When should sales reps engage with buyers?

It’s a question that all marketing and sales leaders ask themselves. To complicate matters, there’s a statistic out there that many thought leaders cite: Buyers typically are 57% through their buying process before they engage a salesperson.

So, should sales reps sit at their desks and await perfect, sales-ready buyers to raise their hands and exclaim, “Show me the contract”? Absolutely not. In fact, waiting is detrimental to your company. Let’s take a look at what happens when you wait.

Entering Late into the Buyer’s Journey

Here’s the buyer’s journey that IBM developed:

It’s fairly straightforward. Buyers need to discover that they have a problem. They need to learn about your company, your category, and the solutions in your category. They need to try your product. Then, they need to buy your product. Next, they need to use your product. And finally, they can advocate for your company.

Where do you think most sales reps enter into this journey?

You got it. At the “Buy” stage.

Many sales reps wait for the perfectly qualified, highly scored buyer to be passed to them from the marketing department. Once the unicorn buyer appears in the CRM, the sales rep goes to work, trying to convince the buyer to choose their product over their competitors’ solutions.

When they’re lucky, the sellers win. But often times, they lose. In fact, sales teams that wait are 56% more likelyto miss their numbers. Let’s take a look at why that happens.

The Price Problem

Nowadays, buyers are in control. They can easily research companies, and when they are ready to buy, they bring their research to the negotiating table.

Buyers know how much your competitors charge, and when companies wait for buyers to approach them, they find themselves negotiating deals based on price. As a result, sales reps slash their prices in order to close deals, and since their deal size drops, sellers have to bring in more deals to hit their numbers.

On the other hand, when sellers are proactive and engage buyers sooner, a different story unfolds. Sales Benchmark Index’s research shows that sales teams that focus on the first part of the journey (i.e. the “Discover” and “Learn” stages) rarely compete on price and often win deals with zero competition because “they got in early” and were able to influence the buyer’s purchasing criteria. In fact, proactive teams are 56% more likely to hit their numbers.

The Consensus Problem

In addition to the price problem, there’s another hiccup in the B2B buyer’s journey. It’s the consensus problem. Sellers often look for a mythical “decision maker” who can approve a complex deal on behalf of the company. But it’s more common to encounter a purchasing committee, which, on average, consists of of 5.4 members.

Think about it. That’s 5.4 opportunities for someone to say, “No.” In fact, the Corporate Executive Board’s research shows that where there are more stakeholders, there’s less likelihood that a purchase will happen.

Note: that’s the likelihood that any purchase will happen – not the likelihood that buyers will choose your solution.

This begs the question, Where do buying committees get stuck? Believe it or not, it’s not at the “Try” or “Buy” stages, when buyers are preparing to select a supplier. It’s much earlier in the process.

Buying committees are most likely to get stuck when they’ve identified their problem and are trying to find the best course of action. In other words, even if groups can agree on the problem they are trying to solve, they encounter even more problems when they try to agree on how to solve their problem.

Buying committees need someone to guide them. They need your sales team to coach them.

That’s why today’s sales reps need to be more than closers. They need to be helpers. They need to be guides along the buyer’s journey, moving buying committees across the chasm between “Discovering and identifying their problem” and “Learning about solutions.”

When sellers are proactive helpers, they win deals that their competitors, who complacently await the perfect lead, never realized were on the table.

Social Selling: They Key to Getting in Earlier

So, what can salespeople do to get into accounts earlier? How can they influence buyers as they figure out how to solve their problems? The CEB surveyed over 1,000 salespeople to find out. Here’s what they discovered:

Social selling is what separates high performers from average performers. The best sales reps actively use Twitter and LinkedIn to:

• Connect with potential customers
• Share points of view valuable to customers
• Generate leads

The best sellers actively position themselves as resources of information on social media, and they are doing so even before sellers are selecting vendors. By having a remarkable presence on social networks, they help buyers discover their company, and by sharing great content, they help buyers learn about and solve their problems.

In other words, by using social networks, sales reps have the opportunity to walk buyers through the entire journey – not just the last few steps before they sign a contract.

Unlike the sellers who wait for the perfect, sales-ready lead, proactive social sellers help your company’s profitability because they aren’t negotiating on price and discounting the cost of your services.

Furthermore, they are uncovering sales opportunities that your competitors never knew existed. By engaging buyers earlier, proactive sellers are teaching their buyers how to buy. They are helping buyers get over the “solution identification” hump. They are showing buyers why they need to solve their problems using a solution from your category, and they are encouraging them to build consensus within the buying committee.

That’s why getting in early is so important.

Want to Learn More about Social Selling?

Check out the Executive’s Guide to Social Selling Success.

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There’s no shortage of content out there, that’s for sure. This is both true in general and also for the vast majority of markets — both mainstream and niche — that are out there today. It’s no wonder that marketers and content strategists are constantly trying to stand out from the crowd: the crowd is huge, and elevating your own voice to prominence is a herculean challenge. With the same few perspectives being echoed about, it might seem insurmountable to successfully drive not just traffic but also conversions where your target audience comes to you for solutions.

