JMRConnect's CEI platform: Sabre Award for Best Marketing Technology

The Holmes Report's 2017 North America In2 SABRE Awards program targets the customer engagement and marketing world, highlighting new and innovative ways brands are engaging and influencing their audiences at a time where face time is at a premium.

Among the winners was influencer communications firm JMRConnect, which won Best Marketing Technology for its JMRConnect CEI platform. CEI, which stands for Connect. Engage. Influence., is a customizable employee advocacy platform that is customizable, easy to use, and quantifies both engagement and ROI.

 

The B2B world is at a marketing crossroads, with content being a major initiative, but getting content out to the right individuals becoming increasingly more difficult.  The age-old quality vs. quantity debate is part of the puzzle.  Pushing out more content means increased opportunities for engagement but, it also includes greater risk in that if brands push out less relevant content, they’ll alienate prospects.  On the other hand, pushing out quality, targeted content increases the likelihood of engagement, but likely with a small audience.

The good news is that business decision makers are looking for content to help them grow their businesses. Among IT professionals, for instance, content consumption is up 38 percent year over year, according to a new report from Netline.

But, content relevance reigns supreme, and remains critical to reaching the right audience.  SearchMetrics reports that, whereas keywords, while still important, aren’t increasing in importance as much as relevance is.  It’s very logical, actually, given the volume of content being driven through social feeds – if you’re anything close to an avid social user, you see your feeds scroll across your screens much faster than you can possibly keep up, and even searching by keyword means sorting through volumes of results to find what is most important to you.  With keyword stuffing, click-bait, and fake news all abundant, it’s not an easy task.

To address the content dilemma, JMRConnect developed its CEI platform, which helps marketers maximize the value of the content they create and raise its organic visibility across public social forums, including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, distributing them directly to a relevant audience in a way that prequalifies the content making shaping influence easier.

JMRConnect’s application to the In2 Sabre Awards was so impressive that it elicited comments from judges at the awards gala included comments like, “I want it!!! Fabulous customer tool that made strong impact.”

“People tend to listen more when a message comes from their peers, whereas messages directly from a corporate entity tend to be tuned out as self-promoting and sales-oriented.  CEI not only helps us exponentially increase the visibility of our posts, it also ensures that important news and information is kept consistent when our employees share company news on social media platforms,” said Samantha Osowski, vice president of marketing, Yorktel. 

By leveraging tools to increase and reward engagement and sharing, JMRConnect CEI connects brands with a loyal and qualified audience, bypassing the daily screening of content that takes place across other B2B and social channels – but, importantly, it does integrate popular social channels into its proprietary platform, so users don’t have to recreate the wheel.  By defining a concrete interest group within the CEI platform, JMRConnect helps brand advocates invite followers into the program through personalized invitations and links, instantly making them part of a community of like-minded, targeted participants that then also become deputy brand advocates, so to speak.  The content instantly becomes relevant.

“Because posts shared through JMRConnect appear as first-person recommendations, not as advertisements or promoted content, the platform helps brands build credibility and expand reach,” she added.  “One click takes content viral, extending earned media value while promoting approved brand messages on multiple channels.”

In addition to increasing the visibilty and value of earned media, the CEI platform empowers social selling by providing sales leaders and teams tools to find and share branded content easily to influence buying decisions for existing prospects and new leads.  Analytics capabilities increase ROI by allowing leadership to measure engagement and run cost-benefit analyses.  The platform, says JMRConnect CEO Mostafa Razzak, fills a gap in the corporate commuications landscape between content creation and sales & marketing.

“PR and corporate communications professionals are too often fighting an uphill battle when it comes to convincing employees to share company content on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, and in many cases, making them aware of media coverage, case studies, whitepapers and other content,” he says.  “CEI solves these problems by not only pushing this information to them, but by also empowering them to share on multiple social media platforms with a single click. They no longer have to take time away from their jobs to search for this information and create individual posts. Each post is developed for them and tailored for the respective platforms. Amplifying visibility and quantifying the value of each campaign has never been easier."