design and creative resources
• Email marketing resources
• Reporting and analytics resources
• Market research tools
• AI and marketing automation resources
• Marketing leadership development resources

Social media marketing resources

Social media marketing is an enormous and ever-changing field. Platforms are constantly making updates, meaning best practices can shift overnight. Luckily, there are tons of free tools available so you can make the most of these changes as they happen. Use this collection of blogs, newsletters and podcasts to keep up with the industry while keeping your sanity.

1. Social Media Today

Social Media Today is an Industry Dive publication providing original analysis on what’s happening in the social media world. They offer content in a variety of formats, including articles, webinars and full-on marketing playbooks. Plus, they have a daily email newsletter that delivers the day’s top stories straight to your inbox.

2. Rachel Karten’s Link in Bio Newsletter

Rachel Karten’s Link in Bio is a must-follow for anyone looking for on-the-ground dispatches on what’s working in social media marketing today.

Karten has more than eight years of experience in social with brands like Bon Appetit and Plated, providing her with a critical point of view on network trends and updates. On top of that, she also publishes feature interviews with social media managers finding unpaved paths to success. You’ll love seeing this in your inbox each week.

What to read first: Have you considered rizzing them up with a newsletter?

3. Sprout Social’s Insights Blog

You didn’t think we’d leave ourselves out, did you? Sprout’s Insights blog is home to tactical how-to articles, interviews with fellow social media marketers, original research and more.

What to read first: 11 social media trends you need to know in 2024

4. ICYMI by Lia Haberman

Lia Haberman is a marketing executive, consultant and lecturer for UCLA Extension where she focuses on social media and influencer marketing. Her weekly newsletter, In Case You Missed It, rounds up the latest social media platform updates, brand campaigns and creator news that marketers of all levels need to know.

If just the thought of trying to keep up with every network’s algorithm changes makes your head spin, ICYMI is the antidote you need.

5. The Arboretum

Over the last couple years, The Arboretum (Arb), a virtual community powered by Sprout, has become a thriving hub for social and marketing professionals—from practitioners to C-suite executives. Having hosted over 30 exclusive events, featuring keynote speakers from leading brands and numerous peer discussions, the community provides tangible value to members across 69 countries. More than 10,000 members turn to The Arb to troubleshoot on-the-job challenges, build their personal brands and learn from other experts in the field.

Digital marketing resources

Digital marketing is an umbrella category for all of the various promotional efforts that take place on the internet or through other digital means. While that’s definitely a wide net, there are tons of publications that can help you stay up to date on trending news and advice. Here are some of our favorites.

6. HubSpot Academy’s Digital Marketing Course

No marketing resource round-up would be complete without a nod to HubSpot Academy. Their course on digital marketing gives a great primer on content creation, social, paid search and more. Plus, if you pass their certification exam, you’ll also receive a certification badge you can add to your LinkedIn profile.

7. Today in Digital Marketing Podcast

Today in Digital Marketing is a daily eight-minute breakdown of what’s happening in the world of social, search and beyond. Fans of audio content will love host Tod Maffin’s quick and simple approach to news delivery.

8. The Contentfolks Newsletter

Contentfolks is a bi-weekly Substack newsletter that uses sticky notes and IRL examples to share a wide-range of content marketing advice. Subscribing is an easy way to commit to improving your marketing skills over time.

What to read first: How to interview your customers

Copywriting resources

Strong, concise writing is a foundational skill for marketers of all stripes, especially social media marketers. These copywriting and content marketing resources will strengthen your editorial skills so you can create punchier content in 2024.

9. Grammarly

Grammarly goes way beyond your standard spell check. Their digital writing assistant will evaluate your writing on correctness, clarity, engagement and delivery so your message always comes across crystal clear.

10. VeryGoodCopy

Eddie Shleyner’s micro-articles, courses and interviews can punch up your writing in less than five minutes each. VeryGoodCopy teaches a single persuasion principle or technique at a time, so you can start your day with a fun and informative copywriting exercise that can be completed in the time it takes to finish a cup of coffee.

What to read first: The lazy writer’s way to success

11. Everybody Writes by Ann Handley*

Everybody Writes is the go-to handbook for developing your copywriting skills. Packed with insightful lessons on grammar, storytelling and crafting compelling copy, this book is an essential addition to any marketer’s bookshelf.

Bonus resource: If you want to read some of Ann’s expertise for free, we’re big fans of her newsletter, too.

Search engine optimization (SEO) resources

Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential to any digital marketing strategy. With the right tools and resources in place, it can be a cost-effective way to reach potential customers at critical moments in their journey. These online marketing resources will help you brush up on SEO staples, from on-page optimizations to more technical and advanced tactics.

12. Google’s SEO Starter Guide

It’s only natural that Google, the world’s largest search engine, would have a comprehensive, easy-to-read guide to SEO. This resource is broken up into several chapters to help you level up your understanding of search, whether you’re new to the topic or a seasoned pro. It’s a must-read for anyone looking to drive more traffic to their site.

13. Backlinko’s SEO Marketing Hub

Backlinko’s exhaustive collection of SEO marketing resources will elevate your search engine optimization knowledge no matter your current skill level. Read through the hub in full or skip around to find out what you need to know. Either way, you’re guaranteed to find what you’re looking for.

What to read first: What is SEO? Search engine optimization in plain english

14. AhrefsTV

Ahrefs excels at breaking down complex SEO topics into simple, easy reads. Their YouTube channel, AhrefsTV, takes this skill and translates it into video. Ahrefs TV is home to both 101-level fundamentals and more advanced content. It’s perfect for anyone looking to brush up on their SEO skills over time.

15. Google Search Console Training

Google Search Console helps users improve their site performance on Google search through a collection of tools and reports that measure site traffic and any issues that may be deterring it. If you haven’t used it before, Google offers a video training course that explains how to use the platform.

The full library contains twenty videos, some of which cater to specific industries and professions—a must-watch for anyone looking to improve their familiarity with Search Console.

Design and creative resources

We’ve said it once and we’ll say it again: “social media manager” and “designer” are two separate roles. Still, if you’re in a pinch and find yourself needing to make your own creative, these tools can help you create something polished and Like-worthy.

16. Sprout’s Social Media Image Size Guide

Visual content is integral to your social media marketing strategy. Keep our always-up-to-date social media image size guide handy as a reference when optimizing content by platform.

17. Landscape by Sprout Social

Once you figure out what image sizes you need, use Landscape to create the picture-perfect crop.

With Landscape, you can upload any image you’d like to post on social media and have it resized to work for all your priority social media networks. This image resizer is a simple but powerful tool designed to help marketers, content creators and business owners stand out in an increasingly visual world.

18. Canva Design School

Anyone can make beautiful visual designs using Canva, the online graphic design platform. Their educational hub, Canva Design School, is home to a series of recorded and live workshops that can help you bring your creative vision to life.

 19. Unsplash

Unsplash hosts over two million free-to-use high-resolution images. Their collection is sorted by a number of categories, including current events, nature, people and more, so you can find the perfect photo faster.

20. Free Social Media Templates Gallery

Sprout’s free template gallery is home to striking social media templates designed specifically for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube. Customize them with your images and text, and you’ll get a unique graphic that makes your account pop.

21. Loom*

Is your download folder filled to the brim with time-stamped screenshots? With Loom, you can take, label and share screenshots. The platform—which offers free and paid plans—is known for its screen recording capabilities, helping you add more context when sharing feedback and delivering creative briefs.

Video editing resources

More than half (65%) of consumers agree that short-form video is the most engaging type of in-feed social content. If you’re looking to build out your video editing toolkit in 2023, here are our top picks.

22. CapCut

You can create some pretty impressive video content using network tools, but if you want a better user experience and advanced features, turn to CapCut. It’s available as both a mobile and desktop app so you can create a stand-out social media video without all the squinting.

23. Adobe Premiere Pro*

Adobe Premiere Pro is a subscription-based video editing application used by brands and creators alike. Use it to create stunning videos that look custom-made for every social channel—including YouTube.

24. Teleprompter App

The Teleprompter app is the perfect tool to have in your back pocket for when your teammates are feeling a bit camera shy. Even the presence of a teleprompter is enough to make people feel more comfortable in front of a camera.. Just remind them not to use it to read their script word-for-word. It’s meant to be a helping hand, not a read-along.

25. Frame.io*

If you’ve ever sent a list of time-stamped video edits to your creative team, consider Frame.io. This tool provides a central hub that supports collaboration across the video editing process through comments and tracked changes. You can also tag specific team members in requests so everyone stays aligned on action items.

Email marketing resources

Email marketing has been around for decades, yet brands are still pushing the standards of what the channel can do. Whether through stunning interactive design or creative campaign strategy, there’s always something to learn from the ol’ inbox.

26. Really Good Emails

Really Good Emails is just that—an ever-growing curated collection of really good emails. This constant stream of marketing design and copy examples is the perfect tool for building your inspiration swipe file.

27. Litmus Blog

The Litmus blog is an indispensable resource for keeping up with best practices in email marketing. Whether you’re concerned with content, deliverability or even changing privacy laws, you’ll find a must-read article as soon as you hit their resources page.

What to read first: The State of Email Trends Report – 2024 Edition

28. Omnisend’s Email Subject Line Tester

This tool from Omnisend gives marketers a chance to analyze and improve subject lines before they press send. Find optimized recommendations based on several factors including length, word count and scannability.

Reporting and analytics resources

Reporting skills are essential to proving the value of your marketing and social strategy. Show your leadership team how your work fuels your marketing goals using these resources.

29. Skillshop

Skillshop is the destination for brushing up on all things Google, from how to manage Google Ads to understanding the ins and outs of YouTube copyright. But almost all marketers can get value from the lineup of GA4 courses. These lessons are a great way to get hands-on experience on the platform, especially since Universal Analytics was discontinued.

30. Orbit Media Studios YouTube Channel

The Orbit Media Studios YouTube channel is a great video complement to their famous blog. Their succinct videos answer a range of analytics questions for people of all experience levels.

What to watch first: Site Search Tracking in GA4: Setup, Analysis & Insights

31. Sprout’s Paid and Organic Reporting Template

Winning social strategies rely on a solid mix of paid and organic efforts. This reporting template will help you track the performance of a two-fold strategy. It’s an essential tool for tying social performance back to top-line business goals.

