SICK AG
About: Franziska Lehmann - Social Media Manager
Franziska Lehmann is the Social Media Manager at SICK AG, one of the world’s leading producers of sensors and sensor solutions for industrial applications. Her area of expertise lies in applying successful social media strategies to increase and build brand awareness, generate leads, and create conversations for SICK AG. She plays a key role in implementing a content marketing strategy via targeted campaigns on social channels, to ensure customers are receiving content that fits their specific interests and business needs.
1. Please outline your social media strategies that you apply to enhance SICK AG brand presence?
SICK relies on social media to increase and build brand awareness, generate leads, and create conversation. In recent years, LinkedIn, our focus platform, has grown in potential and established itself as a reliable business network. Via this channel, we reach a large number of customers and employees, as well as future employees, with thought-leadership content, new product announcements, and organization updates. On LinkedIn, we combine both decentralization (focus pages for subsidiaries) and centrality (global SICK site) in order to focus our reach and take advantage of the targeting tools LinkedIn offers.
2. In your opinion, how does an effective social media campaign provide value for SICK AG’s products such as photoelectric sensors, safety switches etc.
A well-implemented campaign ensures that content is communicated more effectively to our target groups. We use high-level content for the general public paired with campaigns are tailored and targeted to specific groups of people. A potential customer can organically search for a product and be able to find the information they are searching for, yet at the same time, SICK will reach them with tailored content via targeted campaigns.
3. What social media methodologies are you applying to grab the attention of your target customers?
At SICK, we have a content marketing strategy that focuses on building thought-leadership and expertise in our marketplace. We deliver this content via targeted campaigns on our social channels, to ensure customers are receiving content that fits their specific interests and business needs. We also keep in mind the type of content our customers would like to engage with, whether its videos, interactive PDFs, white papers, blog posts, etc., and track these metrics to improve our content creation strategy.
4. How do you usher engaging customer experience to your company’s brand and enhance audience satisfaction through social media?
By sharing success stories through our contents, our goal is to position SICK as an expert and valuable business partner to our customer, regardless of the stage they are at in the buying cycle.
We do not typically advertise individual products, but focus on customer needs by showcasing how SICK can (and has) solve different application challenges.
We also rely heavily on our employees to be advocates for SICK by engaging with the brand and their customers on social media to enhance the journey.
5. Please share some insights on your successful campaigns.
As mentioned, we create content that addresses application challenges. We have found that by understanding our customers’ challenges, problems and questions, and by providing a solution, they are more likely to engage.
6. How do you analyze, customize campaigns and strategies to reach the desired outcomes?
We take full advantage of the advanced targeting options provided by LinkedIn to ensure that we are reaching the right audience, to begin with. From there, we are constantly making tweaks and updates based on the results. LinkedIn provides a wealth of data and by analyzing that information, we are able to make the correct adjustments for the next campaign.