Proving social media's business value is one of the most difficult jobs that a social media marketer has. Luckily, there are quite a few platforms and tools that can help them tie social to sales and give their sales teams the best chance of converting prospects to customers.
Here are four platforms to consider if your brand is trying to tie its social media efforts to actual sales (and what savvy digital enterprise isn't?).
Recently acquired by Axciom for a reported $310 million, LiveRamp can measure the impact of online ad campaigns on in-store purchases. Further, LiveRamp makes a brand's customer database actionable by putting it to use (like for personalization based on browsing behavior, past purchases) in display, search, social, etc., which can improve conversions, engagement and more.
Salesforce Contact Management allows brands to get a complete view of their customers, including activity history, key contacts, customer communications and internal account discussions. When it comes to social, enterprises can tap into activity on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to not only get a good sense of what customers are saying about their products or services, but also pulls social profile information so sales teams can be confident about their approach to converting the lead (shown below on the app).
Most consumers still believe that phone calls are the quickest way to get a response from a brand, which provides a great opportunity to tie social to sales. LogMyCalls is a service that provides different tracking numbers for a company's Facebook page, LinkedIn profile and other social media platforms to gain insight into which social media platforms drive phone calls.
Zoho CRM brings Facebook and Twitter profiles directly into a company's CRM so that its sales staff can connect with prospects from within the social stream and have more personalized conversations with them. For example, a sales person could stay up-to-date with a customer's interests and updates (and even comment or like the posts from within the CRM) to find cues that can help him or her to start an effective conversation with them. What's more, Zoho will store notes for follow-up actions and even assign tasks and alerts to help close the sale, which will of course all be documented within Zoho - thus, tying social to sales.