Market research tools

How do you pressure-test ideas on a budget? Market research, of course. In the past, market research has seemed too expensive or involved for anyone working outside of enterprise businesses. However, thanks to the wealth of social data that exists at your fingertips, you can now quickly and accurately identify actionable insights on what matters to your audience.

32. ThinkWithGoogle

Here’s a two for one. ThinkWithGoogle gathers fresh perspectives on industry trends and consumer behavior sourced from the Google marketing team as well as other leading marketers across the globe. Their research is informed by search trends and expanded upon to include actionable insights so you can apply the data in a way that makes sense for your brand.

33. Exploding Topics

If you want to find out about the next big thing before it’s a trending topic, you need to subscribe to the Exploding Topics newsletter. Every Tuesday, their team shares expert analysis on search topics that are about to take off. Plus, they also include valuable context on why a trend may be gaining popularity and what marketers can expect from it next.

34. Pinterest Trends

Pinterest Trends forecasts what’s next in fashion, food, beauty and more using data from Pinterest users across the US, UK and Canada. If you have a hunch on what’s making waves in your industry, you can also use the Trends tool to check its search volume, related trends and top Pins.

35. Answer The Public

Answer the Public’s website claims it’s a “goldmine of consumer insight” and we will gladly second that assessment. The tool gathers autocomplete data from search engines so you can find all the questions and terms people are searching around your product, brand or even a general topic.

36. Sprout Social’s Listening Tool

Social data can answer a brand’s most important questions about how to manage, expand and grow its business. Sprout’s Social Listening tool is a premium add-on that helps brands distill global social conversations into actionable insights on brand health, content opportunities, product decisions and more.

Start a Free Trial Today

AI and marketing automation resources

This year’s hot topic comes with a learning curve. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are revolutionizing how people are thinking about marketing as we speak, so the time to get up to speed on the topic is now. Here are some of our favorite recommendations.

37. MIT Sloan’s Machine Learning Explained

Shout out to the folks at MIT Sloan School of Management for gifting us all with this free, in-depth primer on machine learning. This article is a long read but it’s more than worth it. Read it for insights from MIT professors who have been working in the AI/ML field for years and for a vocab lesson on some key terms you’ll be hearing throughout 2023 and beyond.

38. ChatGPT

It’s been hard to exist anywhere online lately without hearing about ChatGPT.

Use case examples are constantly discussed on social, in the news and at events, with pros from nearly every industry discovering ways the tool could streamline their day-to-day work. If you haven’t tested out ChatGPT yet, try it today. Here’s a helpful Twitter thread on how to create a workable prompt. Once you get acquainted with the tool’s limitations, your only limit is your imagination.

Even better, test it out in Sprout. Sprout’s AI Assist suite of features integrates with OpenAI’s GPT functiality to help you write captions, respond to customers and craft sophisticated listening queries.

39. Jeff MacDonald’s AI guides

Finding the right opportunities to embed AI in your day-to-day marketing work can feel overwhelming. Jeff MacDonald, Social Strategy Director at Mekanism, is an AI enthusiast who’s here to help. He has built out a variety of how-to guides for marketers on topics including AI prompt writing, image generation and ChatGPT use cases.

Marketing leadership development resources

Remote and hybrid work has turned office communication standards on their head. Whether you currently lead a team or you simply like to be seen as a leader, these resources can help you step up in a changing work environment.

40. Fast Company*

If you want to stay up-to-date on what the future of business has in store, you need to subscribe to Fast Company. Launched by two former Harvard Business Review editors in 1995, Fast Company chronicles how our changing world impacts business and vice versa. It’s a must-read for those looking to zoom out so they can understand their brand’s place in the bigger picture.

41. Harvard Business Review*

Harvard Business Review is on a mission to improve the practice of management in a changing world. Their content ranges from perspectives on current events to general best practice advice on leadership, organizational culture and more. If you’re new to corporate life or if you’re coaching others who are, check out Ascend, HBR’s learning companion for graduating students and Millennials in the workplace.

What to read first: Want to Be a Better Leader? Stop Thinking About Work After Hours

42. CMO Today Newsletter

If your New Year’s resolution is to start thinking more strategically, this is the newsletter subscription for you. The Wall Street Journal’s CMO Today looks at the day’s top news through a marketing lens so you can learn from how other leaders approach today’s ever-changing marketing landscape.

43. Marketing Week

Marketing Week is home to both practical advice and feature stories on game-changing strategies and leaders. It’s a go-to resource for those seeking inspiration from brands piloting new channels and working on the cutting edge of what’s possible with martech.

Elevate your marketing skills in 2024

Think of these resources as your textbooks to help you navigate what is bound to be another great year for you and your team. You probably won’t be able to read them all in one sitting, so be sure to bookmark this page for later. That way you can refer to the list as you work through crushing your 2024 goals.

Remember to share this with your team, as well. Pair it with the social media career growth planning template to get them thinking about what’s next in their marketing journey. Happy learning!

The post The 43 best marketing resources we recommend in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

Once it locks into place, you’re left with a more complete picture of consumer needs.

When searching for your company’s missing piece, an informed decision is the best decision. Kicking off your selection process with a dedicated research phase can pave the way for better process and performance outcomes.

The tool that takes your team’s efforts to the next level is out there. Keep reading to find out what you need to know when choosing an enterprise social media management software.

• Social media for enterprise: Why it’s taking center stage
• How to choose the right enterprise social media management software
• The enterprise social media management tools your business needs

Social media for enterprise: Why it’s taking center stage

Social media has fundamentally altered the brand-consumer relationship. Industry trailblazers—who have championed a new era of brand relevance—have made consumers more receptive than ever to seeing businesses in their feed. Audiences aren’t just passively consuming branded content, they’re looking for it.

According to The 2023 Sprout Social Index™ Report, 68% of consumers follow brands on social media to stay informed about new products or services. Nearly half (48%) follow for access to exclusive deals or promotions. Social has taken the mall experience online, where brands of all sizes go head-to-head for market share.

On social, the best strategy wins. The brands that maximize their use of social data to engage audiences are positioned to foster life-long fans—and generate meaningful revenue.

In a way, this gives smaller businesses a slight advantage, as smaller teams often have more streamlined approval workflows and less internal bureaucracy. If enterprise brands want to capitalize on the full impact of social media, they need to strive for maximum operational efficiency.

Succeeding in the most dynamic channel in marketing calls for more than just creative thinking and a strategic mindset. You need a tech stack designed to dramatically reduce time-to-insights, so you can focus on interpreting trends, developing predictions and making more informed, data-driven decisions.

How to choose the right enterprise social media management software

Enterprise software purchases are a team sport. Throughout the buying process, you’ll likely have to work with several stakeholders across your business, from IT to legal and beyond.

You can ensure that all stakeholder concerns are addressed during the vendor selection process with just a few hours of prep work. Here’s what you need to know to set your company up for social success: 

1. Know your goals

Why does your business need a new enterprise social media management software?

This may sound like an easy question, but asking it is a major step toward ensuring everyone is on the same page. For example, your social team may have different marketing priorities than those operating on the customer service side. Defining your goals creates clarity, which leads to more informed decisions.

Schedule a kickoff meeting with all your stakeholders to decide on top priorities. Remember to keep longevity in mind so you won’t have to repeat this process at the end of your contract terms.

2. Know your governance and compliance policies

When you think of all the bells and whistles you want out of your next social media management solution, governance features probably aren’t at the top of your list. While they may not be particularly flashy, enterprise social media security tools are incredibly important when it comes to eliminating risk.

Work with your IT team to outline the social media governance concerns and requirements you’ll need to discuss with potential vendors. Preparing and sharing a compliance-focused scoresheet before signing up for demos can save both parties time and effort.

Pro tip: Outlining these concerns in a social media RFP helps vendors remove themselves from your process if they can’t meet your security needs.

3. Know your priority integrations

Social data can revolutionize how your business seeks and acts on consumer insights. But if it lives on software that’s isolated from your tech stack, you won’t be getting the full picture.

Identify which social media management integrations matter most when creating wow-worthy customer experiences online. Rank them by importance and mark which are non-negotiable. As you move through vendor evaluations, this will help you identify which software will be most able to meet your needs.

The enterprise social media management tools your business needs

By now, you should have all the information you need to choose a tool that complements both your existing processes and tech stack. It’s finally time to create your vendor shortlist.

• Enterprise social media management
• Enterprise social network
• Influencer marketing
• Customer experience
• Lead generation
• CRM
• Business intelligence
• Workflow and digital asset management
• Reputation management
• Social commerce

Enterprise social media management: Sprout Social

Sprout Social offers a full suite of enterprise-grade tools that unlock significant business impact through social. We work with a roster of partners to ensure your social media processes are integrated into everything from internal communications to customer retention and enterprise reporting. With Sprout, you can mitigate risk, capitalize on opportunities and amplify your brand in a fan-favorite platform.

Our G2 rankings speak for themselves. In 2024, Sprout was named #1 Best Software Product by G2’s Best Software Awards—a recognition informed by authentic reviews by real users. On top of that, Sprout has maintained its status as a G2 Enterprise leader every quarter since 2018.

We could provide you with a whole laundry list of reasons to consider Sprout when selecting a new enterprise social media management tool. In the interest of time, we’ll stick to the top three reasons enterprise organizations choose Sprout for org-wide strategic alignment:

• We invest in research and development: Through strategic acquisitions and investments in cutting-edge AI analytics, we’re enhancing our customers’ ability to drive deeper insights from social media and expand their brand presence. Our AI Assist features are designed through proprietary machine learning and deep automation capabilities with OpenAI’s GPT model, empowering teams to work smarter and achieve greater impact.
• We bring alignment to marketing and customer service teams: Social Customer Care by Sprout Social and Sprout’s partnership with Salesforce Service Cloud set teams up to provide faster, more efficient support. We streamline the handling of incoming messages across networks, integrations, geographies and languages so your service agents can provide better service in less time.
• We speed up time-to-insights: Sprout’s analytics tools provide users with an extensive analysis of their brand’s social media presence in seconds. Reports are easy to build and easy to understand, so teams can focus on using that social data and industry insights to design more effective campaigns.

Enterprise organizations can schedule a demo to discuss their needs and goals with a member of Team Sprout. From there, we’ll take you on a live product tour so you can learn more about how to get the most out of the platform.

Schedule a demo

Enterprise social network: Slack

What is it? Slack is a team collaboration tool that is basically the professional equivalent of AOL Instant Messenger. Companies use this enterprise social network to promote internal communication through direct messaging and group channels.

