Hatty has been with us at Carbon Global for almost two years now and she was recently appointed as the Social Media Manager of Carbon Global’s new brand, spikizi. For this reason, I wanted to tap into her experience of doing both business development and social media to understand the links between both activities.
Elodie: You have been managing the spikizi social media operations from an early stage. What insights has it given you and how has that changed your views on your Business Development Manager role at Carbon Global?
Hatty: Working with Henry and Sam has been very insightful in understanding founders’ mindsets. What strikes me most is the undeniable energy and passion that founders have for their product and the amount of time that they invest into their brand. It has really highlighted to me the risk that they take on hiring a company to work for them. And that’s also the case for Carbon Global’s B2B clients who have a high level of trust when investing in us to take care of their business development strategy and win work. The experience has made me value, even more, the time that I spend on accounts as I have a better understanding of the stakes involved and how hard it is for our clients to have grown to where they are at now. You put everything into starting your own brand!
Elodie: What correlation did you find between business development and social media? How useful is it for the business development and social media team to work together?
Hatty: In both cases, we are trying to reach the right people. In business development, we want to schedule meetings with our target audience and in social media, we want followers that have a genuine interest in our brand. Therefore, the target has to be right so it is invested in the product or service. By working together and identifying a common target, it is easier to identify the contacts that are not quite right and so any research or insights are great to share between the teams.
Elodie: What is the difference between reaching out to prospects in business development rather than via social media?
Hatty: Online, you cannot instantly speak with your followers and those liking your posts so it can be difficult to understand their objections or potential challenges. They may have questions but not ask them. So you’re basically going out into some sort of no man’s land and just throwing things out there to see what lands, it’s much more of a reiterative process. Whereas at least in our B2B lead generation strategies, you actually have conversations and obviously you can pick up questions and have meaningful conversations. You get that connection with someone (or not!) and you get to know quite quickly if they want to keep going. Through social media, it just takes longer to build that up.
Elodie: I think it is also easier for targets to follow an account and see posts from time to time instead of investing time and effort in a phone conversation. That is the tricky part, identifying who is truly interested in the brand and who will eventually buy from the brand.
Elodie: Do you have any tips on how to best collaborate between the business development team and the social media team? How can they best work hand in hand?
Hatty: From social media activities, you obviously gather information on who is engaging with your posts and who is following you and that information can be passed on to the business development team who can go and reach out to them directly which improves their lead generation strategy. At Carbon Global, for one of our B2B clients, we went through the contacts who engaged on LinkedIn and expressed interest in the webinars our clients organised. At Carbon Global, for one of our B2B clients, we went through the contacts who engaged on LinkedIn and expressed interest in the webinars they organised and relayed that information to our business development team. The other way round works too, from our conversations, we can also spot common questions or objections and feed those to the social media team so they can address these online with a targeted message and win new leads.
Elodie Smith
Strategic Operations Manager
Carbon Global