The good news is, there are three things you can do to immediately help address this pain point. The first is to set up an automated system to discover relevant content for you, sifting through the vast recesses of the internet in real-time to deliver a variety of high-quality stories from not only mainstream sources, but also from uncommon, lesser-known voices that still have something valuable (and unique) to say. The second is to create your own content to not only fill the gaps in the conversation, but to position your own brand as a solution-provider in these challenging markets. A balance between this high-quality, third party content and your own, original content can be an incredibly powerful combination, but there’s a third step necessary to put it all together: reaching and being responsive to your audience.

And that means making sure your content gets to where it needs to be. Whether it’s over Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or any other number of channels, there’s a tremendous opportunity to deliver a meaningful and unique voice to your target audience. But you don’t have all day to spend on this, either, and that’s why a balanced approach between hand-curation, where you carefully select and share content manually to social channels in real-time, and automation, where that process takes place without a human needing to step in, is often the way to maximize your effectiveness.

Think about it: the most successful campaigns are focused and informative, but they also engage frequently and on a variety of aspects. Particularly on a fast-paced platform like Twitter, conversations that happened 15 minutes ago might slip so far down someone’s feed that they’ll never see it; sharing a couple of times a day might not be even close to enough. On the other hand, you don’t want to share lesser-quality articles without having a human check-and-verify that a piece is consistent with your brand. But the right tools can make this a breeze.

Imagine having a daily selection of dozens of relevant articles at your fingertips from third-party sources, the ability to plan for an entire day (or multiple days) of scheduled, personalized sharing, all augmented with your own original voice. When done right, this is one of the most powerful vehicles to drive the success of your social campaigns! With the right automated system sprinkled with a little bit of hand-curation, you can set yourself on the path to success in the social sphere, and spend the better part of your time engaging with your audience instead.

-Ethan

Are you looking to start your social selling program?

Are you trying to improve your current program?

Below you’ll find a short list of necessary tools for B2B sales teams – with tips for using those tools for prospecting.

1. LinkedIn Referrals

Okay, you’re right. This isn’t a tool, per se, but it is a must-have feature for connecting with prospects. Why? Because 84% of B2B decision makers begin their buying process with a referral (Edelman Trust Barometer).

Plus, asking for a referral on LinkedIn is rather simple. You can do it in three steps:

• Step 1: You choose a prospect.
• Step 2: You see how you are connected to that person.
• Step 3: You ask a mutual connection for a referral.

So, let’s say that I wanted to target Trapit’s Tommy Ziemer, Trapit’s VP of Operations. First, I need to find him on LinkedIn.

Once I have located him, I look to see how I’m connected to Tommy on LinkedIn.

I have several shared connections. Now, it’s a question of who will be the best referrer. Preferably, I want someone who knows me well and who has some sway. In this case, I’d probably go with Henry Nothhaft, the Co-Founder and Head of Products at Trapit.

Once I have chosen my referrer, I click on the upside down triangle to the right of the “Connect” button and pull down to “Get Introduced.”

Then, I type my message to Henry and ask for a referral. For sample messages, download our templates for breaking the ice on social media.

2. Newsle

Starting using it here

Once you have connected with a prospect, you want to keep track of him or her so that you can look for opportunities to engage with your prospect.

Newsle is an easy way to keep track of those moments when your LinkedIn, Facebook, and Gmail contacts appear in the news.

For the same of example, let’s say that I wanted to do business with Dr. Laura Granka, one of my Facebook friends. Newsle tells me that she will be participating in an upcoming conference on user experience in Boulder, CO.

If I live in Boulder or if I plan to attend that conference, I might ask to have coffee with Laura so that we can talk about potential business opportunities. Alternatively, if I cannot attend the conference, I might send her a message and ask if she can send me her presentation deck, which I can use as a trampoline for starting a discussion with her.

3. LinkedIn Connected

Download the app from the Apple store

Newsle is not the only way to stay on top of what your prospects are doing. LinkedIn has created an iOS app that sends you notifications about your network.

When your prospect celebrates an anniversary, you receive a notification so that you can congratulate her. When your prospect receives a promotion, you receive a notification so that you can congratulate him. This allows you to always stay top-of-mind with potential customers.

Additionally, if you sync your calendar with your LinkedIn account, you will receive a reminder about your upcoming meeting, and you can do pre-meeting intelligence by looking at your prospect’s LinkedIn profile.

4. Trapit

See how it works here

Use Case 1:

With Newsle and LinkedIn Connected, you can search only for individual people. But sometimes you want to know what’s happening with your target companies – not just your contacts.

With Trapit, I can keep tabs on both companies and key employees.