How does it work with Sprout Social? Sprout’s pre-built integration with Slack helps social teams keep up with approval processes and task flows in real time.

Once a Slack Workspace is connected to a Sprout instance, users can choose which Sprout notifications they’d like to receive via Slack. This is a game changer for time-sensitive engagement opportunities and lengthy approval workflows.

Influencer marketing: Tagger

What is it? Tagger by Sprout Social is the leading influencer marketing and social intelligence platform, revolutionizing how brands and agencies harness data and analytics to drive influencer marketing strategies.

How does it work with Sprout Social? Successful influencer marketing strategies can’t exist while siloed off from a greater social media marketing strategy. Sprout Social and Tagger connect the dots between your influencer and brand social strategies, maximizing workflow efficiency from onboarding to project assignment to execution.

Customer experience: Salesforce Service Cloud

What is Salesforce Service Cloud? Service Cloud is the world’s most popular and highly rated customer service software solution.

How does Salesforce Service Cloud work with Sprout Social? Sprout’s preferred partnership with Salesforce drives a true 360 degree understanding of your customers. The integration pulls together conversations across Sprout and Salesforce Service Cloud so agents have complete context to effectively add the right level of personalization to customer inquiries.

According to the 2023 Sprout Social Index™, 76% of consumers notice and appreciate when companies prioritize customer support. Connecting Sprout and Salesforce Service Cloud allows teams to respond to customers faster, with better solutions that meet their unique needs—a recipe for long-term loyalty and retention.

Lead generation: Adobe Marketo Engage

What is it? Adobe Marketo Engage is a lead management platform that helps marketers nurture prospects and target qualified lead-to-revenue opportunities.

How does it work with Sprout Social? Sprout’s integration with Marketo Engage helps social teams send warm leads over to sales quickly and with all the necessary context needed to get the conversation started on the right foot.

Users can create and edit leads within the Sprout platform, creating a richer lead profile that accounts for a prospect’s full experience with your brand.

CRM: Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365

What is it? Customer relationship management (CRM) tools are like digital rolodexes that house all of a business’ prospect, lead and customer data.

Sprout integrates with two enterprise CRM tools: Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

How does Salesforce work with Sprout Social? Sprout’s integration with Salesforce allows users to edit leads, cases and contacts through the Sprout platform. This easy-to-use, pre-built integration supports alignment between marketing, sales and support teams so everyone can take advantage of critical social insights.

How does Microsoft Dynamics 365 work with Sprout Social? Our enterprise social media management solution integrates with Dynamics 365 to assist with lead generation and support case management.

Business Intelligence: Tableau

What is it? Tableau is a visual analytics platform for creating actionable and easy-to-understand data visualizations. The platform processes data from integrated sources, delivering predictions and recommendations using Einstein AI.

How does Tableau work with Sprout Social? Sprout Social’s Tableau Business Intelligence (BI) Connector layers rich social data on insights across marketing channels, creating a truly omnichannel view of the customer experience.

This centralized source of audience insights empowers enterprise brands with the resources necessary to identify opportunities to meaningfully influence the customer journey.

Workflow and digital asset management: Dropbox, Feedly and Canva

What is it? Creating a single piece of content can require several video clips, graphics and reference materials. Workflow and digital asset management tools centralize these files in a single location for easy storage and sharing.

Sprout Social integrates with three workflow and digital asset management tools:

• Dropbox: a cloud-based file hosting service that helps teams share files and folders easily.
• Feedly: a news aggregator that allows users to organize and research stories by topic.
• Canva: an online graphic design tool that can be used to create social media graphics, videos and presentation decks.

How does Dropbox work with Sprout Social? Sprout’s integration with Dropbox streamlines content creation by allowing users to access Dropbox files from directly within the Compose tool.

How does Feedly work with Sprout Social? News aggregators can level up enterprise social media management by creating a direct stream of content inspiration in a centralized location.

Users who connect their Feedly account to Sprout Social can access their personal RSS feeds from the Feeds tab. This content can be used as third-party social shares or for extra doses of inspiration.

 How does Canva work with Sprout Social? If your team relies on Canva to punch up your visuals, Sprout’s Canva integration lets you import design files from your Canva folders for beautiful, on-brand social creative, every time.

Reputation management: Glassdoor, Tripadvisor, Yelp and Google My Business

What is it? Social proof is a psychological phenomenon in digital marketing that has both risks and rewards. While seeking feedback can open your company up to critique, positive feedback is too powerful to miss out on.

Enterprise businesses face a unique challenge when it comes to reputation management. The larger your company, the more customer touch points. More customer touch points leave more opportunities for feedback.

Using social media reputation management tools like Glassdoor, Tripadvisor, Yelp and Google My Business can help enterprise businesses be proactive with reviews, even at high volumes.

How does Sprout work with Glassdoor, Tripadvisor, Yelp and Google My Business? The Reviews tab in Sprout Social centralizes feedback from all four sites.

Enterprise businesses can create multiple filtered views to triage and respond to reviews across channels. You can also report on reviews by volume and star rating from the Reports tab.

Social commerce: Shopify and WooCommerce

What is it? Social commerce—the buying and selling of goods and services within a social media platform—is creating brand new revenue opportunities for enterprise organizations.

To sell directly on social media, marketers typically must link their ecommerce platform to their enterprise social media management tool. Sprout integrates with two ecommerce platforms: Shopify and WooCommerce.

How does Sprout work with Shopify and WooCommerce? Marketers can set up their social commerce shops by integrating their preferred ecommerce platform with Sprout Social.

Once the platforms are connected, you can curate your shop by selecting which listings you’d like to promote on social. Listings can also be promoted in scheduled content using custom product links, turning social into your new storefront.

Enterprise social media management is your tech stack’s missing piece

Social data can do more than just connect the dots between strategy and ROI. When it’s used in collaboration with other enterprise tools, it can provide the insights needed to drive proactive decisions.

To put it simply: When you invest in social data, you invest in future-proofing your business for the road ahead.

Use Sprout Social to create clear links between your social strategy and business impact. Learn more about our enterprise-level social media management software today.

The post Enterprise social media: The tools your organization should use in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

If your product is a good fit to solve this problem, the battle is already halfway over. However, there are thousands of other products out there also trying to grab your audience’s attention and prove just the same.

A solid demand generation strategy helps your brand stand out from the crowd. This proactive marketing approach educates and engages your audience throughout their journey. It convinces them that your solution will solve their problems.

In this guide, we will show you how to create a demand generation strategy and example strategies that can help you engage the right people at the right time.

Table of contents:

• What is demand generation?
• What is a demand generation strategy?
• Elements of a successful demand generation strategy
• 3 demand generation strategy examples
• Demand generation vs. lead generation vs. inbound marketing
• Demand generation and data

What is demand generation?

Demand generation is a marketing strategy that uses education, content and brand storytelling to attract customers. It talks about a problem your target audience faces in their work or life and positions your product as the answer.

While demand generation is all about building engagement and trust, it’s not just an early-funnel marketing strategy. Demand generation can apply to touchpoints throughout the entire sales and conversion cycle. The goal is to build and nurture crucial customer relationships over the long term.

The bottom line is demand generation differs from other types of marketing because it is proactive. It shows potential customers that you understand their challenges—and you have a product to fix them.

What is demand generation strategy?

A demand generation strategy builds awareness or need for a product through customer education. It uses tactics like social media marketing to target an audience throughout their customer journey.

A successful demand generation strategy aims to identify and attract qualified leads (a.k.a. the people who are interested/need your product) into your marketing funnel. From there, you can build trust and ultimately—turn them into paying customers.

Elements of a successful demand generation strategy

A successful demand generation strategy has several moving parts, which vary depending on what content resonates with your target audience and the specific platforms they use.

Here are five elements your demand generation strategy should include.

1. Buyer persona development

If you try to sell to everyone—you end up selling to no one.

A core part of a demand generation strategy is to develop buyer personas, or ideal customer profiles (ICPs), to help target the right people. ICPs are fictitious personas, but they build a description of a person who needs your product based on age, job, industry and budget.

These personas paint a clear picture of:

• What problems/pain points your audience wants to solve
• Any solutions they are already weighing up (i.e. your competitors)
• What motivates this particular persona to buy a product
• What stage of the buying journey they are at

Check out this B2B buyer persona from Semrush.

It covers a (fictitious) customer’s pain points, buying influences and industry knowledge. It also shows the potential value they will get from the product. This can guide what to target in your next marketing campaign to help connect with potential customers who fit this buyer persona.

This strategy is easier with the right tools. Sprout’s Social Listening solutions add more context to your market research. For example, use the demographics report to track your target audience‘s age, gender and even what tech they are using to search for products.

This information enables you to craft more detailed content to match their persona.

2. Multi-channel approach

Multi-channel marketing is a must-have addition to your demand generation strategy. This strategy covers marketing channels like email, social media platforms and content distribution. It also works best when you show up in the places where your audience (actually) hangs out, and data can point you in the right direction.

Say you want to generate demand through your brand’s social media channels. With Sprout, run a Profile Performance Report to uncover what channels currently get the most traction and engagement.

Also get insight into your most engaged followers such as age, interests, professional title or industry. This will make it easier to create content that connects with their specific pain points.

3. Content quality and relevance

The secret sauce to generate demand is to focus on what your audience really needs help with. Talking in your audience’s language and addressing their pain points is more impactful than a strategy that targets generic needs.

Where you create and distribute content also matters. In 2023, 60% of B2B content marketers surveyed said social media was the most effective channel for driving revenue. At Sprout, we use a multi-channel social media approach to generate demand and brand awareness:

• Sprout’s YouTube channel has a library full of videos relevant to our target audience. Viewers can educate themselves about social media marketing by learning new tactics. They can also view annual predictions and learn new marketing hacks. Thanks to these tips, our audience starts to view Sprout as a trusted industry expert.
• We regularly post content to TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. Our presence on these platforms is crucial for brand awareness and telling our story to our core audience.
• We also created the Social Creatures podcast to amplify the stories of our favorite social media accounts. Each episode digs into the success of leading social media marketers and uncovers the tactics they use to grow their accounts.

This targeted content taps into our audience’s problems to generate demand. It’s this connection that helps us build trust.

4. Lead scoring and qualification

Every lead that drops into your marketing funnel is different. Using a lead scoring strategy narrows down which ones are most likely to become paying customers.

Maximizing your resources at this early stage means your team can spend more time nurturing high-quality leads and reducing dead ends.

So, how do you build a foolproof lead scoring strategy?

Start by digging into your attribution data. Figure out which marketing efforts lead to conversions throughout your funnel.

Then, ask your sales and marketing teams to decide what a “good” quality lead looks like in terms of buying signals. Use their suggestions to create a lead scoring model. Weigh actions, like registering for a webinar, against real conversions in your marketing and sales funnels.

Here’s an example.

When a lead reaches a certain score, it signals to your marketing or sales team that it’s worth pursuing.

5. Data-driven decision making

Data-driven marketing helps tailor your demand generation strategy to fit your target audience. For example, a marketing team running a new social media campaign can dig into the performance data throughout the campaign to see what’s working best.

By analyzing this data, the marketing team can make timely optimizations and improve outcomes. This is also a smart way to increase return on ad spend (ROAS) instead of waiting to study it postmortem.

Sprout Social enables you to track engagement, sentiment and impressions to show you what resonates with your audience. It also weighs each demand generation campaign against your competitors. This helps you see what content your target audience is engaging with to help you stay competitive and make better decisions.

3 demand generation strategy examples

Demand generation is cemented in building trust with a target audience. It aims to educate prospects and promote your product as the best way to address a need. This proactive marketing approach is what makes demand generation so impactful.

Here are three strategies to use for demand generation:

1. Account-based marketing (ABM)

ABM is a demand generation strategy used to build relationships with high-value prospects. An ABM Leadership Alliance survey covering over 300 B2B marketers showed 93% used an ABM strategy to bring customers into their funnel.

For ABM to be effective, look at your data and build out a list of potential target accounts. If their attributes match one of your existing buyer personas—add them to your target list.

This is how DocuSign used an ABM-focused campaign to target 450 enterprise prospects. It targeted six internal buyer personas using unique advertisements and landing pages to speak specifically to that audience.

The strategy was effective because:

• Each ad contained personalized messages for target accounts based on their stage in their buying process.
• DocuSign knew every ICP had different problems to solve. It created personalized content, case studies and testimonials to tap into their pain points.

DocuSign then used personalized ads to drive each key account to a customized landing page.

Just three months after launching the campaign, DocuSign improved engagement by 59%. Page views also increased by 300%, and 18% of the target account list had at least one secured opportunity.

2. Target each stage of your content funnel differently

The best way to demonstrate the value of a solution is through content. Eighty-one percent of buyers surveyed in Demand Gen Report’s latest B2B Buyer Survey said content had a significant impact on their buying decisions.

For content to influence a potential customer, it must meet them where they are at in their buying journey. Let’s break down what a typical journey looks like:

• Top of Funnel (TOFU): This is the awareness stage of the funnel. A potential customer is learning about what your brand does and broadly what problems your product solves.
• Middle of Funnel (MOFU): This is the consideration stage. The potential customer knows what their problem is, and they are looking for a product to solve it. They’re aware of your product, but you need to earn their trust first.
• Bottom of Funnel (BOFU): This is the decision stage. It’s your chance to win the potential customer over and convince them your product will be a good fit.

At each stage, the content a potential customer consumes must reflect where they are in the funnel and their awareness of you.

Let’s walk through a (very simple) example of how you can do this.

Imagine a potential customer who is just starting to research your marketing tools. They probably don’t want to read about why your brand is the best platform on the market. But, a guide on a topic like “how to use automation tools” can teach them how a product like yours can improve their marketing efforts.

Now, let’s look at how this works in more detail.

A TOFU piece of content in the marketing funnel will target general marketing topics to educate our audience. For example, we have detailed guides on how to build a social media marketing strategy or improve social media engagement. We wrote these posts to help our target audience become better social media marketers—nothing more.

Once they know who you are, they move to the middle of the marketing funnel. At this point, you may use more product-oriented guides to convince them that your marketing tool is a good investment. Then, if they make it further down the funnel, BOFU content is used. This content is for potential customers who know they need a solution but are weighing up their options.

At this stage, you’re looking to convince them to engage with you, or raise their hand to learn more about what you specifically offer.

Building out a successful content machine takes a lot of work. But, your strategy will get a lot more traction if each content piece targets your audience with what they need, where they need it and when.

3. Use social media for your B2B demand generation strategy

Our 2023 State of Social Media report found seven in 10 leaders agree that social media is underutilized within their organization. Ninety-seven percent of business leaders we talked to believe the use of social data to understand market trends will increase in the coming years.

Like the other strategies on our list, each social media platform requires a different approach. LinkedIn is the perfect place to write longer thought-leadership content. On the other hand, X (formerly known as Twitter) is great for engaging with other business influencers and customers.

One thing is for sure—B2B buyers don’t just hang out on LinkedIn. According to The Sprout Social Index, 68% of customers follow a brand on social to stay informed about new products or services. While 51% of consumers also said responding is the most memorable action a brand takes on social media.

Even brands built on the backs of traditional channels like SEO know the power social media can bring to demand generation.

Ahrefs Chief Marketing Officer, Tim Soulo, uses his social channels to chat with thousands of fellow marketers. He starts LinkedIn conversations around trends like AI to keep followers engaged.

This thought leadership approach to social media shows the power of the platforms to increase brand awareness. It’s also a great reminder that platforms like LinkedIn can build an incredible amount of trust with your target audience.

Demand generation vs. lead generation vs. inbound marketing

Demand generation differs from lead generation in a few ways. Lead generation applies when your audience is actively seeking out different services or products to address a need. The main goal of a lead generation campaign therefore is to obtain a prospect’s information so you can nurture the relationship through the marketing funnel, ultimately selling them your product or service. This differs from demand generation, as its main goal is to increase brand awareness.

Inbound marketing is when your audience seeks out information for a problem that they are trying to solve and organically comes across your brand as a potential solution. If you are regularly creating content, then your lead generation most likely comes through this source. Inbound marketing is less disruptive than outbound strategies, and therefore often results in higher-quality prospects.

Inbound marketing and lead generation complement each other. When you create content that aims to solve a common problem, your brand attracts inbound leads. This is because your audience is already aware of the problem and is actively seeking out solutions. In contrast, demand generation is about you trying to reach audiences that don’t yet know your product or service has benefits to offer them.

Demand generation and data

Demand generation relies on your ability to understand consumer needs. And data is a vital tool for figuring that out. For example, use data to measure if your marketing content and efforts resonate with your audience, or understand how to best reach your audience. Continuous testing, analysis and data collection are crucial for your demand generation efforts to succeed.

There are several key parts of demand generation can you can track.

Metrics throughout the funnel

• Marketing qualified leads (MQLs): This metric represents someone who has taken a step like filling in a contact form or signing up for a free trial. These actions signal people are interested in your product. It’s important to track MQLs so you know what stage of the marketing funnel visitors are turning into potential customers.
• Attribution: This tracks which touchpoints a visitor has hit to become a customer. It will track their engagement with your website or other channels, what pages they visit or if they fill out a form. Attribution tracks how someone turns from a visitor into a paying customer.
• Engagement: Track what level of engagement each post is getting on your social channels. Engagement metrics like shares, comments, likes and impressions show what content resonates best with your target audience.

Account-based marketing metrics

• Total addressable market (TAM): This calculates the total revenue opportunity available for a product or service within your market.
• Conversions: This metric tracks how many accounts your ABM strategy successfully converted. Take the number of accounts your team was targeting and divide it by those who turned into paying customers.

Predictive data

• Customer lifetime value (CLV): A prediction based on historical data of the total amount a customer will likely spend during their relationship with your brand. A high CLV is a good indication the customer has a solid product-market fit and loyalty to your brand.
• Churn probability: This metric calculates the probability that a customer/user will stop using your product or service. Predicting churn probability can fuel a proactive approach and give your brand a chance to re-engage customers before they leave.

Using the right tool can give you an accurate picture of your demand generation strategy’s performance in real-time. Tools like Sprout Social gather customer insights to determine what they think about you and your competitors, their interests and pain points, what kind of content they appreciate most, which social channels you should connect with them on and more.

Use demand generation to turn strangers into customers

A demand generation strategy hinges on understanding your audience, their problems and how your solution can help. While it begins at your customer’s first touchpoint, social media now plays a huge part in any demand generation strategy. If marketers can engage their target audience on social and build trust early, more leads will flow into their marketing funnel.

Keep the strategy simple: show up on your customer’s preferred social channels, target your audience with engaging content and most importantly—pitch your product as a problem solver.

For a more in-depth look at how to set up a social media funnel that complements your demand generation strategy, check out our post on building a successful social media marketing funnel.

The post Executing a successful demand generation strategy [with examples] appeared first on Sprout Social.

Between their highly engaged audiences, content quality and the social proof they bring, influencers offer brands something they can’t get from other marketing channels—pure authenticity. When you optimize your influencer marketing spend, you get more out of your marketing budget.

Of course, you can’t optimize before you organize, which is why we created this handy influencer marketing budget template. It will help you:

• Maintain a birds-eye view of your budget so you can strategically allocate resources toward the right high-value partnerships
• Control costs by setting clear spending limits and guidelines for various points of contact across your team
• Head into contract negotiations with a firm grasp of your financial boundaries and opportunities

Download the influencer marketing budget template to start planning your next activation.

The post An Influencer Marketing Budget Template Designed to Drive Efficiency appeared first on Sprout Social.

So why do so many marketing leaders continue to think of customer care as something that is “another department’s problem?” Marketing and care are two halves of the same whole. Do you care about your brand image? Do you care about overall customer sentiment about your company? Dive deep into your company’s NPS score, and the drivers behind it, and you’ll understand exactly what I’m talking about.

The continued and rapid evolution of social media—a channel typically owned by marketing—from an “amplification” touchpoint to a preferred destination for customers seeking support is forcing marketing leaders to play a larger role in their brand’s customer service strategies. Social media has already become essential to brand and consumer relationships; social customer care is now also becoming a bigger piece of the brand experience.

Brands that recognize this—and answer the call with faster, personalized care—are outshining the competition, both in individual interactions and at scale. Let’s take a deeper look at this.

Rethinking the customer journey

Many CMOs orient their team’s strategy around an “ideal” customer journey: Awareness, consideration, purchase. Many other CMOs are also thinking about how customer onboarding, adoption and retention come into play.

How do you deal with bumps in the road during a trial or after a purchase? When product questions, technical problems and missing orders inevitably bubble up, your customers will need to connect with you. And whether or not you show up for them on their channels of choice will influence their overall experience with your brand.

