Oktopost-HubSpot Integration: Enrich your Marketing Campaigns with Social Engagement

It’s official, Oktopost has joined the HubSpot ecosystem as a Connect Certified Partner. With the Oktopost-HubSpot integration, B2B marketers can leverage social engagement data to build meaningful relationships with prospects and customers across email, website, and phone conversations!

To give some context, this article will walk you through the following sections:

• How HubSpot data looks before and after Oktopost
• How to set up the Oktopost-HubSpot integration
• How to leverage social engagement data in HubSpot

The Buyer Journey: What You See Vs. What Really Happens

It’s no secret that the B2B journey has changed. Customers have adopted a level of self-sufficiency and proactiveness that no longer aligns with the conventional sales model.

According to Marketo’s State of Engagement report, 35% of prospects now turn to social media, among other channels, to do their own research about your product or service well before speaking to your sales rep, let alone, making a purchase decision.

As a B2B marketer, you must keep a pulse on every audience touchpoint and connect between them to produce a unified picture of a lead’s activity, interests, and intent.

Unfortunately, most marketing automation platforms only show you half the picture. HubSpot, for example, presents lead activity from 3 key sources: website, email, and third-party data from your CRM. In other words, data from social media is either incomplete or completely non-existent, which causes major blind spots in your lead scoring, nurturing, and attribution models.

To illustrate this, let’s take a look at the following example:

On day 1, Jill does a quick Google search, discovers your company blog, and eventually fills out a web form, requesting a product demonstration.

Looking at this journey, HubSpot marketers will attribute the conversion (the demo request) to organic search. But what if we showed you what actually happened:

On day 1, Jill clicks on your tweet, which leads her to a Wall Street Journal article praising your product. 7 days later, Jill likes a post on your Facebook page. On day 14, Jill clicks on a LinkedIn post. Finally, on day 22, Jill did a quick Google search, which led her to your company blog, and eventually, to fill out the demo request web form, where she became a known lead.

Based on this complete journey, HubSpot would credit the company’s Twitter profile as the channel that sparked Jill’s interests in your product and pushed her to convert.

Unless you make all data sources visible in HubSpot, you’re left with an incomplete and inaccurate picture of your lead’s pain points, their top-of-mind interests, and how to best target them. With the Oktopost-HubSpot integration, you can finally bring this layer of social engagement into HubSpot to gain full visibility into your buyer’s journey across all channels!

HubSpot & Oktopost: A New Partnership & Integration

More than 80% of HubSpot customers are B2B companies, and the vast majority are using some sort of social media management software. As the premier social media management platform for B2B, we’re thrilled to join HubSpot and offer a best-in-breed solution to their B2B customers.

With this integration, HubSpot users gain access to social engagement data they never had before – right within their Timeline Events. They can then leverage it to build highly-targeted lead scoring, nurturing, segmentation, and attribution programs.

Whenever a social activity is detected by a known contact, Oktopost will automatically push this to HubSpot’s Timeline Events. The supported activity types include:

• Oktopost Link Click
• Oktopost Comment
• Oktopost Like
• Oktopost Mention
• Oktopost Direct Message

Each timeline event will contain detailed information and analysis about the activity. Thanks to this new dimension of social engagement, B2B marketers extract additional insights for building a personalized customer experience that pushes leads through the funnel.

Let’s take a look at the types of campaigns that B2B marketers can create with the Oktopost-HubSpot integration.

HubSpot Use Cases with Social Engagement Data

Once your integration is all set up, there are several HubSpot campaigns you can build to send the right message, to the right person, at the right time based on social engagement:

1. Score Leads Based on Social Engagement

How a lead engages with your brand on social media determines their interest-level and sales-readiness. A lead may be extremely active on your social channels, but super inactive on your website – does that mean they’re any less interested in your brand’s product or service?

Without social engagement data, you may assume that potential buyers aren’t showing interest or engaging with your brand at all. This blind spot is detrimental to the accuracy of your scoring model, and subsequently, to your lead qualification process.

With the Oktopost-HubSpot integration, you can prioritize leads’ social media touchpoints in your scoring model. Using HubSpot’s Manual Lead Scoring, you can associate any of Oktopost’s social properties with positive or negative attributes. For example, you can increase or decrease a lead’s score based on the social network they engaged on (e.g. LinkedIn vs. Facebook) and the type of interaction (link click vs. direct message).

2. Alert Sales Team of Negative Social Sentiment

In any B2B sales cycle, knowledge equals power. That’s why Inside Sales need to keep a constant pulse on prospects’ activity across all channels to understand their top-of-mind interests and pain points.

Arming Salespeople with the right data gives them vital information before they jump on a sales call. The Oktopost-HubSpot integration puts social engagement data right in your salesperson’s CRM so they can navigate a more personal conversation.

Essentially, Oktopost analyzes a range of social activity types, including incoming messages, mentions, and comments, and categorizes them as either negative, positive, or neutral sentiment. Using this information in HubSpot, you can create an automated workflow, which alerts the sales team – in real-time – of a prospect’s negative social sentiment. This way, the sales rep can promptly follow-up with the prospect to turn a negative experience into a positive one.

3. Nurture Leads Based on Social Interests

Lead nurturing is all about building relationships through relevant content. But a poor lead nurturing can do quite the opposite. Without social engagement data, you’re only nurturing leads based on first-known interest. This causes email fatigue and creates a negative experience for contacts, turning them away from your brand altogether.

Using social interest data in HubSpot, you can enroll leads in an email nurturing flow focused on content topics. For example, a lead clicks on a post about ‘GDPR’ receives a GDPR-related case study 25 minutes later. This strategy ensures you’re always providing value to contacts and pushing them in the right direction.

Get Started with the Oktopost-HubSpot Integration

If you’re a HubSpot and Oktopost user, you can set up the integration here or contact your respective customer success manager for more information. For those interested in learning more about Oktopost’s social media management platform, please visit our website or contact us directly.