5 steps to win at nearbound social

Nearbound marketing is about becoming customer-obsessed.

It’s not enough to target or attract the customers you want. Nearbound marketing is about surrounding them with the people they trust.

Nearbound social, a branch of nearbound marketing, is about creating and distributing content across social media channels with your nearbound evangelists.

It used to be that you’d create and distribute content through social channels by yourself. Now even social is a collaborative task.

Marketers are used to going to market through their channels. In the Nearbound Era, they’ll have to learn to go to market with evangelists.

Here’s Logan Lyles’ 5-step framework to winning at nearbound social:

1. Identify your nearbound evangelists
   Internal evangelists include employees, executives, and advisors. External evangelists include creators, influencers, partners, and even your customers.

2. Evaluate — are these the right people?
   To evaluate, you can use the acronym E-A-R:
   Expertise
   
   Audience
   
   Readiness

3. Activation
   Evangelism should have an official activation. Start with a kickoff, set expectations, and provide training. Evangelists aren’t set-it-and-forget-it. Your evangelists are active participants in your marketing strategy.

4. Distribute
   Ask for commitment to share ahead of time then, when the time comes, make it easy for your evangelists to share.

5. Track
   Measure results both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Creating
and distributing with your evangelists means that sometimes these campaigns will take longer. That’s okay.

Which one would you rather have: a campaign that’s shipped in 3 weeks, but only gets 300 impressions on socials? Or a campaign that’s shipped in 5 weeks, gets 1k impressions, and generates real interest for your product?

When you include nearbound evangelists, your content performs better.

Take a look at this example from Logan’s session.

Listen to the session and get the slides here.

Martech stats point to the Nearbound Era

The godfather of martech, Scott Brinker, shared an impressive stat from the Marketing Ops’ State of Marketing Ops report.

The question was: What are your most important criteria when evaluating new marketing technology?

Integrations have become table stakes by a large majority.

Now that the assumption is that you’re integrating, the next step is evolving the operational layer of partnerships. What we’ll see next is nearbound GTM.

It’s the natural progression.

Integrations opened the door to a seamless user experience. Nearbound go-to-market is the connective tissue that’ll actually make the process seamless.

Download the report here.