Microsoft Teams Plus Social27 AI Equals Epic Marketing

While every marketer faces unique challenges, a little artificial intelligence (AI) mixed with Microsoft Teams can help every marketer succeed and thrive.

Don’t you feel that you’re always playing catch up? As if everything should have been done yesterday?

Today’s marketers are bombarded with engagement metrics, content creation, platforms and apps, with little direction in terms of actionable, prescriptive data. They’re often bogged down on manual data entry and creating reports for stakeholders which takes valuable time away from creating stunning content that speaks to their buyers. Moreover, it’s often impossible for marketers to tell whether the leads they’re passing off to sales are truly qualified.

The marketing industry is a whirlwind that requires constant shifts in strategy with social media platforms and search engines changing their algorithms monthly and buyers’ expectations growing even higher about the content they consume and how companies engage with them. It’s time that AI (artificial intelligence) banded with familiar tools to take some of the burden off marketers’ work and allow them to focus on the things that are most important, and that they excel at.

A day in the life of a typical marketer…

While every company, industry and sector differ, marketers across organizations share a few things in common. Marketing professionals, especially managers and executives, have an array of tasks and priorities, burning through multiple hats every day.

They work with the executive team on setting KPIs (key performance indicators) and core strategies, PR and sales on aligning campaign messaging, and their marketing colleagues on driving social channels, digital campaigns and live events. With such a renaissance position in the organization, marketers have to be data-literate, design savvy and excel at collaboration and communication while always staying privy to shifting trends in their field.

Many marketers start their day before stepping foot into the office by reading up on new research and articles about marketing. Or, simply scrolling their personal social media home pages while they strategize on how to grow their individual influence online and leveraging it for their organization’s benefit.

When they do make it into the office they start by updating and analyzing spreadsheets where they keep all their data around engagement, conversions, lead qualifications, customer survey responses, target audiences, KPIs and a multitude of other metrics.

Next, they might sync with the marketing team to ensure they’re on schedule for publishing and posting based on their content calendars and gaining any pertinent insights from online interactions, email campaigns and other online assets. They may debrief with the event team about a recent event or sync on the progress of an upcoming event. They’ll look at the design team’s latest work to give feedback or make any adjustments decided upon by the executive board.

Hunkering down on their own work, they’ll collaborate on messaging based platforms on new initiatives and start brainstorming new campaigns. After syncing with the executive team on metrics, core strategy and new directions, they’ll delegate tasks to the marketing team adjusting the plans set earlier and putting new priorities forward.

Finally, they’ll go back to their dashboards, spreadsheets and documents to make the necessary updates to guides, plans and reports. Sound like a lot? Imagine how your marketing managers are feeling! But don’t fret yet. We’ll show you how a combination of Microsoft Teams and Social27 AI services can make your marketing managers’ lives easier and their efforts more effective. First, let’s outline some of their key challenges.

Five Key challenges marketers face

1. Information and assets are scattered

Often, a marketer has projects and information scattered across the internet and their laptops — a publishing calendar, an event calendar, a style guide, excel sheets, analytics dashboards… the list goes on. Keeping all these sheets, guides, etc. up-to-date can be quite a burden taking valuable time away from their creative pursuits.

2. Collaboration gets messy

Marketing professionals, managers, executives and all the way down to the community managers are in constant collaboration. With so many directions and pivots making their way from one group to another, feedback is often missed, and directions misunderstood, which can end up feeling a lot like playing ‘ The Telephone Game.’

3. Lack of actionable insights

Marketers have access to analytics across social platforms, email platforms, website analytics, etc. However, these analytics dashboards don’t often prescribe actions to take or ways to adjust their content/strategy to be more successful based on the way their users engage with their content.

4. ROI is unclear

Many marketers are at a loss when it comes to measuring the actual ROI (return on investment) of their efforts. Percentage of followers is a far cry from an accurate metric and even the number of leads passed to sales can be misleading. Website conversion doesn’t give the big picture either. Where can marketers turn without comprehensive data on this critical KPI?

