Marketing to Finance Office Influencers. Thought Leadership Strategies Around Social Media Marketing

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Ready? …. Aim …  Hold it!  Everyone’s using social media and blogging and SEO-ing their way to B2B traffic, so let’s forget all about aiming and just fire!
Let your audience enthusiasm and the pack mentality run your business. But have you actually spent enough time studying the target demographic’s tribe behavior before considering implementing social media marketing strategies to understand better why and how you want to use them?
If you’re marketing to influencers, get clear on the following:

• Which social media they actually use,
• How and how often,
• What information they are looking for on each platform and what time/days of the week,
• What content format most appeals to them,
• What content they consume and share the most,
• Which thought leadership marketing strategies are most likely to actually achieve your goals, and
• What are your goals: Sales? Leads? Support? Feedback? Branding?

If your business head is hurting from all these considerations, let me soothe you with this. Because no one is certain yet about really well-measured value of social media channels, nothing is wrong with just building a presence, getting as many followers as you can, doing what you can to keep them happy and promoting your brand and solutions to them.
IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED, FAIL AGAIN
If you’ve spent any time browsing conversations of social media marketing strategists, you know the “experts” all agree it’s the Wild West: Shoot first, see what you hit, reload and try again and again … and again … and again … and again. And the winner is the one who doesn’t stop until they begin to hit their original target.
In other words, perhaps all you need to decide is:

• What you’re trying to accomplish,
• A wild and fluid enough strategy,
• How to carefully measure results,
• To continue to shift content and strategies until something starts to work.

SOME THINGS FOR SOCIAL MARKETING EXECUTIVES TO DO
Align all your social media marketing strategies, taking into account the goals of various elements of your business, so at least you’ll know what to measure. The content-rich world of social media is too valuable to ignore or take lightly. Spend more time identifying and connecting all your functional areas that can benefit from your department’s social marketing effort.
Sales teams are especially excited by the fact that customers are increasingly showing up through search and social portals. It’s easier to prospect and close if they are engaged in or witness conversations about your company’s latest news. Visibility, visibility, visibility.
Produce more content, engage your tribes, combine SEO with social strategies, incorporate lead generation component, and your company will thrive if you discover and follow just the right formula.
Social media bring an opportunity to listen directly to your customer. With no agency between, you can create an intimate relationship that can’t help but have you do better business together.
TARGETING CFOs AND CORPORATE FINANCE EXECUTIVES
As always, there’s an element of no-nonsense when you market to influencers and decision makers.
A few points to consider:

• Emphasize ROI
• Use clear, direct language
• Stay aware of their pain points
• Use effective testimonials and case studies
• Establish your thought leadership position and implement demand generation programs with high ROI using Proformative’s ability to broadcast your content to over 600,000 corporate finance decision makers

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP MARKETING
Whether it’s offering an opinion, actual argument, interesting information, speculation or promotion, your team’s job is to make your social media content compelling!

• Target audiences based on their searches and relevance to their expressed interests.
• Spread your excellent content on all possible platforms to help establish yourself as a leader in your field.
• Generate activity by responding to conversations, encouraging others to contribute and anything else to make your digital assets (main web site, brochure, promo and microsites, case studies, white papers, blog posts etc.) worth visiting.
• Give away “secrets” and “know-how.”
• Get the brightest minds and biggest names on your side, if you can.
• Establish your executives as experts and give them a unique voice in publications in your niche.
• Be alert to what’s new and hot in your market segment and take the lead on it ASAP.
• Create a series of webinars about your segment and publish more white papers to leverage your content.
• Be relentless. Believe in your perspective enough to keep communicating about it.
• Partner with Proformative to get your TLM campaigns designed and executed.

With the vast amounts of data and content to wade through, it’s valuable to have a partner like Proformative that will help you develop content that is easy to share via social channels, will aggregate your existing content and broadcast your message to its community of over 600,000 corporate finance executives.
Attend our webinars and our demand generation white papers to learn more about how to sell to today’s CFOs.
Now, tell us how you’re using social channels to improve visibility of your thought leadership marketing programs.

• What seemingly intractable problems have you solved using social strategies?
• How has it affected your brand and reputation?
• How has your culture changed?
• How performance of your social marketing efforts increased after partnering with Proformative?
• Got any statistics to tell us about?

Please comment on our questions and share this article with others.
Download our white paper “How To Market To Today’s CFOs” and let us connect your content with a captive audience of over 600,000 corporate finance executives, members of Proformative. 

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