Let’s say that I was actively pursuing Apple as a customer. In the Trapit application, I can discover what’s happening with the company. First, I enter my search terms. For example, I can create a “trap” that looks for content on “Apple Computers” and “AAPL.” Trapit consults its library of 100,000+ sources, and it gives me the latest information on Apple:

If I were an agency in the e-commerce space, I’d look at the article about the App Store, and I’d start brainstorming ways to leverage the “impenetrable jungle” of the App Store to my advantage. How could I offer my services as a way to redesign the App Store?

Use Case 2:

With Trapit, I’m not limited to doing reconnaissance work, I can also look for smart content that my prospects will want to read.

Let’s say that I’m in the marketing automation space, and I’m targeting the president of a startup. As the president of a startup, my prospect is responsible for both sales and marketing, and I’d assume that she is having the usual trouble of creating harmony between the two.

If I wanted to be a helpful resource for Madam President as I’m prospecting, I would create a “trap” (i.e. a topic) in Trapit on sales and marketing alignment:

Then, I would choose an article, and I would share it with my network or just with my prospect. (For sample messages, download our templates.)

When selling on social media, salespeople must be perceived as trusted sources of information – not as pushy peddlers of their wares. Trapit can help salespeople build rapport by enabling sales teams to share the right content at the right time.

What about you?

What are your favorite apps for social selling? Share your insight in the comments section below!

If you’d like more information about Trapit…

Request a 15-minute demo!

Employee advocacy continues to be one of the hottest topics in social media marketing circles. And while many companies have successfully, launched, grown, and scaled their programs, there’s still a lot of room for improvement. According to Prophet’s research, very few industries have created highly mature advocacy programs.

For employee advocacy programs to evolve and drive results, leaders need to need to continue to update their strategies. In our discussions with customers and thought leaders, we’ve identified five areas of growth. We hope that they help you!

Think beyond Promoting Marketing Content

As a marketer, you want to amplify your marketing messages. That’s one of the added benefits of employee advocacy for your department. As for your advocates, your marketing content can help them, as well. It educates them on your industry, and it keeps them in the know about what’s happening with your company.

However, those aren’t the only reasons why your employees are using social media. For example, salespeople will want to read and share content about their industry. Engineers will want to engage with people who are experts in their field. In fact, when we surveyed employees, we found that they want to share news about their industry. That was their number one answer:

You can read the full survey results here.

Coordinate Efforts across Departments

Many times, marketers are the ones who initiate employee advocacy programs, but most employee advocacy and social business initiatives span across departments. Salespeople want to engage prospects, while HR professionals want to encourage employer branding. So, it’s important to sit down with the key stakeholders from each department, discuss their needs, and agree on a set of priorities for the program.

Beyond agreeing upon macro-level goals across departments, it’s also important to discuss operating processes, especially when it comes to rules of engagement. For example, let’s say that a salesperson comes across an upset customer on Twitter. Should the sales rep engage that person? Or is that the job of the marketing department or the customer success department? By answering questions like these and creating a governance model, you’ll minimize friction and set your program up for success.

Gather Insights to Optimize Your Social Tactics

Some employee advocacy programs start informally. Companies encourage their employees to use the native LinkedIn and Twitter apps. They email their employees a list of links to share. And they cross their fingers. As a result, program managers are left in the dark. They don’t have the data they need to see what’s working and to report on the program’s success to their executive champions.

What they need is a technological backbone to support their program. An employee advocacy platform can ensure that your team has the right data at their fingertips. With the right metrics in place, program managers can see what’s working and what’s not working (e.g. what type of content is resonating on which social platforms). And they can adjust their approach accordingly.

Training Shouldn’t Focus Solely on How to Use Social Media

We’ve seen many companies provide their advocates with great “how to” advice. They explain how to use hashtags, and they have lunch and learns about creating the perfect LinkedIn bio. However, sometimes, they forget about the “why.” Why should your employees use social media? Why should they use hashtags on Twitter? How will that “pound sign” help your sales team find and engage in conversations with influencers and potential prospects?

Training without purpose and context will never stick.

Use Social Listening to Build Business Acumen

For a while, employee advocacy was seen primarily as a way to broadcast, but over the years, it has become so much more than that. Social media is a great way to listen and learn. Sales reps can learn about their prospects and industry. A petroleum engineer can learn from and engage with some of the greatest oil and gas technical experts. A civil engineer can listen to discussions about road safety. CEOs can read about the latest management trends and exchange ideas with other CEOs. The list goes on…

Bottom line: If your employee advocates aren’t listening, they’re missing out.

Need Help with Your Employee Advocacy Program?

Check out Employee Advocacy 101: The Rise of the Employee Marketer. It covers the basics of launching an advocacy program.

Forrester is predicting a sharpened focus on the customer in 2017. They are even going as far as referring to a shift towards customer obsession. Augie Ray, Customer Experience advisor at @GartnerDigital, is saying, “The king isn’t your content but your customer.”

