marketing practice Archives

By Phil Jones

Partnerships can be an excellent way to expand reach, spread the load and create a more collaborative coordinated marketing approach. The Marketing Practice’s head of inside sales and data strategy Phil Jones interviews its client ServiceNow to find out how it views partnerships, and offers tips on how to cultivate a successful mutually-beneficial relationship.

When it comes to B2B routes to market in the technology sector, ‘two’s company, three’s a crowd’ couldn’t be further from the truth. Partnering up with other organizations makes sense for vendors, partner organizations and clients alike. Vendor organizations can increase revenue and market penetration and strengthen client relationships. Organizations that fall into the ‘partner’ category – which covers anything from distributors and resellers to systems integrators and consultancy firms – can offer clients a broader range of sophisticated propositions. And clients often receive a more bespoke, integrated response to the problem they’re looking to solve.

That’s not to say it’s easy. It can be challenging to coordinate teams and offerings within a global multinational – add a partner or three into the mix, and the complexity increases accordingly. So I asked Carl Shanahan, senior manager of the technology partner program at ServiceNow, to share his tips on creating and managing partnerships that add value to all parties.

How do you decide which partners you need?

The customer’s always right. So, if your customer is coming to you saying I want to use your product, and I also want to use your competitor’s product, you have to figure out with partners how you do that. The partner’s job is to fill the areas that either your technology doesn’t do, your salespeople don’t cover, your services don’t provide or a vertical market in which you don’t know how to walk and talk.

Equally, you might spot a market opportunity that means you actively seek certain partners; or there may be a strategic account that you can’t crack alone.

What should the starting point be for a successful partnership?

Successful partnership programs are focused on solving the customer’s biggest business challenges. They require strong cross-functional collaboration across technology, marketing and sales teams. Start building your partnership by identifying the value that you will each get out of it – which new routes to revenue does the partnership open, and what further opportunities might appear as the partnership develops?

Looking for ways to optimize the partner experience and add value should be an ‘always-on’ activity. So I look at all three steps in the partnership – technical, marketing and sales – to determine where they are getting stuck, make the program more accessible for them, and make it easier for them to raise their hand and get help.

How do you align objectives?

Focus on building your offering around customer challenges. A big part is really hooking into the conversation with the partner about how they grow and expand their revenue as a company. What markets or new business opportunities can we open for them? How can your partnership open up new routes to revenue and reduce time to value?

A long-term partner of ours had customers coming to them asking for software apps and integrations. At that time, they offered implementation and wraparound services only, but we worked with them to help them develop a technology offering too. In less than a year, we’ve been able to open up a new line of business for them: now they can sell customers a great application with a services model, set it up for them, customize it as required and provide ongoing support.

How do you take a joint offering to market?

Keep it simple. Limit your plan to a page with two or three goals that you decide on together. These goals can include entering a new market, targeting specific companies or growing your user base.

Focus on building your messaging and marketing where you’ve already had success, such as a particular industry or account. Sometimes partners can be resistant to a narrow focus on a few customers or markets. But that focus allows us to illustrate why customers need this proposition and, more importantly, the value the partner can offer, given its understanding of the market and the customer’s very specific business problem.

How can you anticipate and overcome challenges?

Different partners have different capabilities, offer different benefits and require different levels of support. Take the time to learn how each partner operates. Research how each partner makes money, what the sales process looks like and what training or support they might need.

The people element often gets overlooked. Yes, you want to make it easy for partners to self-serve, but if partners don’t have a support system to reach out to, they will quickly become frustrated with the process and move on. In addition, since partners are often selling dozens of other products (some of which may be your competitors), you need to be proactive in understanding how you can support each partner to add value to its customers and progress joint opportunities.

How do you get sales teams onboard?

Make sure sales understand the value of working with partners. Train your sales teams to identify opportunities to bring in partners to enhance each other’s portfolios, drive bigger, more strategic deals, and help them close more sales. Share stories of how the partners are helping customers realize the value of company solutions. For example, partners can provide valuable customer feedback helping to shape product roadmaps, increase speed to market and test new propositions contributing to the overall solution development.

By Phil Jones

Sourced from The Drum

By Scott Clark

Social listening enables brands to understand what their customers truly think about the brand’s products and services. By “listening” for mentions of the brand’s name, products, and services on social media, brands can remove pain points in the customer journey, resolve customer complaints, learn what customers like and what they don’t, and even learn what customers think about the brand’s competitors. That said, there are several things that brands should avoid doing when using social listening. This article will discuss the pitfalls of social listening and how to avoid them.

What Is Social Listening?

Social listening is a marketing practice in which brands “listen” for keywords, typically the brand name, the brand’s products and services, and its competitor’s brand names, products and services, on social media outlets. By actively listening for those terms, brands are able to rapidly respond to customer complaints, determine where the pain points are in the customer journey, understand what they are doing right, and where they are going wrong. Additionally, brands can learn the things that customers like or dislike about the brand’s competitor’s products and services.

Research by SmartInsights revealed that as of October 2021, 57.6% of the world’s population (4.55 billion people) use social media. The leading social media outlets are, in order, Facebook (2.8 billion users), YouTube (2.2 billion users), WhatsApp (2 billion users), Instagram (1.3 billion users), and farther down the list, TikTok (732 million users), Pinterest (478 million users), and Twitter (397 million users).

A report from GlobalWebIndex showed that up to 50% of social media users use social networks to do research on products and services. Additionally, a report from Statista indicated that 33% of those polled from the United States said that they have used social media to complain about a brand or its customer service. Given these statistics, brands have a huge opportunity to learn more about their customers through social listening.

