Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies. Michelle Krasniak

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      Courtesy of HCSS

      At this point, the company’s various marketing efforts produce hundreds of leads a month for sales staff to work on. Moss observes that “We’ve refined our funnel so well that our sales teams only work leads that we deem are qualified through our lead scoring.”

      HCSS now manages numerous social media accounts split among its core business accounts, career topics, customer support, and the “I Build America” campaign. That’s a lot to manage with only two full-time employees, some part-time interns, and Moss leading the effort. To help, they rely on multiple tools. One of the social media interns, Jack Briscoe, had the responsibility of constantly monitoring notifications to see whether an urgent response is required. He used Google Alerts, Iconosquare to monitor Instagram, and Hootsuite to monitor Facebook and Twitter. Hootsuite is used also to repost construction photos on Instagram, and MeetEdgar is used to schedule cross-posts by category on Twitter and Facebook.

      HCSS also uses a variety of tools to track the path from prospect to sale, starting with marketing automation software from HubSpot, which helps with lead scoring. Qualified prospects are then sent to sales using Salesforce. To follow customers’ paths through sales funnels, Moss also relies on Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, as well as Crazy Egg heat maps and video heat-mapping software. (A heat map is a color-coded display of data, such as where customers look on a web page or which links they click.) For social media, Moss uses data from Google Analytics and HubSpot to track leads and customer conversions.

      “When you know … how much you are spending on each social media platform and the value of a customer, you [can] calculate your CPL, or cost per lead… . Find the source that produces the best CPL and lowest CPC, cost per customer,” says Moss. “That will help you refine your social media spending for ads, sponsored content, or retargeting.” However, from his point of view, SEO traffic still retains the lead in ROI.

      Moss fervently recommends starting with a persona, so marketers know exactly which marketing techniques will work, and how, when, and where different personas like to engage with content. He pursues that approach by targeting content that specifically addresses different personas’ problems, needs, issues, and challenges. For HCSS, this method has led to a 300 percent growth in organic traffic versus branded traffic over the past three years.

      Of course, a company this size has a robust marketing mix that also includes email, trade shows, print ads, newsletters, video-publishing platforms, and social media retargeting ads. Although Moss doesn’t think that having social media icons on a website matters much now, he does think it helps to cross-promote content among social media channels. For example, he cross-promotes user-generated images from I Build America to Twitter and Facebook. What makes a difference, he contends, is whether people on Facebook, for example, will share an interesting post with their own followers.

      HCSS has also experimented with advertising on social media. It tried a three-month Facebook look-alike campaign and monitored the conversions and CPL. At the end, Moss decided that the CPL for its B2B market was way too high to sustain. On the other hand, a sponsored content campaign on LinkedIn drove more targeted customers at a lower CPL, even though the cost per click was five to ten times as high as on Facebook.

      Both Briscoe and Moss have important insights to share. Briscoe reminds people to keep posting and experimenting. “Don’t be afraid to not have the perfect content because that doesn’t exist. You can’t please everyone with just a single post,” he says.

      Adds Moss, “Always remember that your true north is your customer; they are your guiding compass and will tell you all you want to know. You just have to ask.”

Following is a list of sites that make up HCSS’s web presence: