Unlock Organic and Paid Social Signals To Supercharge Attribution, ABM, and Lead Generation

Intent signals are actions and behaviors taken by prospects that signal a potential intent to buy a product or service. B2B marketers and sellers pay attention to these signals to become more effective at reaching potential buyers and moving them through the funnel. 

However, capitalizing on the intent signal generated by social media post engagement is a missed opportunity that prevents salespeople from following up with qualified prospects and prevents marketers from understanding content performance analytics. 

This limits the impact of paid and organic social media has on revenue generation, creates gaps in revenue attribution models, limits content marketers from optimizing content strategy, and creates a missed opportunity for follow up by a salesperson. 

This document addresses these shortfalls and offers strategic plays to capitalize on the intent signals to accelerate your revenue engine.

Understanding the missed opportunity

When prospects engage with other mediums, such as email, website, webinars, and tradeshow booths, marketers use the intent signals generated from behavior such as email opens, link clicks, page views, registrations, and tradeshow booth visits to trigger automated workflows and mark people as campaign responders. 

These workflows may include routing leads to sales people, triggering email nurture programs, creating milestones for buyer journey mapping, creating analytics for content strategy optimization, and providing revenue attribution.

Social media post and ad engagement creates a similar and equally powerful intent signal. When prospects leave a reaction (like, support, care, etc,,) on a post, comment, or share it the signal they are creating is strong. For a brief time period they are engaged with your content and your brand is top of mind. 

However due to the amount of time and resources needed to capture the intent signal the opportunity to include it within the sales and marketing operations plan is missed.

Social Media Post Engagement Playbook

Intent signals captured from social media post engagement can be used across several different sales and marketing motions.

ABM Insight from LinkedIn Ads

If you’re investing in LinkedIn Ads to generate awareness and leads from target accounts this workflow will provide additional insight into the effectiveness of the campaign spend. 

Understanding the number of accounts who engaged with the ad and the number of people who engaged within the ad are early indicators of the effectiveness of the ad campaign. Also, routing the qualified prospects to SDRs will maximize the revenue generated from the ad spend. They may be able to set meetings before the prospect takes the ad campaigns desired conversion action.

Using the below LinkedIn Ad from Hevo Data as an example and assuming that the target audience is their target airline account list. A table is provided that shows the number of people within the accounts who engaged with the ad.

Understanding revenue generated from this campaign may be an enterprise sales cycle away. This data can be used to show sales and marketing leaders an early indicator that the ad spend is having a positive impact on high value accounts.

Send leads to SDRs

Sending qualified prospects who engage with social media posts and ads to SDRs will accelerate the amount of revenue generated from your organic and social media strategy.

From an SDRs perspective, this gives them a reason to reach out and provides a great ice breaker for a phone call. 

Equipped with details about the social media post and type of engagement the SDR will understand the type of content (resource, product, research stat, vent) they engaged with and a classification regarding the prospects mindset (taken from the engagement type).

To maximize the effectiveness of this strategy, host a training meeting to review the concept, show where this intent data is found within the CRM, and provide examples on how to craft personalized outreach by phone and email.

If you have a learning management system, create a short training that provides this information and requires them to complete the process and request they upload a video of a mock phone call that uses this strategy as an ice breaker.

If the SDRs outreach results in an opportunity, make sure that the opportunity is mapped back to the primary campaign filed within the SFDC campaign to ensure revenue attribution to this workflow and social channel.

Capitalize on the social reach and influence of key employees

When sharing company content on social media sometimes key employees have higher reach and audience engagement than the corporate channels. In these cases, deploy the workflow when they post about content relevant to the corporate products and services. 

Train these key employees to add the post URL into the workflow when one of their personal posts receives high engagement. 

When qualified prospects within their network engage with the content the sales team will be notified. They can even use the prospect's relationship with the key employee as an ice breaker.

Social media content strategy optimization

Use Salesforce reporting, or whatever data analytics system you use (Tableau/Domo/Looker Studio) to provide actionable insight for the content marketer so they can optimize their content strategy. 

Below is an example of the type of analytics that LinkedIn provides for a social post compared to the type of analytics that this workflow can provide.

Note: This workflow solves for the metrics highlighted in Yellow. Revenue metrics will require additional workflow and multi-touch attribution software.

With these metrics a content marketer can move beyond simple firmographic data and performance data such as impressions, CTR, and clicks to optimize content. Now, they will be able to understand if their customers and prospects are engaging with social content and  if a social post played a role in a buying team's decision making process. They can also understand if the post generated revenue, created pipeline, and see the total amount of influenced revenue that the post had. 

With this understanding of the impact that the social media post has on the content marketer can adjust the type of content that is being posted, the tone, and design and understand how their changes impact revenue, pipeline creation, and engagement from high value audiences. 

For example, if an executive team’s top priority is to expand revenue within customer accounts and the content marketer now knows that a certain type of content is best to engage customers on social channels. they can adjust the content calendar accordingly. 

Additionally, executive reporting can be modified using enhanced analytics to report on the social media strategies effectiveness.

Adjust your multi-touch attribution model.

If you are using MTA software like Terminus or Bizable you may already have a channel classifier within the campaign object to assign attribution to paid social and organic social. If you do not, add them. 

When qualified post engagers are marked as campaign responders the amount of revenue attribution that the social channels receive will increase.

Use this data to justify the resources spent on content creation, social media technology, and headcount. 

When social media posts reach customers and prospects that have live opportunities the impact that marketing has on revenue and pipeline will increase. Additionally, this is a strong signal that the content strategy is effective.

Enhance buyer journey mapping

Within your marketing automation platform create workflows that create milestones and/or interesting moments when qualified prospects engage with social media posts and ads.

Account and Lead Scoring

Within your marketing automation system, assign point values to qualified contacts when they engage with social posts. This additional scoring may increase the number of leads you send to the sales team for qualification.

Conclusion

Until now, B2B marketers have not yet been able to unlock the intent signals held within social media post and ad engagements to accelerate their revenue engine, optimize content strategy, understand audience behavior, and report on social media effectiveness. 

This workflow provides a solution so Marketers can harness the power of social media intent signals for post engagements. 

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