Sales-led buying motions look more and more like an endangered species in the B2B world. Increasingly, buyers are learning about and evaluating products and services within their own independent social channels, a trend that many have called “dark social” or the “invisible share.”
To dive into this recent trend, Splash’s own Karyn Thompson sat down with the Director of Demand Generation at Refine Labs, Chris Glanzman. Chris helps answer our many questions about dark social – what it is, how you can begin to track it, and what you can do to leverage it in your event marketing and social strategy.
Dark social isn’t as sinister as the name may sound. While dark social isn’t a brand-new phenomenon, there can be confusion about what it actually means. Before diving into any dictionary definitions, Chris helped us “zoom out” a bit to understand better how dark social came to be:
“Information has never been more available than it is today. As the internet has matured, more information has become available and accessible through online search and other places…Buyers have started turning to sources that they potentially trust more than B2B companies in and of themselves – in the form of their peers, people in their networks or just people in similar roles who they know have used products they may be interested in.”
Chris’ commentary really summarizes the “social” part of dark social. But the “dark” part, as he continues, really just means that there’s no good tracking system for it. Even attribution and intent providers can struggle with defining dark social resources as an origin point for sales opportunities and marketing leads.
Chris advises that marketers start with self-reported attribution and then layer that information on top of what they already know about their prospects and buyers. He has some good tactics on how to really tease the most out of this self-reported attribution:
“First thing is to start with an open text field. You don't want to force your visitors to put themselves in a box or navigate your taxonomy for sources. Then, with any big marketing automation platform now, you can comb through those responses and other open text in order to structure and group that data.”
Again, Chris sets up the context for incorporating dark social into your overall events, marketing, and social strategies:
"If you take dark social and incorporate it into how you’re thinking about the rest of your marketing work, it reshapes how you think about accomplishing different things in different channels, what channels you potentially pick, and how you execute on that.”
Chris goes on to highlight the two key categories that summarize how he and his team think about dark social at Refine Labs:
