Social media has worked exceptionally well for B2C businesses. It is a remarkably versatile medium for promoting business to the public. It works for B2B as well but it seems that not as many B2B businesses have embraced social media. That must change. Here are the reasons:
- People continue to block interruptive marketing attempts and this becomes increasingly so day by day.
- Because of the blocking, direct marketing efforts become more and more difficult to execute.
- Direct mail is not often looked at think of the last direct mail piece you acted on.
The old saying, “what goes around comes around’ is causing a great amount of difficulty for B2B marketers. Think about it…if you screen your calls and email, you better believe that others are doing the same. The fact is that in screening, all of us pass up the opportunities to find really beneficial products or services that we need. The reason for this is that we find that most of the time we are not interested or we do not need the product or services being offered. This is precisely the reason that we view direct marketing efforts as interruptive.
Herein lays the importance of social media and blogging. Blogging is the perfect way to share incredible, valuable content and the social media is a perfect way to share your blogging efforts. This requires two things from B2B business people. First, they must participate in blogging and in social media and, secondly, they must have patience and be in it for the long haul. The sooner you begin this effort the better.
The ideal perfect world for social marketing would have all B2B businesses participating regularly. This would allow social media to be the source of business exchange… you may say to me duh! It already is. Well that is true, but for the B2B segment it is not nearly true enough.
At the very least, small B2B companies should be doing at least one thoughtful quality blog post per week and they should share it where their target audience is hanging out in the social media. Added to this, they should be giving at least two thoughtful and valuable posts per day on twitter and face book. What this does is build relationships and thought leadership over time. I want to emphasize the words over time. Social media marketing is definitely a relationship building process and this take time. Establishing yourself and your company as a thought leader takes time.
Joe,
ReplyDeleteGreat post! I totally agree that B2B is a little behind B2C in social media. We offer social media marketing services for small and midsize companies, and there is always much more of an "educational" aspect in the sales cycle for our B2B clients than B2C.
People in the B2B space are still trying to figure out how Social Media affects their business when they have only a few customers, don't market traditionally anyway, still fax price sheets to customers, etc. The marketing challenges of B2B are a little harder to overcome with B2B, but I agree, the need to start doing it is the same.
One thing I have found is that until you can clearly connect the dots between social media and increased revenue or profit, talking about brand recognition on Twitter/FaceBook to B2B companies is futile (no matter how many millions of people are on FaceBook). They need to see how it will directly affect their business and the bottom line.
Here's a great story about how a B2B company that never thought they even needed a website, grew their business and continues to do so through social media. And it's a fencing supplies company!
http://www.orchestrateam.com/small-business-benefits-from-social-media-marketing
Also, myself and about 40 others enjoyed a Social media Bootcamp today put on by Kinesis, a great marketing company in Portland. The interest in social media is phenomenal and growing, that I can vouch for.
Cheers!
Brad Windecker
CEO, Orchestra Team
"Doing business should be easy"