When Augie talks about “customer as king,” it is not about the old traditions of rolling out the red carpet, but deeply understanding a customer’s needs and providing the solutions and experiences that address those needs. When Forrester talks about customer obsession, it is about moving away from focusing on products and services. It is about shifting that focus to individual customers and their unique needs and business challenges. This is a critical imperative for B2B marketers and sales leaders. And at Trapit, this extends to our approach to Customer Success. Customer obsession is not new for us at Trapit.

Our approach to Customer Success is not just about helping you get started with our product and providing ongoing support. We start with making sure we deeply understand you, your customer and the problems you are trying to solve. For the Customer Success team at Trapit, everything starts with understanding your industry, your business, your challenges, your goals, and your objectives.

Understanding our Customers

While there may be some common themes across our customers, each customer has unique needs and challenges.

Our customers are at different stages of developing their programs:

• Many customers see the value of social selling and employee advocacy, they recognize the importance of a robust content strategy, and they are looking for help getting started.
• Others have more advanced programs, but are struggling to find highly relevant content for their sales teams to share.
• Some customers invested in tools that are not meeting their needs and as a result, are not seeing results.

Our customers come from a range of industries and businesses with unique challenges and goals:

• A tech-forward company wants to build the digital literacy of its executives, sales team, and marketers.
• A B2B technology company has seen social selling success from a small group of early adopters on their sales team. They would like to better enable the entire sales team to master the modern, digital buyer journey.
• A financial services firm is looking to build and execute a content strategy that helps position their advisors as subject matter experts who understand the unique needs of their target market.
• A global company in a regulated industry with a risk-averse culture wants to rollout out a successful employee advocacy program while ensuring that they understand and manage the risks unique to their industry.
• A Fortune 50 technology organization has a formal group of social sellers who require highly relevant and unique content for multiple industries, geographies, and languages.

Our Customer Success approach is designed to understand and align to our customers’ unique needs. It is flexible so that we can adjust and feather in expert advice and consultative support where it is most needed. Here’s a bird’s-eye view of what you get when you work with Trapit.

We Draw on Our Years of Experience

Our team has deep experience working with a range of customers to help plan, launch, refine and scale content marketing, social selling, and employee advocacy programs. While each of our customers is unique, the approach we take is consistent and deliberate. It is informed by our expertise, our experience, industry-leading best practices, and the fundamentals of organizational change management. Our team brings industry knowledge, business acumen, and product expertise. This is complemented with a depth of experience with content marketing, social selling, and employee advocacy program development. For example, I have almost 10 years experience of building social media and digital communication programs at a large financial institution as well as consulting in various industries. I love sharing my knowledge and experience with our customers, helping them to build and grow their programs.

It Is Not Just about the Tool; It Is about Your Program

Our software enables us to work quickly and set you up for success. But, if you think it is just a matter of purchasing the software you will not be successful. It is about building a program that is aligned to your business objectives and fits with our organization’s culture and social media maturity. Through a series of consultative workshops we take the time to understand the unique considerations for your business, your stakeholders, governance and your team. We also work with you to develop a program plan that includes executive and stakeholder engagement, training, adoption and communications. Our commitment is to work with you building a program that meets your business needs and sets you up for success.

“It’s about taking deliberate, yet creative steps to help build an effective program, that makes sense for our customers. It’s a challenge, that I love to take head on every day.” Cyd Anderson, Customer Success

Note: In a previous blog post series, we talk about the importance of organizational change management. Successful social media programs are much broader than investing in the right tool and following best practices. It is about building a change management program that instills new mindsets and processes to drive lasting behavior change. You can read more about our thinking on change management in these blog posts.

Everything Starts with a Plan

We believe a plan sets the foundation for your success. We get to know our customers quite well during the sales process. Our Customer Success team digs deep to understand your business objectives and work with you to build a plan for your program success. This plan will include all of the important change management elements. We take a consultative approach to understand the unique considerations for your business. We also work with you to set program objectives that can be measured and are aligned to your goals. Our Customer Success approach is grounded in project management fundamentals to keep us all on track.

How We Approach Training

We are confident that you will find Trapit “ridiculously easy” to use. So, how do we think about training? Do you even need training? Absolutely. We have designed our training to be focused on the “Why,” ”What” and “How” of content marketing, social selling and employee advocacy.

Our training is not just about the tool but how the tool can help you achieve your business objectives. For marketers and content curators, our training is designed to empower and enable you to get the most out of the tool, saving you time by discovering highly relevant and engaging content. For sales reps and employees, our training integrates best practices for social media platforms, social selling, and advocacy. Practical guidance on the “How” – balanced with the “Why” and the “What”. We have tons of resources our customers can use to adapt and customize training to your needs.

