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How do you see social media as a touchpoint in your buying journey?

At Convert, we have three offerings: Convert Experiences, Convert Compass & Convert Nexus. We usually have different people from the same company interact with our business several times before they become customers. This takes months. Social media is one place where they reach us. We use social media to connect with potential customers right where they are. They usually have questions which we answer. Potential customers have signed up for trials and demos after connecting with us on LinkedIn. Social media also lets us boost the successes of our customers and partner agencies. These successes endorse our company and products.

Do you automate any part of your social marketing or selling? How does that work?

We use a couple of social media automations. The most important one is set off as soon as we identify a potential customer. Copper, our CRM, sends me a message to connect with the potential customer on LinkedIn. Once we connect, all our interactions are human and personal. We do not automate answering questions from potential customers. One question I routinely get when I connect with people on LinkedIn is “how does our product (Convert Experiences) deal with how Safari, the browser, works with cookies?’ Sometimes, I get very technical questions which if I can’t answer, a developer on the team will.

How has the GDPR influenced how you handle social media marketing and selling?

As a business that respects customers’ privacy, we had to rethink our social selling strategy to make sure it is complies with GDPR. Because we connect with potential customers on social media, we see their posts and updates. It can be tempting to gather all that social data but we don’t. We believe that just because we can see these posts doesn’t mean the customers have given us the consent to use them. Our team is trained to respect this when gathering data and in marketing.While this approach complies with GDPR, we can’t tailor our messages to be personal as we would like. But this has paid off in other ways. Potential customers trust us because they realize we keep our word on respecting their privacy. The trust of your customers is priceless.

How do you measure social media success?

Our measurement of social media success is still in its early stages. This is because it is hard for us to accurately measure how much money social media brings in for us right now. We still measure engagements on our social media accounts, brand visibility and how often our customers refer us to their friends and family. Referrals from satisfied customers on social media is one of our biggest successes so far.

Do you run any social media experiments?

We do. Running experiments is at the heart of what we do at Convert and we bring that into every aspect of our business. Our social seller regularly tries new hashtags, content formats and campaigns. In a recent experiment, our Holacracy Boostrapper, Morgan took over our Instagram channel to show how we work. Businesses that sell to other businesses do not often use Instagram. But we see Instagram as a great opportunity to show the human side of our company. Giving your business a human face makes it easier to gain customers and sell to them. We also ran our first Twitter AMA.We’ve learnt a lot from our social media experiments. We use Convert Compass, our inhouse tool, to plan our social media experiments. We use what we learn from current experiments to plan future ones.