Like millions of other businesses, you must be using Slack for your internal communication. However, have you ever considered using Slack for marketing? If not, you are missing out on a huge opportunity.
Slack marketing has become the next big thing. In a recent Forrester Consulting report, The Total Economic Impact™ of Slack for Marketing Teams, the researchers found the following:
Cross-functional work is an integral part of marketing, which is why marketing teams require a ''digital headquarters'' where they can bring together people, tools, and processes to achieve their common objectives. Slack serves as the headquarters. Let's learn more about how it does so.
It is true that email marketing has gained exponential momentum and is the most popular means of marketing. Why use Slack instead? Here are some reasons.
Businesses like Dow Jones, 1-800-Flowers, Cole Haan, and Hearst use Slack for marketing. So, you know you're in good company. You can check out the case studies for these businesses to see how they leverage Slack.
The first thing that comes to mind when talking about Slack is team communication. Marketing teams need to stay aligned with their strategies, and Slack provides the perfect platform for it. We'll start with communication and then go on to other use cases for Slack marketing.
Let's take two scenarios. In Scenario A, your marketing team is collaborating through a series of emails. The possible issues here are:
In Scenario B, you're using Slack. Here's how it addresses all the problems mentioned above:
When you use Slack, you can partner with your sales team or track progress with the development team. All teams can work on the same key performance indicators (KPIs) with complete context awareness. In fact, in the Slack Customer Tracking Survey for 2021, 90% of marketers agreed that Slack improved company-wide information sharing.
Slack has a useful handbook for marketing teams that you can check out here. If you have trouble aligning your marketing teams, Slack's webinar on using a combination of Smartsheet and Slack could be helpful.
Besides intra-team communication, Slack allows easy collaboration with external partners or clients. You can use Slack Connect to reach out to potential leads. So, there's no disconnect between your marketing team and sales representatives or external stakeholders.
If product launch is one of your Slack marketing objectives, you'll be happy to learn that Cole Haan credits Slack for speedy time-to-market.
Christopher Newsome, the Senior Product Developer for Advanced Concepts at Cole Haan, explains that Slack makes approvals much faster. In an industry where trends come and go like the wind, being able to successfully deliver products to market in time is crucial.
Here are some ways Slack helps Cole Haan launch its products faster:
Your business can also take a leaf out of Cole Haan's book and use Slack to launch your products faster.
As a SaaS business, customer satisfaction and retention would be among your primary concerns. Slack helps you keep your clients happy from the first touchpoint onward.
Suppose you're a SaaS startup offering a project management tool. You cater to a wide range of customers in different industries, including healthcare, tech, retail, finance, etc.
All these customers will have individual use cases for your product. So, it doesn't always make sense to feed them the same marketing messaging. Instead, you can create separate Slack channels for each industry and personalize your onboarding process.
Why? Because 99% of marketers report that personalization advances customer relationships. Isn't that the dream?
How Slack ties into this is simple. Let's stick to healthcare for this example. You can create a separate channel for healthcare professionals. Your team can share use cases, best practices, features, integrations, and tips that are specific to healthcare companies.
Do the same for each industry. You can also share new product updates in these channels. Similarly, send feedback surveys to customers in their respective channels instead of emailing them.
A big part of getting your marketing right is knowing what the customers want. You can learn that through Slack, too.
Remember how we talked about integrations earlier? JustReply is one such customer support tool that you can use to resolve your customers' issues right through Slack. Once integrated, the support team will get notified of any new support tickets raised by customers in the relevant Slack channel.
The team can then reply to these tickets directly through the Slack channel, keeping the conversation organized and easily accessible. On the one hand, this enables swift customer support. On the other hand, it creates a repository of customer data.
Here are some insights you can get through this dedicated Slack channel:
Let's say your Slack customer support communications show that retail consumers struggle with a particular feature. You can leverage that information to improve the specific feature and then share the update in the relevant Slack channel for retail customers.
Do you know how many B2B marketers use email newsletters as a content marketing tactic? 81%, according to Content Marketing Institute research. Why should you stay behind?
But instead of sending newsletters through email, you can share them on your Slack channel. You already have a channel where you share feature announcements and onboarding resources.
Why not use that same channel to share newsletters and keep your customers updated with the latest company news and product updates? Again, you can use marketing tools or Slack's built-in analytics to see how many people are engaging with your newsletters and what kind of response you're getting.
You can even ''segment'' customers by creating different channels for different segments based on industries or company size. Then, you may create personalized newsletters for each segment and share them on their respective channels. Targeted messaging could help drive a better response than a one-fits-all approach.
Being a part of different channels and communities in Slack helps identify potential leads. Being in the space with the leads enables easy communication with them.
This direct engagement with potential leads in an informal setting allows them to explore the option of collaboration without any pressure.
Alternative to shared communities and channels is hosting webinars or online workshops to generate more leads. You can place invites across different channels and communities and invite people to join your workshop. This strategy not only helps in generating leads, but leads to higher conversions.
If you didn't consider marketing through Slack earlier, that's alright. You can start now.
Here are some takeaways from the guide above that can help you curate a Slack marketing campaign:
The good news about these Slack marketing tactics is that they are not limited to a specific industry. They work in all sectors, from financial services and education to media and technology.
