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PART I
The Fundamentals of Social Media Lead Generation
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Chapter 1
Why B2B Is Better at Social Media Than B2C
Be a marketing superstar. It isnāt any more difficult than being ordinary. As a business-to-business (B2B) marketer, you are a core contributor to the growth and success of your company. It is your hard work, balancing the demands of generating quality leads on a limited budget that helps fuel the sales team. Unfortunately, this hard work and diligence often goes underappreciated.
Seventy-three percent of chief executive officers (CEOs) believe marketers are not able to demonstrate how their strategies and campaigns help increase their organizationsā top line in terms of more customer demand, sales, prospects, conversions, and market share. This is according to the ā2011 Global Marketing Effectiveness Programā1 by Fournaise Marketing Group.
End this false perception today!
B2B social media marketing is a new set of marketing tools that integrates with existing marketing strategies to help you work smarter instead of harder. When done well, social media marketing can reduce marketing expense, increase lead volume, and provide a clear and measurable return on investment for your marketing dollars. Donāt fall victim to the marketing status quo.
The Marketing Status Quo
For decades, B2B marketers would start the year off with a marketing budget and then divide it among print publications, industry trade shows, and some direct mail campaigns. This process involved renting attention from someone else. Renting is expensive.
B2B marketing of the past has been about writing checks for fun ideas and interrupting potential customers with cold calling or direct mail. Enough is enough.
Todayās marketing should be about delivering measurable results for the business.
B2B marketing is at a crossroads. You, the marketer, now stand in the face of the most empowering moment of your career. It doesnāt matter if you are the chief marketing officer (CMO) or if you have just started your first job in marketing. This is your opportunity to be great at the career you love. Let business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers worry about coming up with the cute mascots.
What Your Marketing Could Be
Marketing greatness is at your fingertips. Open your hand and grab it. Tomorrow is a day in which B2B marketing attracts the best and brightest minds in business. Social media has ushered in a new tool set that complements the skills of B2B marketers more closely than any marketing innovation ever. This book will empower you with the social media tactics, keen content creation insights, data analysis, and reporting methods that will take you to a level of B2B marketing that few CEOs could even imagine.
B2B companies are better suited for social media marketing than B2C companies.
Stop. Go back. Read the last sentence again. It is true.
In the initial adoption of social media marketing, an unfortunate phenomenon happened. It become widely accepted that social media marketing was applicable only to B2C companies. This stereotype ignores five key ways in which social media marketing is better suited for B2B companies. If your boss questions why your B2B company should be using social media for marketing, simply share these five reasons with him or her.
Five Reasons B2B Companies Are a Better Fit for Social Media Marketing Than B2C Companies
1. Clear Understanding of CustomersāEven more so than B2C marketers, B2B marketers are closely tuned to the behavior, habits, and desires of their prospects and customers. B2B marketers go far past demographic data. As a B2B marketing superstar, you have clear and detailed personas for every prospect you are working to reach. Having this level of familiarity and clarity is a major advantage in social media marketing.
2. Depth of Subject Matter ExpertiseāB2B companies are trailblazers. They develop new industries or innovate in existing ones. This type of leadership and disruption traditionally means that B2B companiesā employees are the leading experts within a particular industry. Because social media is often used as a platform for educating prospects through content and relationships, having the depth of knowledge is a clear boost in the quest for social media marketing success.
3. Need for Generating Higher Revenue with Lower Marketing BudgetsāYou are a miracle worker. You generate leads and brand recognition for your company sales team with a short-handed staff and less budget than you really need. B2B marketers are always looking for value on a quest to maximize cost per lead. Social media acts as a lever to help reduce cost per lead and enables you to do more with less.
4. Relationship-Based SalesāThe B2B sales process is all about relationships. With large purchase prices and lengthy sales cycles, building strong relationships with sales leads is critical. The social web facilitates relationship building throughout the sales and marketing cycle to help improve lead quality and reduce sales cycle length.
5. Already Have Practice Doing ItāB2B marketers have long been social media marketing pioneers, even though they might not have known it. Long before the social web, you were publishing newsletters, quarterly magazines, and other marketing tactics that map to many key social media marketing methods. B2B marketers have a history of telling business-focused stories and educating customers with content.
Donāt believe us?
Then believe a shipping logistics company that increased overall quote requests by 270 percent using social media and inbound marketing. Lynden, Inc. (www.lynden.com), a transportation and logistics company that operates in some of the most remote areas of the world, has leveraged blogging, search engine optimization (SEO), and landing pages to increase quotes for their service online by 412 percent. These results seem astounding, so how did they do it?
Lynden has been blogging since 2009 and creating content to attract new website visits from search engines and social media channels. They use the data and performance from past blog posts to optimize and increase the performance of future content they create. They also track new inbound links that are created as a result of their blog posts and how they rank for specific keywords related to their business.
When Social Media Isnāt Right for B2B
This book isnāt about sugarplums and gumdrops. Donāt think of it as some idealized view of marketing. Instead, it is meant to serve as a reference, inspiration, and a compass for B2B marketers looking to improve and help drive more revenue for their business. Because this book isnāt another sugar-coated glamorization of social media, it is important early on to cover situations in which social media marketing isnāt right for a B2B company.
In these situations some aspects of social media could work and help support other inbound marketing objectives such as search and branding, but the truth is, when it comes to driving transactions, there are better options.
Do you answer yes to any of these questions?
Does your company have fewer than five potential customers? In the B2B space, some companies exist that have an extremely small niche. They fill a need by providing a product or service for only a handful of customers. When your customer base is so targeted, you have to be direct with your limited marketing budget. Regular face-to-face meetings, customer events, and other tactics are a better fit for this niche. Social media helps individuals and companies scale their social interaction. However, when your scale is small, you are less dependent on the scale that social media can provide.
Do purchasing decision makers spend all of their time behind a highly secure firewall? In situations in which you provide products or services to the military, electrical power grid, and others, key purchasing decision makers spend their time in a work environment that is secure and locked down from access to most or all of the information available online. If this is the case for your customer base, then using the Web wonāt be a successful spend of your marketing budget. The success and engagement of social media depends on the ability to reach and connect with customers digitally and in person. For companies in this environment, the digital option should be a lower priority.
Is your company missing an internal advocate for social media? Sometimes it is not about your customers, but rather, about your organization. One thing that successful organizations have in common when it comes to leveraging social media and word-of-mouth effectively is that they have buy-in from key advocates within the company. At many companies it is the CEO, but at least it is a key decision maker within the organization who can supply the needed resources and leadership to allow the organization to be successful. If you donāt have this, then spend your time finding someone within your organization who can fill this role instead of rolling out a social media effort prematurely.
Does your company need to generate a high volume of short-term sales? Can social media drive sales? Yes. Can it drive targeted short-term high-volume sales? In most cases, it cannot. If you have a plan to sell x number of units of a product over the next three to four weeks, then social media isnāt the right choice for you. As Chris Brogan, coauthor of the book Trust Agents says, creating transactional opportunities on the Web takes trust, but trust takes time to establish. If you donāt have time, then you must go a different route. These are most likely direct response, pricing incentives, or enhanced sales support.
Does your company have the resources to be successful? A major issue with social media is that most people think that since most online platforms are free, it should be cheap to add social media to their marketing or communications mix. It isnāt cheap. Social media marketing done properly takes a lot of time and the support of staff who understand the business of their customers. Many organizations now are simply letting social media happen as an experiment. The problem with this is that, most of the time, these experiments are drastically underresourced and handicapped from the beginning. Understanding the resources that you need and having them in place is a critical factor for success. Hint: You will always need more time and money than you expect for executing your social media tactics.
We are not saying that companies in the situations outlined here, canāt use social media for their B2B organizations. Instead, we suggest that for these opportunities, there are better ways to leverage the limited pool of resources available and social media should be lower on the priority list.
B2B Social Media as an Annuity
The social web is not linear. Information and interactions happen across the social web in every direction. There is not one clear path. It is critical to understand this simple idea of a nonlinear communications channel. It is this idea that allows you and your organization to begin to think of marketing as an asset, instead of an expense. In the status quo world of marketing where B2B marketing is about renting eyeballs and writing checks, it is easy to view marketing as an expense. In a B2B social media world, marketing is an annuity.
According to Wikipedia, an annuity is used in finance theory to refer to any terminating stream of fixed payments over a specified period. B2B social media marketing functions as a marketing annuity. It delivers website visits, leads, and customers over time, long after the work and budget for the social media tactic have become a distant memory.
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