On June’s edition of The New World of New Biz, Founder Katie Street was joined by an amazing panel of industry experts including…

Andy Lambert, Sr. Manager Product Marketing at Adobe

Ed Knights, Head of New business & Marketing at Born Social

Dan Knowlton Co-Founder & CMO at Knowlton

Together they discussed how you can step up your agency’s social media strategy in order to create more inbound leads.

The following was covered during the session:

What trends should you be utilising on social

Andy led the conversation by saying there are 4 macro trends to think about, although social media trends change all the time, there are some key macros agencies should be tapping into. “The first trend is the broader creator economy and the shift towards that. The latest figures show that 200 million people are now part of the creator economy. That may seem quite disconnected from B2B, but the reason that’s so important is it’s creating microcosms of so many small, niche communities which create incredible opportunities for us to scale our business through word of mouth. It has a huge impact because it’s leading all the social media platforms in terms of the features that they’re developing”. Ed then injected by agreeing with the idea that there is a difference between consumer facing and business facing social, however the difference is getting closer together. Katie then concluded the conversation by saying that social media can seem overwhelming and hard to keep on top of however the more consistent you are the more you see results.

How do you find out what is keeping your audience up at night and how often do you evolve your marketing based on other trends?

Ed led this conversation by saying that “developing a strong feedback loop is the way we do it at Born. Our information to answer that question comes from loads of different sources. First and foremost, all the new business conversations we have are the first thing that fuel our next quarters content. One of the challenges we’re constantly hearing about, whether that’s operational challenges which in agency can solve, whether it’s marketing challenges and then can we map product and content around that. We then often probably giving away the secret sauce here but we tend to test blogs before doing event content. So we do monthly webinars but if you are sneaky and go through our blogs you will see that we normally preclude an event piece of content with a blog a few months before. That informs whether we want to do it as an event or not because it would genuinely see fairly good traction from an engagement perspective. So that’s another good little feedback loop we have and then we tend to see again from webinar sign ups, high numbers on certain content and that may then inform future service and product updates” Dan then contributed to the discussion and added “to answer your question about what keeps your audience up at night, you speak to them! We started doing this a few years ago actually, interviewing and speaking to our current customers and asking them once we’ve completed the project so we’re not being annoying, by like why did you choose us? What made you actually want to work with us?” Katie then wrapped up the topic by concluding that “it’s so obvious isn’t it, but people forget to do it. Like how often are you asking your clients what they truly value from you, not what you think they value?”

Do you need a dedicated social media team?

Dan led by saying “Our production team are obviously creating the content so very involved in our marketing and social, and the creative team are coming up with concepts and writing scripts. I’d say 10 out of the 11 in house working on our marketing, but we’ve also got a wider network of freelancing stuff we bring in for external projects and things.” Ed then contributed by sharing his answer “We have a senior marketing manager and a junior marketing manager on the team. They’re running full time on marketing alongside myself, but I would say people at Born social who have either written event content, been on events, written blogs, write papers in the last year is probably 40 out of 100 at least. If we extended that to writing case studies and award entries you could probably push that up to 50, 60 basically the entire client services team will be involved in producing content. The big thing I found was the difference at Born social compared with previous agencies. I’m hearing a lot more agencies are doing this would be my best advice for any person running a marketing agency, get it resourced. Exactly what Dan said, get it resourced like a client and carve out time. I think it used to be very much that marketing content was a favour. It was “build your career, build your profile” but I think you give people the time and the space to do good work, just like they do for the clients it’s going to go so much better”.

June’s webinar was full of so many other incredible insights which you can catch up on here. And don’t miss out on July’s webinar where we’ll be discussing why building relationships is the solution to your sales problem, secure your free place here.

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