Growing and Optimizing Your Program

So, you have a plan and understand how Trapit can enable your program success. You have implemented Trapit, and your team is using the tool and finding success. We are not quite done; in fact, we are never done. This is where things start to get exciting. We will work with you to measure, capture, and share accomplishments with your key stakeholders. Adoption is key for social selling and employee advocacy programs, and without the buy-in of your stakeholders, adoption will be impossible.

Informed by your accomplishments and insights from measurement, we will work with you to continue to develop and optimize your program. Once launched there is so much opportunity to continue to refine and grow your program:

Your business and marketing priorities may change, so your content strategy might need to be adjusted.

As your initial sales team starts to see success other sales groups will want to join the program.

“I relish the opportunity to work with our customers to help drive program adoption. As adoption grows, business value increases significantly.” Bill Seibert, Customer Success

Through ongoing business reviews and consultations we love working with you as your business and program evolves.

From planning to training to collaboratively working with you to refine and scale your program, our Customer Success team is obsessed with you and your needs. Whether you are just getting started with building your program or you are well advanced and looking to take your program to the next level with Trapit, our Customer Success team would love the opportunity to work with you.

We don’t scrub our cars with toothbrushes, nor do we stir our coffee with shovels. The same should be said of sales teams.

Sales teams have many tools at their disposal. Yet often times, they find themselves choosing the wrong one for the task at hand. This is especially true for social sellers. We continue to hear about sales teams that adopt the wrong technology for social selling, only to have lackluster results. Let’s take a look at where those sales teams go wrong.

They Adopt a Social Media Management Tool

No doubt, social media marketing tools provide great value to marketing organizations. But the reality is that they fall short for sales teams. In our experience, companies that give social media marketing tools to sales reps often experience low adoption rates. (Some as low as 0%!)

From a functional level, social media marketing tools make life difficult for sales representatives. Though powerful, these tools were built for marketers–not for sales enablement and sales teams.

What do I mean by that? Social marketing tools often put the onus on sales people to find content, copy and paste links into the tool, and then share posts. They don’t have a complete workflow that enables content and messaging to flow freely between marketing and sales.

By contrast, a good social selling platform is built to align sales and marketing. It allows marketers and sales enablement teams to build a content library, to write sample messages, to split sales teams according to verticals and regions, and to track results.

They Adopt a Generic Employee Advocacy Tool

If you dig into the design and capabilities, you’ll find that employee advocacy tools are great for increasing awareness and generating leads. With an advocacy tool, marketers can select content for their employees to share and build a content library of pre-approved assets. In turn, advocates can sign in and share content to their followers.

There’s no doubt that sales reps can benefit from a tool that allows them to receive pre-approved content from their marketing teams. But for sales reps, this is not enough. They need a tool that is built for account and pipeline management.

For example, a true social selling tool gives reps more control over their social selling process. Instead of just accepting content from marketing, sales reps can use their platform to research their key accounts – both around the web and on social media. What’s more, a good social selling tool will have integrations with common CRMs, a crucial piece that many advocacy platforms overlook.

They Only Adopt LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Sales Navigator might be part of your social selling program, but many sellers find that LinkedIn’s platform is not enough. When a seller is looking for buyers, Sales Navigator provides an excellent toolset for the initial stages of a buyer-seller relationship. It allows reps the opportunity to find, research, and connect with prospects and customers. But it has its limits when it comes to maintaining those relationships.

1. Sales Navigator Is Limited to LinkedIn

Social selling is about building relationships on the channels your customers use. Sure, many customers might have LinkedIn accounts. But they also might be on Twitter or Facebook. In fact, they might be more active on those networks. By limiting your social selling technology to LinkedIn, you’re limiting your customer-seller relationships.

2. There’s No Easy Way to Deliver Content to Your Sales Team

In the digital age, content is the bond that holds together many of our professional relationships. We send colleagues memes and infographics that make us think of them. We spark conversations by posting articles on social networks. We help our customers stay informed by sharing the latest industry research.

But where does that content come from?

Sales reps should not have to spend their days looking for content. A good social selling platform will include a content workflow. That way, marketing can easily surface the best content for sales and provide sample messaging for reps to use. Sales reps in turn can access that content from anywhere, on any device, and share it with the click of a button.

Unfortunately, Sales Navigator lacks compelling content features, leaving sales reps to dig through emails and shared drives to find relevant content to curate.

3. Analytics and Reporting Are Limited

Sales Navigator’s key metric is the Social Selling Index (SSI). It measures a rep’s professional brand, how many senior decision makers she has connected with, and whether she engages those decision makers with insights.

Many sales leaders have run into problems with the SSI. For starters, the Index measures activity on LinkedIn alone – not on other networks. Plus, the SSI lacks flexibility. It doesn’t enable sales leaders to decide what’s important. For example, the Index measures how many connections a sales rep has. However, in the digital age, the number of connections isn’t as important as the depth of those connections.

Bottom Line: Use the Right Tool for the Job

There’s nothing wrong with an employee advocacy tool or a social media marketing tool – if you’re running an employee advocacy program or in charge of social media marketing for your company. To effectively run a social selling program, you need a social selling platform – one that runs across multiple networks.

