Why hootsuite is failing.
We all know Hootsuite, and we've probably all used it before; scheduling our social posts, promoting our latest campaign; but now with the rise of full blown marketing automation solutions and social listening we're clearly seeing a decay in stand alone solutions like Hootsuite.
A lot of companies are replacing all of the seperate solutions they had;
just because they want to integrate all of the data they gathered in their crm's and connect those data points to enable cross-channel digital marketing campaigns. By opting for a full-blown marketing automation solution they can employ social listening and trigger profile based responses on social activities.
An example on progressive profiling with social listening
Imagine that you're a B2B company selling an HR software solution in regards to training, by converting at an earlier point (thus creating a profile within the CRM database) we open up the possibility of "progressive profiling" for those of you unaquainted with the term, it means offering known prospects other form values as to enrich the current profile such as twitter handles or LinkedIn profile URL's (when you use a more full-blown marketing automation solution this data should be added automatically due to a lookup of the e-mail address with known web-services). Either way, you can compile an audience of such prospects within your database and monitor their usage of certain keywords; you might then for example set up an auto-responder to reply to their tweets/posts/etc. and to offer them additional content based on their keyword usage.
So to get back to the example, one of our known DMU prospects tweets about: "#DTA what are the best performing trainings in sales at the moment".. If you set your social monitoring to #trainings #sales you can set an autoreply to deliver it your latest e-book on "the top 10 best performing trainings within 'location x, y, z'" or "top 10 sales training tips" or something of that sort.
Lead scoring for the win
Upon a new conversion you'll know that the fruit is ripe for the picking; by assigning scores based on prospect activity to trigger an alert for your (inside) sales to follow up with the lead.
..So you see
As marketing automation and the need for more extensive customer information enables you as a marketeer or as an (inside) sales to grow revenue it's becoming ever more important to get an integrated view on the customer and that is exactly why; solutions like hootsuite are failing.. Not because their service has deteriorated; or that they've become irrelevant.. But only because they've failed to get acquired/integrated into a bigger part of the digital marketing spectrum.