5. Not fully aligned with sales

There has long been a contentious relationship between sales and marketing. In part because marketers aren’t passing the most qualified leads to sales. On the other side, sales representatives often don’t align their value propositions to marketing messages nor share marketing assets that are relevant to their prospects — often because they aren’t aware these assets exist.

What are the top 5 items on every marketer’s wish list?

The above challenges pose mounting obstacles for marketers trying to succeed in a competitive market place. To overcome these challenges marketers need:

1. A central location to store all their guides, reports and other marketing assets that’s easy to access when they need them.

2. The ability to easily track and record brainstorming sessions and other collaborate conversations with the assets related to those projects to ensure every idea, piece of feedback and pivot made is accounted for.

3. Comprehensive insights that not only show them what has happened but what their best next step is to improve their efforts and achieve their goals.

4. A simple, straightforward way to measure the ROI of their marketing efforts and tools so they can prove their work’s success as well as cut their losses where necessary.

5. A streamlined way to ensure they are passing the most qualified leads to sales and that marketing messages fully align with sales representatives’ value propositions.

How Microsoft Teams plus Social27 AI can help marketers be productive and successful

Microsoft Teams is a godsend for marketers, which addresses a few of the key challenges listed above. With Teams, marketers can keep all their assets and conversations in one place. It’s all organized to their liking, they can add all relevant team members and stakeholders to their Team and they can keep their assets and conversations side-by-side to ensure nothing is ever missed or overlooked.

Team members can also get notified about any comments, conversations or important updates that are made on a document or they can simply reference the Team conversation to get caught up in seconds.

It can also provide part of the solution to align better with sales by making sure they’re looped into important conversations and messaging changes. Much of the remaining challenges marketers face rely on the data they have access to and their ability to interpret that data.

Luckily, artificial intelligence (AI) can collect and analyze data then provide prescriptive suggestions based on how buyers will likely behave. This is where Social27 AI solutions steps in. Social27 AI Assistant, Playlist, Conversational Intelligence and dashboard can be added as a tab to a Microsoft Teams Team where marketers can get a wealth of valuable, actionable insights.

Social27 Playlist

Social27 Playlist is a content delivery system that allows potential buyers to binge on marketing content the same way they would on a streaming service like Netflix. Powered by AI, Playlist helps marketers push potential buyers through the marketing funnel faster by surfacing the content most relevant to their interests. It provides a great user experience to your Playlist’s visitors and provides marketers with invaluable insights never before available to them, including:

· An account level view of who has viewed the Playlist content

· What content they consumed

· How long they engaged with the content

This not only allows marketers to pass more qualified leads onto sales, but also give them pertinent information about what those leads are interested in to make sure sales representatives are having relevant, context-driven conversations with leads.

Social27 AI Assistant on Teams

Social27 AI Assistant is a virtual assistant that can live on a Playlist to give potential buyers further assistance while accelerating the marketing funnel even faster. Social27 AI Assistant can get an even more refined understanding of the buyer’s needs and can answer their questions, direct them to the information they want and schedule an appointment with a sales representative. On top of this, sellers get transcripts of the whole conversation, so they know exactly what potential buyers are looking for before they hop on a call with them.

Meanwhile, through the dashboard, marketers get a comprehensive view of how many conversations AI Assistant has, how many buyer questions were resolved, what the buyers’ attitudes during the conversations are (mainly positive or negative), and so much more. Marketers can also see the most frequent words that arise during these conversations, letting them know what kind of content they need to create or elaborate on.

Proof of ROI

The direct line Social27’s insights provide allow marketers to trace the buyer’s journey from awareness to sale, ending the guess work about the effectiveness of their efforts. Together with Teams, Social27 AI empowers marketers to work in one space from the seed of an idea, all the way through to the blossoming of a sale. Marketers can now focus more on their creative work with their processes better streamlined and get actionable insights that let them make the best content to meet their buyers’ needs.

To learn more about how Social27 AI services and Teams can combine to accelerate your marketing funnel and pass off more qualified leads to sales, go to social27.com today.