Traditionally, businesses provided customer service on their terms. We all know the feeling of being stuck on hold as the thousandth person in the queue. Or repeating your situation to multiple service reps. Slow, antiquated and frustrating means of communication became the norm for customers.

The old ways aren’t tolerated anymore. According to The Sprout Social Index™, 76% of consumers notice and appreciate when companies prioritize customer support on social, and an additional 76% value how quickly a brand can respond to their needs.

Your customers expect that you will provide fast, quality care on social media—and if you don’t, their loyalty is up for grabs.

The right social customer service interactions can help your customers love you even more…or quickly get them to research alternatives. They touch everyone from people who have never heard of your brand or bought from you, to existing customers and brand advocates. When marketing leaders make customer care a priority in the customer journey, everybody wins.

Building a world-class brand is everyone’s responsibility

Consumers are still price sensitive, audience demographics are in flux and customer needs are evolving at a rapid pace. One bad experience can cost you a customer for life. And when it happens on a public forum like social media, the outcome can be catastrophic.

(It’s a fun time to be a marketer, right?)

The Sprout Social Index™ revealed that 8% of service teams and 16% of marketing teams exclusively own social media customer care. Everyone else was somewhere in the middle. The majority of brands agree both teams must work in harmony to deliver best-in-class service.

When social marketers alone manage social care, it can take several hours (or even days) for customers to be passed to the right service rep or get their questions answered. And when the service team is responsible for all social customer care, they can miss opportunities for positive engagement (in favor of dealing with complaints and escalations) and fail to pass on relevant customer insights.

When marketing and service teams work as partners, service agents can jump in immediately to resolve customer complaints. And social marketers can focus on crafting content, community engagement and interpreting customer data from service team interactions to make better decisions. This kind of collaboration requires both teams have compatible tools and adequate resources.

Collaboration should be more than a handoff

Many service professionals are dissatisfied with their existing tech stacks, and find it challenging to coordinate efforts with other teams. One-off DMs, long email chains and mismatched tools are to blame.

According to Q3 2023 Sprout Social Pulse Survey data, only 25% of customer care professionals rate their teams’ responses to customers on social as excellent, and only 32% are very confident in their team’s ability to handle a sudden influx of customer inquiries on social.

When reflecting on these numbers, alarm bells should sound.

Most care teams are working with piecemeal tech, leaving them underprepared and vital customer intelligence lost in limbo. This is especially concerning when it comes to social. Social is where care and marketing work most closely, and it’s a direct portal to understanding your brand performance, audience and industry. Decentralized, incompatible tools can add up to major opportunity costs.

Without shared tech to tap into social insights, care and marketing teams struggle to increase brand affinity. Almost all (94%) of business leaders agree social media data and insights help build brand reputation and loyalty. Another 88% agree social data is a critical tool in providing customer care.

As the lines between marketing and customer service blur, marketing leaders need to do more than master the handoff of tasks and tickets between their teams. They need to truly work in tandem to shift brand perception—finding processes and tools that increase productivity and surface strategic knowledge.

Customer care gives you a competitive edge

When companies master customer service and marketing collaboration, they create the brand experience audiences are looking for. What marketer out there doesn’t want to be the best of the best?

According to the Index, consumers think the most memorable thing brands can do on social is respond to them. One-on-one engagement trumps publishing volume and jumping on trends. Rather than spamming their followers’ feeds with content, savvy brands prioritize responding to customers and use those interactions to amplify their brand values. Customer care and community engagement tactics have become a content strategy in their own right.

Customer care, and everything it entails (i.e., engaging with comments and questions, review management, personalization, cross-channel support), is the critical piece of the brand perception equation. With the right social data and technology, brands can integrate care into the mix and turn it into a true competitive advantage and revenue driver.

Take Casey’s, the fifth largest pizza chain in the US. The company consistently prioritizes responding to and delighting their customers on social, and has built an impressive care-as-content strategy. They’re quick to respond to customers in their signature empathetic and friendly tone, while addressing unique needs and pain points.

As another example, Patagonia, the outdoor retailer known for its authenticity and community, has a world-renowned brand reputation. Just like the helpfulness they’re known for in-store, the company provides stellar care on social. The people behind their customer care team are quick to jump in with outdoor expertise and information about their repair program and return policy.

This level of orchestration only happens when marketing and customer service teams are in lock step.

Positive brand perception hinges on quality customer care

Customer service and marketing teams must be more aligned than ever before.

But CMOs and marketing leaders can’t let incompatible tech stacks and departmental silos define the customer experience. To truly deliver an amazing customer experience across the funnel, you must work with your customer service team to forge new processes, invest in the right resources and unite your teams in an unprecedented way.

Looking for more on the evolving customer care landscape, and how you can guide your company with an innovative strategy? Read about how Social Customer Care by Sprout Social fosters collaboration, enriches customer experiences and synthesizes customer data.

The post Marketing leaders: If you’re not hyper-focused on customer care, you’re setting your org up to fail appeared first on Sprout Social.

Competitor mapping is the cornerstone of competitive analysis. By visualizing opportunities, businesses can make strategic decisions when launching a new product/service or new social media marketing strategy. In this guide, we’ll walk through some of the benefits of competitor mapping and how to create your map.

What is competitor mapping?

Competitor mapping is the process of identifying competitors and analyzing their market position to visualize the overall competitive landscape. Competitor mapping involves using competitive benchmark data to help you make decisions about the business, and gain intelligence about your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.

To help visualize your competitive analysis, competitor maps contextualize your research and competitive data, enabling you to make informed business decisions. For example, monitoring competitive benchmark data can help you set realistic goals and metrics.

The benefits of competitor mapping

There are many competitor analysis tools out there—which is a testament to the benefits of competitor mapping. Competitive data unveils advantages and opportunities for your business by analyzing your competitors’ products, marketing strategy and social media. Examining your industry peers will help you better understand your customers’ needs and brand perception. There are more benefits to competitor mapping, but let’s walk through some of our favorites: competitive product analysis, marketing competitive analysis and social media analysis.

Competitive product analysis

Through competitive product analysis you can build a stronger product. Comparing your product to your competition highlights areas to improve whether it’s adding additional features or using better quality materials.

Marketing competitive analysis

Through marketing competitor analysis, you can pinpoint iterations for your marketing strategy. For example, you can determine how to optimize product placement by looking at how your competitors position their products through messaging, branding and packaging. This type of analysis can help you discover how your brand can differentiate itself through marketing.

Social media competitive analysis

Social media competitive analysis is another key benefit of competitor mapping. Through tools like Sprout Social you can use social listening to help identify conversations involving your competitors and what your audiences are talking about. With Sprout, you can also conduct sentiment analysis to compare how people feel about your brand vs. your competitors.

How to create a competitor map

Analyze and visualize your brand’s competitive intelligence with these steps:

1. Identify your competitors

Consider all of your competitors. This includes your direct, indirect and emerging competitors.

Direct competitors offer similar products and/or services as your business. Indirect competitors target the same market or customer segment, but offer a different product or service. For example, cable and streaming services are indirect competitors because they both offer film and TV shows. SEO competitors—businesses that outrank you in search engine results—can also be indirect competitors. Emerging competitors are companies that just entered the market and have the potential to disrupt the industry.

You can also consider replacement competitors. Replacement competitors offer products or services that fulfill a similar need or problem. For example, a bowling alley and roller rink may be replacement competitors because they both offer family-friendly entertainment.

Once you consider all of your competitors, select about four to 10 businesses. Review their websites, social media and overall online presence to discover more about their product, target audiences and marketing strategies.

2. Select a focus area

Identify focus areas such as product range, pricing or other variables to niche your research down and concentrate on the most relevant things to analyze. For example, if you wanted to create a competitor map for social media, you would take an in-depth look at your competitors’ profiles, from monitoring their engagement and most active channels to their overall content strategy. To help you get started, think about which areas you want to analyze deeper based on your goals. For example, if your brand is launching a new product, one focus area could be price.

3. Write a list of your strengths and improvement areas

List out your brand’s strengths and weaknesses. Consider brand perception in comparison to your competitors. What do people think about each brand and product? After considering strong and weaker areas, brainstorm a list of solutions or gaps to fill.

4. Create a competitor map

After all of your data is collected, you can create your competitor map. A competitor map can be visualized in a variety of formats such as comparison charts, pie charts, scatter graphs and bubble maps. You can create these through design platforms like Canva, but there are also tools like Sprout that can automate visuals as well.

For example with Sprout’s Competitive Analysis Listening tool, you can view and export a side-by-side competitor comparison of key performance metrics across social, including share of voice, engagement, sentiment and impressions.

If you want to track and compare your competitors’ social media profiles, Sprout’s Competitor Performance Report shows analytics across major networks like Instagram, Facebook and X (formerly known as Twitter).

Examples of competitor mapping

As you execute competitive monitoring, you may discover you want to visualize the information differently based on your findings. Here are some examples of competitor maps to get you inspired.

SWOT analysis

A SWOT analysis chart is a classic example of a competitor map. It enables you to simply organize your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, making it easier to understand the insights and compare them directly against yours.

For instance, in the example below, high engagement and social following are listed as strengths while not publishing as frequently as competitors is listed as a weakness. Also notice how in the “Opportunities” section, the brand has a chance to target a male audience better since they make up 20% of their market’s audience. And lastly, things out of their control like algorithm changes causing dips in performance is listed as a threat.

Comparison table

A comparison table is a traditional method for mapping. It involves making a list of factors and scoring each attribute per competitor. In the example below, quality, price, customer service and SEO rank are included as attributes. When using comparison tables, you can use numbers, stars or another system to indicate score.

Create a solid foundation of competitor analysis

Remember that competitive analysis is like preparing to face an opposing team. You need to study their strengths, weaknesses and behaviors to help identify opportunities for stronger plays that boost your competitive edge. If you haven’t already, consider signing up for a free Sprout trial and get started on finding the white space for your brand to fill in.

The post Competitor mapping: The benefits and how to create your own appeared first on Sprout Social.

We’ll walk you through the process.

• What is B2B content marketing?
• Why is content marketing important to B2B?
• Best practices for a B2B content marketing strategy
• Types of B2B content
• 4 B2B content marketing examples to inspire you
• Next steps for B2B content marketing

What is B2B content marketing?

B2B content marketing is the practice of using content to promote your product or services to a business audience. It involves producing high-quality content that appeals to and/or addresses major pain points of B2B consumers. This may be in the form of blog posts, infographics, case studies, white papers, tutorials and educational videos among many others.

