Insufficient resources. That’s the excuse 70 percent of B2B companies give
to explain their dormant social media presence.
And it is an excuse. More than half of companies surveyed in BtoB magazine’s report, Emerging Trends in B-to-B Social Media Marketing: Insights from the Field, remain firmly committed to more traditional marketing communications channels, such as advertising and public relations. In other words, the resources exist; companies are just allocating them elsewhere. The report says social comprises only 5 percent of the typical B2B marketing budget.
However, for B2B companies that are active in the space and have a strong social strategy, the results are staggering. Social-savvy B2B firms gained 230 percent more leads via social media than their peers, says Ann Handley, chief content officer of MarketingProfs, an online portal for marketing advice. In fact, B2B companies that do social media well generate, on average, 17 percent of their leads from social sites efforts. (See “Content and Conversations” on pg. 23 for a full interview with Handley.)
In addition to the misallocation of resources, misguided goals prevent companies from building a successful social media presence. Most in the B2B world want social marketing to support sales, while experienced marketers
say its biggest benefit is community building. According to the BtoB report, social is a “more subtle media” that garners customer feedback, good and bad, and strengthens the relationships B2B companies have always relied on to succeed.
But instead of thinking about social media in terms of resources, sales support and marketing tactics, B2B companies should think about how they connect with customers every day to understand where social should fit into their organization. It’s a strategy that’s working well for their peers.
B2B sales are built on relationships.
B2C companies use social media to create and build relationships with customers who traditionally have had only a transactional relationship with a brand. With B2B firms, on the other hand, long-lasting, trusted relationships are the foundation of a successful sales strategy. That’s why B2B companies should have a leg up on their B2C counterparts on social channels. However, many B2B firms that use social media rank “building a community” lower on their list of goals than branding, increasing Web traffic and promotions, according to the BtoB report. That means they’re using social media wrong. It’s no wonder, then, they’d rather spend money on more traditional channels.
Interestingly enough, companies that are experienced in social media placed community
building much higher in the survey, and 21 percent have gone so far as to create customer communities. Intel, for instance, has five communities in addition to Facebook and Twitter accounts. All of Intel’s communities, open to qualified users, are actually robust blog pages, so no expensive site building is required. They achieve the excellent SEO benefits of a blog with the engagement and listening potential of a community.
While InsideScoop, a community for anyone who owns Cisco equipment, is the most
consumer-oriented of the bunch, the other four are clearly purpose-built B2B communities. The Intel Embedded Community for hardware and software developers, for instance, houses more than 2,000 pieces of content, from whitepapers to blog posts, and almost 800 discussions. The Intel Software Developers community is divided into more targeted groups. For the most part, community members are talking to each other and to company representatives; Intel is part of the conversation at every step, from troubleshooting technical problems with community members to merely joining the software shop talk.
The B2B target market is smaller and more focused.
One of BtoB magazine’s 2011 social media winners, Firehouse.com, is a trade media company for firefighters and EMS personnel. As an industry leader, the company produces a lot of content through its 75,000-circulation magazine and its website, and it has an events business, as well. Realizing the changes in media taste and consumption, however, the company implemented a Facebook campaign in the fall of 2010 to retain control of this highly targeted audience.
Today, the Firehouse.com Facebook page has more than 162,000 likes and almost a thousand talkers. It’s newsy, topical and timely, and it generates healthy levels of engagement. Once Firehouse got serious about social media—regularly supplying content and monitoring the feeds—its number of Facebook followers doubled in only six months.
B2B companies can more tightly control their social presence because there is less noise.
Given all the chatter—positive and negative—about B2C brands, they have control issues on their social media channels.
Rackspace, a hosting and cloud computing company based in San Antonio, leverages social media to communicate with customers, including the disgruntled ones. Rackspace tracks activity across the social Web to locate detractors, wherever they may be. The social media team of six engineers engages the unhappy customer, sometimes emailing or calling them personally if the issue can’t be resolved quickly and cleanly in the social space. Not only is the customer’s problem solved, the argument is no longer out in public and potentially viral. The company has 180,000 customers and 80,000 servers, so social media is staffed for 24/7 monitoring. Probably not something a consumer brand could handle.
Most B2B leads come through referrals.