Don’t Fail to Listen to How People Feel

Dean Browell, PhD, Professor of Digital Ethnography and Social Listening at the VCU School of Business, shared his thoughts on the true benefit of social listening: gaining a much clearer picture of the personalities, behaviours, and feelings of customers. “Social listening provides deep behavioural insights into the decision making of the online public while also providing the landscape through which peers find when they are information gathering,” explained professor Browell. “It helps to illustrate the personalities and behaviours of audiences and can be used to follow trends and patterns in both the audiences and their feelings toward brands, services, products, facilities, and more. Social listening seeks to provide the voice of the consumer and understand the volume and timber of that voice and how it influences others.”

Brands often get caught up on metrics, rather than paying attention to the feelings that their customers are expressing on social media. These customers are representative of all the other customers that feel the same way but haven’t taken the time to post on social media. “Listen to them — they’re telling you what products they want, how they want to be treated, and who they trust. And if you think those are just the loudest voices, then understand the power of those loud voices for all the lurkers looking for answers. Social listening can help you understand the customer experience and their perception of it — and how it influences others. That’s very different than simply how they navigate your website or find products in store (although they might talk about that too),” said professor Browell.

Don’t Focus on the Brand’s Official Social Channels

When brands focus on social media, they often turn to their own official channels, focusing on what customers post there, or how they respond to what the brand has posted. Often, however, the most revealing aspects of social listening will show up on customer’s own profile pages, or within other groups or communities.

“It’s understandable that brands would be focused on the channels they own first, but there’s a real issue with thinking that by mostly paying attention to who shows up at your official channels represents how people actually feel about you,” said professor Browell. “Yes, there’s things to be revealed in those interactions, but the context of those interactions is incredibly important — and showing how people speak to peers when you’re not around is crucial to understanding why some segment shows up at all on your digital doorstep. It’s too small of a focus group.”

According to Davitha Ghiassi, executive vice president of Social and Integration at Red Havas, a merged media public relations and communication agency, going beyond the comments that come to brands is vital to gain a fuller understanding of their customers. “Whilst much of your customer feedback may come to you directly via branded channels — research shows that 96% of the people that discuss brands online do not follow those brands’ owned profiles,” said Ghiassi. “Therefore, looking beyond the comments that come to you is crucial in order to see the complete picture; and social listening enables you to do just that by tracking conversations including relevant keywords, brand mentions and even visual mentions of your brand (i.e. logo, product through visual intelligence tools like Talkwalker).”

Don’t Just Listen, Participate

The 2020 Sprout Social Index report revealed that 79% of customers expect a response within the first 24 hours after they have reached out to a brand through social media, and 40% expect brands to respond within an hour. Although social listening is about just that — listening — it also provides opportunities for brands to interact and respond to customers.

When customers create a post extolling the virtues of a brand’s products, that brand should step in and reply, thanking them for their feedback. When customers leave negative comments about a product or service, it’s the perfect time for the brand to resolve a problem and gain a loyal customer. Social listening is not just about listening to what customers are saying — it’s about participating, and having conversations with customers, showing them that the brand cares about them, and is grateful to be able to learn how they feel about the brand.

Brands must avoid being confrontational or defensive when they reply to what may appear to be negative comments left by customers on social media. They should leave a well thought out reply explaining that they are sorry that the customer had an issue, along with a way for the customer to contact them directly to resolve the issue. If the issue cannot be resolved, they should offer to immediately reimburse the customer for the entirety of what they paid. Once the offer has been resolved, there is always the opportunity to provide the customer with a special discount, buy one get one free, or something extra that shows that the brand cares about the customer’s feelings.

“Social listening not only offers a powerful means of identifying and directly addressing comments, questions or concerns surrounding your brand or product — it also allows you to look to them for insights that can help improve the overall customer service strategy,” explained Ghiassi. “For example, by creating pro-active content that can live across channels and addresses frequently asked questions sourced via social.”

Don’t Fail to Set Goals for Social Listening Initiatives

Many brands begin social listening initiatives without setting any specific goals or KPIs. Not only do specific goals require different practices, but without goals or KPIs it becomes impossible to gauge the effectiveness of social listening initiatives.

Depending on the goals that have been set for social listening initiatives, brands can gain a much deeper understanding of their customers’ needs and desires, how they feel about the brand in general, or how they feel about specific products and services, than they can through other channels. “Goals of social listening can be incredibly varied,” said professor Browell. “Social listening could help inform a brand of their actual brand health, it could provide insight into how their target audiences (B2C or B2B) make decisions and therefore inform decision paths, it can help validate and enhance personas, it can help with recruitment and retention, it can illuminate crucial geographic differences, it can enrich other research including making big data more valuable with rich insights, it can help in product development and adoption…honestly, the applications are as endless as a market research tool, the only difference is social listening also informs you on what the public will find when they look for peer input — something that a survey or focus group can’t fundamentally confirm.”

Final Thoughts

Social listening can be a very effective tool that enables brands to get to know their customers on a more personal, emotional level — when it is done correctly. Brands must set goals for their social listening initiatives in order to reap the most benefits, listen to how their customers feel, and learn to empathize with what they are hearing. They must not make the mistake of only listening to what is posted on the brand’s own official social media channels, and they must participate, rather than just listen, responding to customers when appropriate. Finally, brands must take action based on the insights that social listening has revealed, and ultimately, improve the customer journey.

Feature Image Credit: Adobe