Want to learn more about social selling? Check out this resource:

Bah! Humbug! For your employee advocacy program to work, you need your employees to participate. But your employees are reluctant to participate in your program.

You know that your employees are on social media. You just can’t get them to be part of your official program. Below, you’ll find three common objections – with tips on how to overcome them.

“You’re trying to spy on me.”

Your employees’ privacy is important to them. If you’re managing an advocacy program, you have to acknowledge your commitment to your employees’ privacy. Reassure your employees that you trust them and that employee advocacy is not some type of conspiracy theory.

If an employee is still skeptical, here are a few measures that you can take.

1. Review your social media policy.

Your social media policy should indicate what your employees can and can’t do on social media. And if you’ve done your due diligence, your policy should be built on federal laws and regulations. When speaking with your employees, indicate that…

• You respect your employees’ right to complain about their working conditions.
• You cannot ask for your employees’ password, and therefore, you cannot post on your behalf.
• If your employees endorses your products or speaks about your competitors on social media, the FTC requires that your employees identify their affiliation with your company. That’s why you’re asking your employees to identify their employer on social media.

2. Offer training related to what’s private and what’s public on social media.

Some employees may not understand the difference between what’s public on social and what’s private. Take Twitter as an example. Unless your employees change their privacy settings, you can see their public tweets. But you cannot see their direct messages.

Facebook can cause a lot of confusion for employees simply because there are so many privacy settings. You may want to show your employees how to create friend lists, hide posts from their walls, and change the privacy settings on their photo albums.

3. Emphasize that your program is meant to help your employees.

Indicate that the goal of the program is not to monitor your employees, but rather, to empower them. You want to help them reach their professional goals through social media. You want to teach them, for instance, how to leverage LinkedIn to reach their sales quotas.

“I want my social media profiles to be a reflection of me – not my company.”

If your employee advocacy program has matured, you should be committed to fighting corporate spam. You don’t want each and every status update to sound like it came from your PR or marketing office, nor do you want your employees to share only branded content.

Instead, teach your employees how they can personalize their social media presence. Discuss the following:

1. Tone and Voice on Social

Employees should have a strong personal brand, and they should understand how to convey that brand on social media. Sit down with them and have them map out the tone that they want to convey when communicating on social media.

2. Content Choices

Sure, you will supply your employees with branded content. You want your employees to be proud of their company and to feel part of the marketing, PR, and HR efforts. But encourage them to use the 4-1-1 rule and share third-party content related to their industry and hobbies.

3. This Is Voluntary.

Emphasize that participating in your employee advocacy program is voluntary. Your employees do not have to participate. If they feel like they are being asked to do too much on social media, they can drop out of the program.

“My boss doesn’t want me on social media.”

Let’s imagine that your employee’s boss is, indeed, anti-social. This isn’t some lame excuse from your employee. If that’s the case, it sounds like your executive sponsor needs to have a chat with the employee’s disapproving boss.

In the meantime, here are some action items that you can take with your employee.

1. Help Your Employees Create Goals for Their Social Media Use.

When you’re on-boarding employees, help your employees set realistic, professional goals. If your employees are in HR and want to attract new top talent, what tactics should the employees use? How many new hires do they want to add to the talent pipeline each month using social media? Go over these kinds of questions with your advocates.

2. Include testimonials from their fellow coworkers.

Use your marketing know-how. You know that testimonials help customers buy your product. Well, testimonials can help your employees feel comfortable with your advocacy program. If prospective advocates hear how social media helped their co-workers, it might ease their fears.

3. Introduce Your Executive Sponsor.

Maybe the employee’s boss is skeptical, but someone in upper management is championing your cause. Have your executive sponsor introduce himself or herself. That way, your employees understand that the company backs their social media efforts.

Getting Employee Buy-in

Getting your employees to join your advocacy program is all about education. You have to educate them on the benefits of social media for work, as well as your company’s overall commitment to social.

In short, employee advocacy is a long-term investment in your employees’ professional development. That’s why you’re doing it.

Good luck getting your employees on board. Let us know your challenges for getting employee buy-in in the comments below!

-Mark

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Image Credit: Ethan Lofton

When we launched the beta version of Trapit back in 2011, it was with the lofty ambition to create a uniquely personalized web for each and every person. We knew that lurking beyond the shallow social echo chamber, crappy search results, memes, and trends is a vast undiscovered web of high-quality, original content with no way of reaching its intended audience, an audience of people frustrated with the growing lack of personal relevance in the web experience and their inability to connect with good content on the subjects most important or interesting to them.