Social media makes referrals from satisfied customers easier and more immediate. Aon Corp., the global insurance broker, uses the Client Promise Initiative program, which rates each customer contract against certain goals: timely service, claim assistance and so forth. This program also enables Aon to identify brand promoters in their social media platforms. But instead of asking for online recommendations, the company asks them to participate in case studies and testimonials that are used in marketing materials.
Deployed in 60 or so countries, the system has improved the aggregate promotion of Aon’s risk business by 24 percent (calculating the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors).
B2B companies rely on their reputation as experts.
B2B firms pride themselves on providing “solutions” rather than simple products. Social media is the perfect way to project a smart, responsive, reliable brand. B2B companies also rely on blogs as content engines and destinations for existing and potential customers. There, too, social media provides the marketing pull necessary to drive users to content and showcase a company’s knowledge in the more complex B2B sales environment.
General Electric Corp. uses social media to promote “the people behind our most innovative technologies” by hosting blogs from in-house experts. Each blogger at GEblogs.com has an individual social media presence—their own Twitter handle, LinkedIn profile, etc.—in addition to the main GE platforms. This broadens the reach and makes the experience more personal, and less corporate. GE is also exploring the use of Pinterest, a platform dismissed by most in B2B marketing.
Cisco uses The Network, a website that looks more like a social media page, as a content creation engine. The networking giant launched the site last year and presents the latest technology news using top-flight writers from all over the world. The content rarely mentions Cisco, even though the company refers to this as an experiment in “brand journalism.” Social media outreach using all the major platforms, with a heavy reliance on Twitter and multi-media sites like Flickr and YouTube, is deployed to create the type of user experience one would expect from a leading technology company. For instance, a nine-part series on Cities of the Future, written by such well-known authors as Wendy Tanaka, the technology editor of Forbes, includes videos that load instantly—a key tenet of user friendliness for video on the Web. Between the high-quality content and the flawless technology, you get an exceptionally sophisticated branding message. You “know” the company through what it does and how it thinks. Interestingly,
Cisco does not try to control published content. The site says, “We welcome the re-use, republication, and distribution of The Network” content, asking only for attribution. A fairly genius approach, considering that free and high-quality content are tenets of Web 2.0.
Social media can expedite the B2B sales cycle.
Most of Omni Hotels & Resorts’ social media efforts are geared toward consumers. Guests submit reviews and photos, enter
contests and look for promotions. But the high-margin meeting and conference business is crucial to the hospitality company’s bottom line. Last year, an Omni campaign used social media to target those who influence meeting planners early in the planners’ research.
Omni specifically targeted bloggers in the meeting and event industry with information and invitations to tour Omni properties, either virtually or in person. According to BtoB, the program resulted in more than 290 conversations with meeting planners and their influencers. The company reached about 70 percent of its target audience and generated six large sale leads.
B2B has a longer tail than B2C.
B2B customers are less fickle than B2C customers, which makes social media for B2B
companies more cost-effective and gives social posts a longer shelf life. (See Shelf Life, pg. 24.) In its bite-sized content updates, much of social media seems too short and attention-deprived to adequately address the less fickle B2B customer. There are, however, platforms that invite the same sort of attention and longevity as a good white paper, albeit in a totally different way and with a completely different aim. Blogs are one example, and video is another.
Video is a sticky medium that creates visit duration. YouTube videos have the longest shelf life—the time in which a post will receive over half its clicks—of any social media channel and pay off much more quickly. The average social media effort takes 10 months to prove effective; video takes only two to six months. And video can be a lot more fun without being overly consumerish or inappropriate.
Xerox, for instance, produced a video promoting its document-management capabilities by showcasing work with the motorcycle company Ducati. The emphasis was on speed and safety, watchwords for both brands. The video has been watched more than 51,000 times on YouTube.
EMC Corp., the IT company concentrating mostly on cloud computing and big data, features the sort of videos you could watch forever on its popular Facebook page. For instance, the beautiful Perpetual Oceans video is set to soothing music and shows water-movement patterns among the world’s oceans. This, next to a post about EMC’s latest scientific white paper. It’s impossible to say whether the 46 people who “liked” the video in one Facebook post are the same as the 44 who downloaded the white paper from the adjacent post.
Suffice it to say, whatever drew them to the page resulted in clicking on the type of sophisticated content EMC can provide.
And that is the essence of the ever-changing role of social media in the overall B2B marketing mix: Pull, not push. Community, not sales.