Additionally, B2B content marketing requires strategically distributing content to reach your target audience. It goes hand in hand with your social media content strategy where you share links and visuals to attract the right people. Email, organic search and paid ads are other popular distribution channels included in a B2B content marketing strategy.

Why is content marketing important to B2B?

Content marketing helps B2B companies educate and inform their target audiences. It enables you to share in-depth information even without the need for one-to-one communication. As such, it’s highly effective for showcasing your expertise and establishing authority in the field. This has several benefits, with the main ones being:

High ROI for a low-cost channel

Content marketing is a relatively low-cost channel. You’ll spend money on labor and tools for content creation and publishing. But those costs are relatively low compared to the potential returns. Unless you’re investing in paid ads, most of the publishing and distribution channels don’t cost extra. So the returns are substantial in comparison to the investments.

Content has a long lifespan

Add to the fact that content marketing continues to pay off even in the long run, it’s worth the initial investment. You can continue to reap benefits for months or years after publishing content. This is particularly true for evergreen topics that see consistent interest over time.

Best practices for a B2B content marketing strategy

When coming up with a content marketing plan for your B2B company, the following best practices can improve your chances of success. Below are six best practices we’ve identified for a successful content marketing strategy

1. Identify your B2B content goals

Start with a clear understanding of how content should contribute to larger business goals. Do you want to use it to raise awareness? Do you want to generate leads? How are you going to measure these goals?

Identifying and defining these goals will help you shape the rest of your content marketing strategy. For instance, if your goal is lead generation, you’ll want to focus on lead magnets such as white papers and industry reports.

When you know your content goals, it’s easier to identify the KPIs needed for measuring the efficacy of your strategy. In the above example, you can use KPIs like number of leads generated and number of email signups to measure content marketing success.

2. Research your target audience and identify their needs

The purpose of content marketing is to create content that appeals to your target audience and addresses their pain points. So a crucial step is to get a better understanding of what makes your audience tick. What are their needs and challenges? How can your content address them? And how can you provide solutions to their needs?

Semrush’s State of Content Marketing 2023 report even found that audience research is a leading factor for content marketing success. Forty-seven percent of respondents attributed their success to researching their audience.

Source: Semrush

Keep in mind that you may have multiple audiences for your product, and not everyone will share the same needs. For example, the same design tool will serve different purposes to different groups of users. While one uses it to create original social media visuals, another may use it to create captivating newsletters. Naturally, these two users may have similar but not exactly the same needs.

Create different buyer personas according to shared characteristics. This will help you develop various types of content to effectively address the unique pain points of different audiences. Download our buyer persona template to get started with this step.

3. Conduct competitive analysis

A competitive analysis gives you a better idea of what’s working and what’s not. What are your competitors creating and what are they missing? Check out their top-performing content and compare them against yours. If something is working for your competitors but you can do it better, by all means, go after it. Similarly, check out their poorly performing pieces to figure out how to improve on them.

Use a competitor analysis tool to dig deeper into your competitors’ content strategy. For example, Ahrefs Site Explorer helps you explore your competitor’s backlink profile, so you can identify the types of content that are getting links from reputable sites.

Source: Ahrefs

4. Create content for all stages of the marketing funnel

Since the B2B buying journey is much longer, you need content to engage buyers at every stage of the marketing funnel. People will have different needs and concerns based on where they are in the funnel.

• Top of funnel (Awareness) – This is where people start to learn about your business and its products or service offerings. Social media posts, blog posts, guest blog posts, infographics and podcasts are some examples of ToFu content.
• Middle of funnel (Consideration) – At this stage, people are starting to consider your product or service as an option. Ebooks, webinars, product feature pages, product comparisons and live video are some examples of MoFu content.
• Bottom of funnel (Decision) – This is where they finally decide on a solution and convert into buyers. Customer case studies, pitch decks, proposals and website pricing pages are some examples of BoFu content.

5. Explore content distribution and promotion

A B2B content marketing strategy is only as effective as its distribution strategy. It’s not enough to just create great content. What matters is how you distribute it to the right people through the right channels.

As briefly mentioned earlier, social media is one of the most popular distribution channels. Many successful B2B marketers even go beyond organic social and invest in paid social to promote their content. In the Semrush survey from earlier, 49% of very successful content marketers used paid social for promoting content.

Source: Semrush

Paid channels, in general, are highly popular among the most successful content marketers. Additionally, influencer marketing and email marketing are other popular ways of promoting content.

6. Measure performance and results

Finally, keep track of your content marketing efforts to see how they’re paying off. Experiment with different content types and promotion strategies to understand what’s working. See which distribution channels yield high-value leads and shift your focus on them. Use these performance insights to pivot and continuously optimize your strategy.

Types of B2B content

Let’s take a look at the various content types that you can use for your B2B content marketing strategies.

Blog posts

A blog post is a written article published in the blog section of your company’s website. Blog posts can rest in the awareness stage (or top of the funnel) but since content can be created about anything, blog posts can fall in other stages too. When using it in the awareness stage, the post should be educational in tone with very little to no call to action.

However, as the blog topics become more complex or detailed, the call to actions become more directly related to the marketing funnel, such as downloading a guide or accessing a trial.

Case studies

Used most often in the decision stage, case studies take an in-depth look at one of your customers. They follow a common format of presenting an issue at hand and then details of how your business helped them solve the issue. These days, case studies are readily available on the business’ website. Featured businesses represent your various target audiences, and the reader can easily identify themselves in at least one of the case studies.

Sprout Social’s software covers many industries and businesses of various sizes. There are also features that some businesses might not realize are useful to them. Our case studies page highlights different businesses and references Sprout’s features to explore the use case. Along with that, we include real numbers to demonstrate the ROI of the software.

Source: Sprout Social

White papers or industry reports

A white paper is a downloadable piece of content that serves up knowledge that your business specializes in. An industry report summarizes a survey or study that your business executed and relates it to the industry you’re in.

These fall into the same group because they help convey a business’ expertise on a topic. They require research and analysis before disseminating information in a meaningful way to users. They are most popular in the consideration stage because they provide strategic insights or show how a business helps brands realize success in these areas.

Sprout regularly produces data reports to help our audience understand the industry better.

Source: Sprout Social

Infographic

Infographics are useful for delivering dense information in simple, graphical layouts. This makes them ideal for use at the awareness stage.

Infographics often take existing data in your business to make them digestible in a visual format, appropriate for sharing on social media, to prospects or to industry publishers. When using infographics in the awareness stage, you want to serve general information that your audience wants to know. Infographics don’t always necessarily mean flowcharts either, they can be any data shared as a visual collection.

Podcasts

Podcasts are digital audio content typically presented in a series of episodes. You can distribute them through channels like Spotify and Apple Podcasts or even host them on your website. They can feature a single speaker, a panel of speakers or even as an interview format. This makes them perfect for presenting in-depth information in a conversational tone.

At Sprout, we created the Social Creatures podcast with episodes focusing on our favorite social media accounts. Each episode explores the secrets to the account’s success through a conversation with the business’ social media or marketing manager or executive.

Source: Sprout Social

Educational videos

With their audio-visual nature, videos are an engaging way to present huge volumes of information. In fact, 45% of marketers in the Semrush survey agree that videos are the top-performing content format. Create educational videos highlighting key industry insights and tips that will be of value to your audience. These can prove to be valuable to audiences in the awareness and consideration stages.

Sprout’s YouTube channel houses videos on topics relevant to our audience. From Instagram marketing hacks to annual predictions – there’s a lot that our viewers can learn from these videos. As with static social media content, test what works on video too: long-form, short-form or bite-sized content.

Source: YouTube

Testimonials

Testimonials are customer statements describing how your business has addressed a major challenge. It serves as social proof to help convince the reader to make a decision. Depending on the details, testimonials can be effective at every stage of the funnel.

Testimonials can either be in video or text format. Video testimonials are an effective way to humanize the client and add authenticity to the story. With text-based testimonials, including the person’s photo for each testimonial to humanize the story.

Here’s how Ninja Promo highlights testimonials on the homepage.

Source: Ninja Promo

Tutorials

Once you’ve got businesses interested or even onboarded, the process doesn’t stop there. You’ll need to help users take full advantage of everything you have to offer. Tutorials are crucial in the retention stage, helping the customer through setup and beyond.

4 B2B content marketing examples to inspire you

Need more ideas to inspire your content strategy? Check out these B2B content marketing examples to give you a jump-start.

Sprout Social

Of course, we may be a little biased, but our content marketing strategy is first-rate. From in-depth blog posts on trending topics to educational webinars – we share a wealth of information for our target audiences. Our case studies showcase the difference that Sprout can make to business’ social strategies and bottom lines. And we regularly host podcast episodes where we share the secrets to social media success for various industries.

Source: Sprout Social

On top of this, our data reports are among the most notable and popularly cited in the industry. These reports provide actionable data that guide business decisions and back up claims.

Even more, we produce downloadable templates so you can instantly get started with our tips and advice. Check out this free B2B content plan worksheet, for example.

Canva

Canva isn’t just a great tool; it also boasts a solid B2B content marketing strategy to support its business users. The brand regularly shares actionable bite-sized tips in a visual format to engage its social media followers. Beyond this, the team produces excellent resources to ramp up your brand’s design efforts.

This includes blog posts and online courses as well as a Design Circle community to connect with like-minded individuals. You can even download marketing toolkits and templates for your branding and design strategy.

Source: Canva

Roots Marketing Agency

Roots is a woman-led digital marketing agency with an exceptional Instagram content strategy. The team demonstrates their flair for social media by creating visually engaging Reels and image posts. They share a mix of industry insights, ideas, tips and client testimonials to showcase their expertise.

Source: Instagram

The Goat Agency

In another agency example, The Goat Agency nails its LinkedIn content strategy. The team regularly shares insights on the most in-the-moment topics and news related to the industry.

For example, the team shared a post about the 2024 Instagram Trend Talk soon after its release. They provided the insights as an infographic slideshow on LinkedIn. Similarly, the agency quickly provided insights about Twitch’s exit from South Korea after the announcement.

This type of news-worthy content helps the team prove that they know the industry inside and out, establishing trust with the audience.

Source: LinkedIn

Next steps for B2B content marketing

The above best practices should set you up for successful B2B content marketing. After you’ve decided which content types align with your strategy and goals, the next moves are to execute and promote the content. Of course, you’ll want to know how your fresh content is performing, which is why you should look at your social media data to guide your analysis.

Before all that, check out our 2023 Content Benchmarks Report to understand industry trends and challenges.

The post B2B content marketing: Ultimate strategy guide for 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

The fast-paced nature of digital marketing, especially social media, complicates zeroing in on marketing priorities. Emerging technologies are evolving quickly, customer expectations are steadily increasing and the pressure to prove the ROI of your efforts is intensifying. Plus, leaders are being asked to do more with less budget.

To help you identify your most strategic focus areas, we’ve curated a list of the six most pressing marketing priorities you should have on your radar in 2024.

Embed AI into team rituals and processes

In 2023, democratized access to AI models forever changed social media marketing. More than 80% of marketers say AI already has a positive impact on their work. Despite high usage rates, a lot of ambiguity surrounds AI. As The 2023 State of Social Media Report highlights, 98% of leaders acknowledge they need to better understand the long-term potential of AI. Another 37% of executives say they have limited organizational experience working with AI, making it clear that the current skill sets of most workplaces aren’t adequately prepared for a large-scale, AI-powered corporate future.

2024 will usher in a new chapter, where AI-powered data analysis, copywriting, graphic design, social media management and customer care tools become the new standard. Businesses that make the shift to AI-driven processes will have a clear competitive advantage, so leaders can no longer afford to wait and see. It’s your responsibility to prepare your team for the future and invest in AI processes that count.

What does an AI-powered way of working look like? According to Aaron Rankin, CTO of Sprout Social, “AI will serve as an exoskeleton, a layer that enhances your existing strengths, or be a virtual assistant who shields you from tedious tasks—preserving your time and energy to focus on truly creative work. As AI tools evolve and become more intuitive, business leaders need to identify how their workforce and existing systems need to adapt for AI to be successfully onboarded.”

Yet, AI still isn’t something you ​​should rush into. It has critical flaws, like perpetuating biases and hallucinating information. You need human intervention in your processes, both internally and externally, to reap the benefits of AI and protect your brand. If you don’t already have an AI use policy in place, now is the time to implement one.

Considerations: Start by giving your team space to experiment and find ways to use AI to complement their work. Observe the results, and ask what your executive and senior leadership teams are doing to champion the widespread use of AI technology. Then, invest in the most durable, impactful tools that empower your team to create more space for creativity and set your company up for the long haul.

Read more about how CMOs are leading their teams into the AI frontier.

Perfect the marketing and customer service handoff to strengthen social customer care

It used to be that whoever owned the keys to a brand’s social channels was responsible for effectively addressing customer inquiries, concerns and feedback. Social media managers would attempt to juggle their own marketing priorities while also serving as the liaison between consumers and service teams. This left social teams overtaxed, and resulted in a lackluster experience across the customer journey. As social evolves, social customer care has to move from an ancillary duty to a business-wide priority.

According to the Index, only a quarter of businesses say social customer care will be exclusively owned by marketing in the future. Marketing and service teams working in harmony is the future of customer care. Service agents shouldn’t have to wait for social marketers to triage messages in order to resolve customer complaints. Likewise, social marketers should focus more effort on activities that best harness their expertise instead of chasing down answers that could be easily addressed by the service team. But for shared ownership to be productive rather than chaotic, everyone who touches social customer care needs to be on the same playing field. And that takes thoughtful coordination.

As Ryan Barretto, President of Sprout Social, put it, “Expecting one team, or one person, to manage every online consumer interaction sets your brand up for failure and ignores how customers actually want to engage. But coordinating stakeholders across multiple departments to align on one cohesive customer care strategy presents its own set of challenges. The more players you have contributing to social customer care, the more essential it becomes to have a sophisticated playbook that keeps everyone in sync.”

To meet (and exceed) increasing customer expectations for high quality and efficient service, 96% of leaders plan to integrate social data into their CRM system in the next three years, according to the Index.

Considerations: To scale customer care efforts, you need the right tools and workflows in place. Everyone needs to be able to access and act on the right information without relying on others. It’s the path toward increased efficiency, stronger risk management and top-line growth. Ask yourself: Does social customer care have clear ownership within your organization today? Do your tools and processes support a steady flow of communication and data between teams?

Balance brand and performance marketing

Today’s uncertain economic climate is leading some brands to pull back on their brand marketing investments. But a laser focus on performance marketing can hurt your business long-term and impair future growth. According to The State of Social Media Report, 66% of business leaders say increasing brand reputation and loyalty is a top priority. Another 56% of executives say telling a compelling brand story and weaving together a cohesive identity gives their brand a competitive advantage.

Failing to make equal investments in brand and performance marketing can tip the scales against you, making customer interactions seem one-sided and strictly transactional. Consumers are savvier than ever—they can tell when brands only see them as dollar signs and aren’t afraid to switch their loyalties.

Faced with higher customer expectations, dwindling customer loyalty and stiffer competition, executives need to place as much emphasis on investing in brand marketing as they do with its performance-based counterpart. In financial terms, the brands that demonstrate they truly get their audience and create value in consumers’ lives are nearly five times more likely to outperform the brands that don’t on customer lifetime value.

Considerations: Rethink how brand marketing efforts—like awareness and loyalty—are quantified, or risk those efforts being panned and abandoned. Nurture your relationship with your CFO and senior leadership team, and learn to discuss social media marketing priorities in their language so you can contextualize your brand-building efforts. How do your brand marketing efforts contribute to revenue and the bottom line?

Get your business intelligence house in order

Google is moving forward with plans to deprecate third-party cookies, significantly restricting the kind of user-behavior data marketers have access to to inform their ad campaigns. That’s not to suggest that limited user data will spell the death of performance marketing. But it’s safe to say these tactics won’t generate the same type of measurable returns as they once did, and there will be gaps in marketers’ customer knowledge.

This puts even more pressure on brands to invest in processes and tools that collect and centralize accurate first-party data from all digital and non-digital touchpoints. By following data collection best practices—like refining targeting and attribution, and keeping your data current, you can turn raw data into actionable marketing business intelligence (BI).

Considerations: Marketing BI exists across the customer lifecycle—from the first time someone comments on a post to the last time they make a purchase—underscoring the importance of streamlined data storage. When selecting tools and creating new processes for collecting marketing BI, first ask yourself: What is my end goal? Then, evaluate tools for user-friendliness, ease of integration with your existing tech stack and ability to contextualize BI insights from different sources in one place.

Elevate influencer marketing efforts for stronger ROI

According to a Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey, social marketers rate influencer marketing as having a significant impact on their efforts, including brand awareness, brand reputation and customer loyalty. Another 81% of social marketers describe influencer marketing as an essential part of their social media strategy, with 79% describing it as essential to their customers’ experiences.

Despite this, only 34% of marketers have a dedicated budget for influencer marketing, and nearly half of social marketers say measuring the effectiveness of campaigns is one of their top influencer marketing challenges that prevents them from maximizing their efforts.

Peter Kennedy, Founder and General Manager, Influencer Marketing for Tagger by Sprout Social, explained why influencer marketing ROI can be a challenge to quantify. In our recent LinkedIn influencer marketing roundtable, Kennedy said, “When you start to use influencer content across the entire journey, sales are definitely part of [your results]. But what’s the ROI of the awareness and consideration you’re building?”

Calculating influencer marketing ROI is a critical proxy for gauging effectiveness, not to mention a jumping off point for future budget asks. But it’s important to remember influencer marketing drives returns across the customer journey. Two-thirds of social marketers use social media engagements (e.g., likes, shares and comments) to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. Social engagement data as well as conversion rates (e.g., sales, sign-ups and downloads) are the two most important metrics to secure internal buy-in for influencer marketing.

Considerations: Kennedy went on to emphasize that influencer content often fuels higher engagement than branded content. But in order to achieve success, it’s essential to identify the right influencers, and align your influencer marketing efforts with appropriate business goals. Just because someone has millions of followers, doesn’t mean they will effectively reach your audience.

Realign team structures for maximum business impact

Sharing social data beyond the marketing department is crucial, and bringing multiple teams into social execution—like customer support, community, sales, account management, product, etc.—will strengthen the customer experience.

Yet, according to the Index, nearly half (43%) of social teams still feel siloed from other departments. That sentiment is felt even more strongly in larger organizations, with 48% of mid-market and 44% of enterprise social teams saying they feel siloed.

Brands that continue to silo social in one department will find themselves struggling to capitalize on social’s ability to transform their entire business. Consolidating your tech stack and rethinking conventional team structures are necessary first steps for improving access to social data, and empowering non-marketing teams to take immediate action on social media intelligence.

Considerations: Does your current tech stack make social data inaccessible and collaboration between teams clunky? Break down barriers by investigating where there’s room for consolidation and integration. Is your team using a platform-specific team structure that inadvertently creates silos? Instead, try aligning your social experts with internal functions (like engagement) to ensure they stay agile and social intelligence is disseminated across the organization.

Focus your marketing priorities where it matters most

As a marketing leader, your teams’ resources are pulled in many directions, and it’s challenging to sift through tactical items and decide which ones you should prioritize. Plus, consumer expectations are more nuanced, emerging tech is more powerful, and it’s difficult to even forecast what new trends and market forces you’ll need to address six months from now. With these six marketing priorities as your north star, you can plan for a future of stronger collaboration, business growth and greater impact.

Use the data from our latest Index report to rise to today’s challenges, rally your team around the opportunities within your business and pave the way for a bright future for your brand.

The post 6 marketing priorities leaders will obsess over in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

Social-driven business-to-business (B2B) market research insights help you respond to market dynamics swiftly and foster stronger, more targeted cross-functional decision-making.

According to The 2023 State of Social Media Report ™, 95% of business executives feel it’s imperative to prioritize social media data for informed decision-making beyond marketing. They’re using it to anticipate industry shifts and address customer pain points head-on to build trust and solidify their company’s position amidst tough competition.

This article explores how B2B market research enables better decision-making, including overlooked methods and social data that will help you explore new depths in audience insights.

What is B2B market research?

B2B market research encompasses collecting and analyzing data about what businesses are looking for and need to improve their operations. This includes the engagements between a company providing a product or service and the businesses it aims to reach as prospective customers.

B2B research involves both qualitative and quantitative research such as ratings, surveys, customer experience (CX) analysis and social media listening. It provides decision-makers with actionable insights into key areas like industry trends, competitors and macroeconomic factors, which impact a sale, purchase or partnership between two companies.

