An Inbound Marketing Case Study: #SocialSuccess

The Social Success website that you're on right now is actually a case study in social media marketing, content marketing and what some people call 'inbound marketing'.

I presented our experiences at the Technology For Marketing conference in London in March 2012 and I thought I'd share the slides here, too. The presentation discusses a changing landscape that we as marketers find ourselves in, as people don’t buy like they used to. Instead there is a new purchase journey for prospects that is:

Search initiated
Social powered
Buyer-controlled

Companies need to look at their current strategies and determine if their marketing and sales fit into this new journey.

The slide deck was designed to be presented so not all the information is on the slides – but I think you'll get the idea. (Just so you know, the '90/10' rule on slide 15 is our take on the 80/20 rule that says 80% of your content marketing should be about customers and 20% about your products. For Social Success, we made this more like 90/10!).

Our task is to work out how best to harness these opportunities for the simultaneous benefit of customers and our organisations. In order to do this effectively we need to understand our customers' preferences and to up-skill our employees to become 'knowledge workers' who can meet the needs of customers who want increasingly complex issues resolved fast.

I also included some of our metrics for the site and the results so far.

Hope you enjoy the slides – and do post comments if you have anything to add.

#SocialSucess - An Inbound Marketing Case Study

Kieran Flanagan

Inbound Marketing Manager

Kieran Flanagan is responsible for salesforce.com's Inbound Marketing strategy in EMEA. He works across holistic strategies to produce transformational marketing that attracts visitors naturally through mediums like search engines, the blogosphere and social media. Kieran is also a keen writer and can be found across the web guest posting on all things inbound marketing.

On Twitter: @searchbrat On LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kieranjflanagan