It wasn’t until we built and started using an early version of Trapit that we realized just how big this undiscovered web really is, and how much of that good stuff we’d been missing. Great content that we didn’t know existed simply because it wasn’t deemed important enough by our social networks – or didn’t show up on the first (or second, fifth, tenth…) page of search results. Since our launch we’ve helped tens of million of people connect with hundreds of millions of pieces of content through our award-winning user experiences on web and mobile. What’s better is that we’ve made a difference in people’s lives, from the troubled patient who discovered an experimental cancer drug trial, to the celebrity chef who is using Trapit discoveries to fight childhood obesity and diabetes, to the teacher whose curriculum leverages Trapit to teach digital literacy and expose students to topical content in support of lesson plans.

Perhaps the most fortuitous trend to emerge from our “free app” experiment is the outpouring of interest we receive from businesses ranging from the titans of media, manufacturing, professional services, retail and technology to visionary start-up companies, all looking to tell their own stories and enhance their own customer experiences through the use of Trapit. Clearly our unique approach to content discovery and distribution struck a nerve with the so-called enterprise, presenting us with a path to create a sustainable and profitable business model. Sometimes it’s easy to forget here in the Silicon Valley, but making money is one of the reasons you start a business after all.

What became abundantly clear from the initial engagements with our new business friends is that enterprise customers demand enterprise-grade solutions, far more capable than our free “consumer” offering. So we rolled up our sleeves and got to work building a new, super version of Trapit we now call the Content Curation Center – chock full of advanced capabilities, customization options and analytics. Our customers love it and Trapit content discoveries now reach an audience of over 100 million people a month through their implementations.

This is all very exciting, and while we are as ambitious as a team can be, we must face the realities of our small size. It is imperative to our success and our ability to provide the ongoing innovation and quality of service our business customers demand that we maintain a rigorous focus. It’s true that in the time we’ve been working on the Content Curation Center, we’ve left the free service untouched, no longer reflective of our latest technology advancements nor our standard of quality. After an extended deliberation and with heavy hearts, we’ve decided to end the availability of our free “consumer” apps for web and iPad effective Wednesday, January 15, 2014.

We sincerely appreciate your patronage and support over the past few years and wish you well in your pursuit of great content.

– Hank, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer

Content marketing is a lot like cooking. With the right ingredients, the right measurements, and the right recipes, you’ll be able to serve up scrumptious morsels of content to your audience.

This week, Addvocate and Trapit merged. Together, the combined company provides you with the ingredients, utensils, and appliances you need to become a maître cuisinier of content.

In the graphic below, you’ll see how you can take our technologies’ ingredients and meld them with the tastes of your company. That way, you can deliver piping hot content to your hungry audience at the right time and in the right places.

Let’s take a look at the infographic closer. First up, the ingredients…

Ingredients

1. A hearty content strategy

Your content strategy is like salt. From salty pretzels to savory treats like chocolate chip cookies, every recipe needs salt. Similarly, every content team needs a strategy.

Unfortunately, only 35% of content marketers have a documented content marketing strategy. Which means that a lot of people are committing random acts of content.

To help you develop a strategy and tactics, we created an interactive content curation workbook, which you can download and fill out.

2. A heaping spoonful of content sources

Created content is important for any business. You need your e-books, customer testimonials, and case studies. But most marketers are not able to create enough content. The Aberdeen Group has found that 68% of marketers are unable to create enough content to satiate their audience.

So, what do companies do? They rely on content from other sources. Heck, even those marketers who can create enough content could benefit from some third-party content.

Why? Sharing only branded content is like eating only Snickers bars for the rest of your life. At first, gobbling up nougat, caramel, peanuts, and chocolate for every meal might sound appetizing. But after a few days, you will have quite the tummy ache.

The same is true of sharing only branded content. Your followers will get sick of reading branded post after branded post, and they will begin to file those posts away as corporate spam. To break up the monotony, it’s wise for marketers to share third-party content. In fact, the Aberdeen Group has done a study on this subject. They found that best-in-class sellers rely heavily on content, especially third-party content, to close deals.

With Addvocate-Trapit’s library of over 100,000 sources, you can find the third-party content that you need, and you can co-mingle it with your created content.

3. An assortment of publishing channels

This goes back to your content strategy. Where are you going to serve up your piping hot content?

To give you a few ideas, you can create e-mail newsletters. You can share content on your social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. You can share content internally to educate your team.

Those are just a few examples. The most creative people will find new ways and innovative techniques.

4. Your executive curatorial chefs

Someone needs to oversee the cooks in the kitchen. Many times, the best content marketing team will have a few people overseeing their recipes so that you have different opinions and perspectives. Does this taste too salty? Is this too sweet? Is this too hot?

But remember: Nothing gets done if you have too many cooks in the kitchen.

5. A handful of helpers

In order to get your message out there, you need a human face. You need helpers who will promote your brand’s messages and represent your brand well.

Did you know that 90% of people trust recommendations from people they actually know? So, why not have your employees support your marketing efforts by sharing your messages with their peers?