B2B market research is different from general or business-to-customer (B2C) research because it involves a more complex decision-making process. For example, in contrast to B2C interactions, the B2B buyer journey usually involves multiple stakeholders with different roles and interests in the buying process.

B2B sales cycles are typically longer than B2C ones too. This is because B2B purchase decisions need careful deliberation on factors like contract negotiations, alignment with regulatory bodies, specific needs of the customer and tech stack considerations.

What are the benefits of B2B market research?

B2B market research gives a company in-depth insights into its business landscape and evolving customer behavior. This helps you fine-tune your sales, marketing and product strategies. You’re also able to develop more effective go-to-market (GMT) plans that meet the specific needs of your prospects and differentiate your brand from competitors.

These insights also enable you to strengthen your brand positioning, improve strategic relations with partners, and resonate with current and potential customers better. The trick to ensure your research helps all these elements is that it’s fresh, relevant and in tune with the market. And that’s by conducting continuous research.

So now that we know how B2B research can help you strengthen your market positioning, let’s look at how exactly your teams can use it to their advantage while building strategies.

1. Plan goals strategically

Set realistic business goals, prioritize resource allocations more effectively and build well-calibrated partnerships. Regularly running research helps you measure brand perception and get insights in near real-time, which enables you to refine your positioning and product offering so they’re aligned with market shifts.

2. Identify growth opportunities

Capitalize on emerging trends and innovations to identify growth opportunities such as new customer segments, product/service offerings gaps or ways to increase customers’ lifetime value.

3. Understand evolving customer needs

B2B market research will also help you track customer preferences based on their evolving needs and recurring pain points. Use this knowledge to tailor your brand messaging and improve products and services to meet client expectations more effectively.

4. Gain a competitive advantage

Regularly monitor the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) of your competitors to make your brand more differentiated and gain a competitive edge. Monitoring their social media activity and customer interactions will help you benchmark your company’s performance against industry standards and identify areas for improvement or innovation.

5. Prepare for potential challenges

Prepare for challenges caused by market fluctuations such as geo-political factors, foreign exchange rates or environmental policies that can affect your business. Proactively address these hurdles with nuanced insights from cutting-edge machine learning (ML)-powered social listening and data analysis tools that can meticulously extract actionable insights from millions of data points across various social and online channels such as X (formerly Twitter), blogs, forums and news articles, in near real-time.

Thus, giving you the tools you need to make strategic decisions in an uncertain business climate with confidence and nurture trust among stakeholders and customers.

6. Optimize marketing and advertising strategies

Tailor and pivot marketing and advertising strategies as needed for maximum impact. Insights from continuous market research help your teams develop targeted content and engagement initiatives that resonate with your B2B audiences.

B2B market overlooked research methods

Let’s take a detailed look at some potent but underutilized B2B market research strategies that can give you a competitive edge.

1. Understand B2B customers through keyword research

Keyword research is a tactical market research methodology in the early stages of the buyer journey, where the intention is to explore brands and businesses that match a company’s needs. And B2B buyer behavior is significantly changing in this aspect. As a recent report showed, B2B buyers are exploring more avenues outside of vendors, especially third-party resources, to make a purchase decision.

Commonly used keyword research tools include search engine optimization (SEO) tools like Google Trends, Answer the Public, Ahrefs Keywords Explorer and Google Keyword Planner.

Discovering how businesses seek solutions online (for instance, mentioning pain points or searching alternatives to your competitors) can help you build a more holistic business strategy to deliver hyper-relevant information to your target audience. This will significantly improve your brand visibility and attract more marketing-qualified leads.

2. Analyze industry and brand-relevant social conversations

Analyzing social listening data for industry and brand-relevant conversations provides you with timely and relevant B2B market research insights.

It gives you an insider view into customers’ opinions, experiences and their sentiments towards your business. You get a real-time reflection of current trends and discussions and use them to identify emerging topics, new trends and evolving customer preferences.

Also use these insights to align your content marketing strategy with what your audience is discussing to enhance engagement and develop a more targeted B2B social media strategy.

This research doesn’t need to be a passive process. Engage in discussions in industry forums and thought leader groups to gauge industry trends and the competitive landscape. These discussions enable you to learn first-hand what audiences think. They’re also great for promoting a higher brand recall and adapting your strategies to influence customers and stall attrition.

3. Examine competitors on social media

Social listening can also provide you with a transparent view of how your target audience perceives your competitors. Analyzing conversations around competitors will reveal their strengths and weaknesses, and yours too, contextually.

This granular competitive intelligence is valuable for refining your go-to-market strategy and brand positioning. It’s also crucial for content planning and your larger marketing strategy because it highlights topics that resonate (or don’t) with your ideal customers.

4. Dig into ratings and reviews

Traditional B2B market research methods such as customer surveys and focus groups are time-consuming and don’t capture real-time data—unlike social insights that provide instant feedback and insights.

Analyzing customer opinions in reviews forums enables you to go beyond typical review metrics like star ratings and net promoter scores (NPS). Gather qualitative data around customer pain points (and what they love about your brand), so your team can proactively address and respond to their needs. This will build customer trust, encourage engagement and improve brand recall.

Your teams can analyze data on forums and review sites like Reddit, G2 and Capterra to glean insights from unbiased ratings on user satisfaction, features, price and other key factors. App reviews are another great source to understand how businesses use your software and collect information that may even inform the product’s direction.

5. Analyze industry influencers

Trust is a significant factor in a business relationship and most prospects trust third parties more than vendors. This makes influencers a great source of audience insights. Use social listening to identify the influencers and advocates within your industry to see who is influencing discussions in different domains and driving conversations.

Analyzing their content will give you a better understanding of your brand perception, the competition and emerging market needs. This research will also enable you to explore possibilities to collaborate with the right influencers for your brand to amplify brand reach and credibility.

How to use social media to conduct B2B market research

B2B market research involves a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods that include surveys, interviews, customer data analysis and industry monitoring. Social-driven B2B research and analytics enable all of this at a fraction of the cost and time, so you can supercharge your marketing strategies including customer care requirements and brand management.

Here’s a look at how a powerful social media management solution will bring your data to life and enable you to leverage the methods noted above efficiently.

Monitor market trends by tracking keywords and hashtags

Use social listening for real-time B2B market research by tracking keywords and hashtags in customer conversations. This will reveal insights on competing brands and upcoming trends in your industry.

For example, Sprout’s Listening solution, with our AI-powered Query Builder, enables you to apply a keyword search on thousands of social conversations across networks to gather targeted insights on your brand and business environment.

Your teams can customize searches by including or excluding keywords most relevant to your business and analyze results to discover what’s top-of-mind among your customers. Thus, your teams have access to a significant sample size for market research without being overwhelmed.

Watch this video to see how the Query Builder helps research teams glean targeted information from social data.

Track B2B competitors across key performance indicators (KPIs)

Analyze social media data, such as customer conversations, trending topics and hashtags, to identify top competitors within your industry, including direct competitors or companies offering similar products or services.

This approach also gives you insights into what social media networks your competitors are most active on and if there is a gap that you can fill. For example, you may notice your competitors have become more active on LinkedIn vs. Facebook.

Sprout Social’s Competitive Analysis Listening tool gives a comparative analysis of key metrics across social such as audience sentiment, total engagements and share of voice. Monitor competitors’ follower growth and engagement on their social media profiles.

Also identify which types of content generate the most interaction in your target audience and how they react to it.

Analyze sentiment to improve customer experience

Conducting social media sentiment analysis enables you to see how B2B audiences feel about your brand, products and services as well as your competitors’. For example, Reddit has a reputation for being a place where people share unfiltered opinions. Mining insights from threads related to your industry can help you map gaps in brand perception that may not have been on your radar.

Similarly, your teams can dive into the comments and brand mentions across social channels to gauge customer sentiment and identify recurring themes, common feedback and issues customers may be facing. This kind of qualitative research provides valuable insights into what your customers actually think about you.

Sprout’s sentiment analysis solution powered by natural language processing (NLP) and named entity recognition (NER) helps you explore positive and negative sentiment in brand mentions and conversations about you effortlessly. Get rich insights into what your customers like about you, or what product features are most popular amongst your customers and why.

These findings will help you optimize marketing strategies, spark product improvement ideas and improve the customer experience.

Identify influencers to build your brand

Build your brand by researching influencers such as industry experts, analysts or thought leaders within your B2B niche. Actively engaging with these social influencers by participating in webinars, events and discussions will boost your company’s share of voice significantly.

This not only gives you access to fresh perspectives on relevant industry topics but also opportunities to observe unique perspectives and best practices.

Sprout’s Influencer marketing solution helps you collaborate with verified influencers that best appeal to your brand so you reach new audiences on the social platforms they use most.

Keep a close eye on the conversations and discussions initiated by your chosen influencers. Your teams can use the“People View” within Sprout to discover and organize profiles that interact with your brand to manage VIP lists and view conversation histories with these influencers.

Also analyze comments and responses from their followers to get additional insights into industry trends, challenges and customer sentiments. Influencers are an investment in your brand awareness, so assess the impact of influencer collaborations on your B2B market research efforts by tracking KPIs such as engagement, reach and the quality of insights gathered through these initiatives.

Integrate social insights with your CRM data

Integrate your social media market research with your customer data in your CRM tools to better understand your B2B customers and improve the customer journey for a smoother partnership. For example, use Sprout’s powerful Saleforce integrations to leverage your social data to tailor sales and marketing campaigns to your customers for faster decision-making.

Similarly, Sprout’s Tableau Business Intelligence (BI) Connector enables you to aggregate insights from multiple systems to get important metrics from all stages of your customer journey. Track brand mentions and competitive share of voice and map conversion rates to your sales data.

Stay focused, relevant and informed with B2B market research

Knowledge is currency. And when it’s timely and targeted, it’s the foundation of informed decision-making.

Your social data is not just information—it’s the catalyst for innovation that can help your business reach new heights. So take advantage of this treasure trove of potent market wisdom to foster continuous growth and alleviate growing pains.

Use precise, social and AI-driven intelligence to double down on customer-centricity and help your brand exceed market expectations. You’ll empower your teams to unearth timely opportunities and forge stronger partnerships across the org with meticulously crafted insights.

Download the guide to turn your B2B social data into a revenue driver and bring your vision to life.

The post 5 overlooked B2B market research methods for understanding your customers appeared first on Sprout Social.