Directions

1. Plan it.

Your content strategy needs some planning. Think of it like creating a menu. You need to think about the flavors and foods your customers will want? In the case of content, what themes and types of content will your audience want?

To help you formulate your content menu, here’s a page from our content curation workbook.

Download the rest of the workbook here

2. Discover it.

There are 1,600 varieties of bananas alone, and scientists continually make new varieties. In a similar fashion, people keep making more and more content.

Every minute:

• Facebook users share nearly 2.5 million pieces of content.
• Twitter users tweet nearly 300,000 times.
• Instagram users post nearly 220,000 new photos.
• YouTube users upload 72 hours of new video content.
• Apple users download nearly 50,000 apps.
• Email users send over 200 million messages.

That’s quite the smorgasbord of content. In order to sift through the content and find the tastiest items on the internet, you’re going to need some help. Through our product’s machine learning and artificial intelligence, our platform shrinks the internet, and it learns your tastes, making it easier to find what you and your buyers want, when you want it.

3. Curate it.

Most chocolate chip cookies are good, but there’s nothing quite like your grandmother’s special recipe. Bakers and chefs have to leave their mark on their food. And the same is true of your content. You have to add something memorable – a spicy point of view, a sweet certain tone of voice, or a salty remark.

In short, don’t be bland.

4. Share it.

Don’t hoard all the good stuff for yourself. When you create or discover a real treat, share it with others. The channels that you use will depend largely on your company’s goals and profile. You may want to tap into Facebook’s 1 billion users who are looking to be entertained. Or maybe LinkedIn’s more “serious” platform is for you.

Remember: You shouldn’t serve soup on a plate, nor should you serve the same content across all social channels.

For instance, your LinkedIn followers may want to read industry news and how-to posts, but your Pinterest audience is going to want infographics and photos.

5. Amplify it.

Expedite your created and curated content to your waiters and helpers, and let them pass it along to their followers. Let them be the “front of the house” for you.

Trust me, you’re going to need their help.

Right now, the reach of brands is plummeting. But individual users still can reach their audiences. In fact, they can reach an audience that is 10 times larger than what your brand is reaching through its social channels. That’s a lot of reach. Why not use them?

6. Analyze it.

Some recipes are great and are worth repeating without making any changes. Others need small adjustments. And let’s face it, there are some recipes that are total duds you simply have to ditch.

When creating and curating content, you have to figure out what works. With the analytics and reporting capabilities of Addvocate-Trapit, you can determine what success looks like for your content strategies.

Ready to start cooking the perfect content meal?

You can read more about how Trapit works and how Addvocate works. If you’re interested in either product, feel free to contact us to request more information.

We look forward to hearing from you soon!

-Mark

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Image via

Earlier this week we talked about the problem of “the buried web” – vast archives (by traditional or digital publishers) of great content that remains largely undiscovered because of the minute-by-minute pace of the Internet. But how can a publisher transform that content from a pile of old news into something of value to an audience? Readers are still going to want the latest news, to be sure, but much of that archived content is still relevant and could enhance more recent discoveries by providing depth or context. Sometimes recency is incredibly important, but other times it’s relevancy that should be paramount. Finding what is new and buzz-worthy on the Internet is a cake-walk, but discovering quality content that is unexpected and pertinent to your interests is a whole other challenge.

We all know how to Google search. You type in what you’re looking for and receive results often based on recency and page rank. Usually what pops up is anything but unexpected. It’s useful, yes, but it’s not the ideal way to get the best content. Instead we may look to favorite websites, blogs, or even a discovery app like Trapit, to get a more relevant or personalized view of a topic than a typical search engine would provide. But even while making an effort to gather content based on relevancy to the topic, we are still confronted with recency of publication as the main determiner of what we see or don’t see. Sometimes that is a pitfall of the digital-content age. Bringing archival content back into these spaces could help by giving readers a much fuller perspective on the topics they care about.

If I am looking for interesting recipes for pickling vegetables, for example, I would be happy to see a well-written article from a few years back alongside a new blog post, as long as both were of high quality. The same goes for DIY projects or great rock climbing spots. If I’m interested in these topics, the likelihood is that I am much more concerned with the content itself than the date it was originally published. I’m looking for the cream of the crop, not just content from the past week.

And even when recency is a concern, archival content can still provide context for important topics. News and entertainment are both very timely categories. But if I’m reading about the protests in Egypt, finding stories of the country’s past struggles alongside the breaking news would be a welcome sight. The same would apply to discovering a great older essay about Woody Allen’s unique film-making style while I read reviews of his latest film. The use of archival content alongside more newsworthy stories is something we don’t see very often – but it’s something that could teach us and help us understand the bigger picture.

The lightning-speed pace of online content is here to stay, but if quality and relevancy are what we are really getting at, the use of archival content alongside what’s recent is definitely worth considering. Despite what the Internet might try to tell us, the best user experience will come from well-rounded content discovery that places relevancy and context at the top of the priorities list.

-Kelly