What role does social media play in B2B?
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People use social media to sell Old Spice - not for B2B, right? These slides are from a meet up to discuss this topic - http://www.meetup.com/Insightful-Sales-and-Marketing/events/139811622/ - we looked at some of the current challenges of being a social business - how to work out ROI, and some basic tactics you can get started on today.
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What role does social media play in B2B?
- 2. Agenda • What is social media? • Being social • Mindshare
- 3. What is social media?
- 4. More than JUST social networks • Blogs • Community / groups • Videos • Wikis • Meetups • …
- 5. Is social media better for B2C?
- 6. The key to this business is personal relationships
- 7. Content marketing • Subject matter expertise • Newsletters • Magazines
- 9. How do we “do” social media?
- 10. … the same as any channel: 1. Develop strategy 2. Allocate resources (team, tools, money) 3. Execute (build an engaged audience, write get content) 4. Measure results, refine approach and repeat!
- 11. Where to start?
- 12. Maturity model
- 13. Could the same exist for social? Listen Shout Converse
- 14. Does social media have an ROI?
- 15. Measuring success • Lead generation (and hence, sales) - no different than any other marketing channel • Engagement – More than just likes / followers / fans – Possibly even more than just a share / retweet Further reading: http://searchengineland.com/how-to-run-a- successful-b2b-social-media-marketing-campaign-177923
- 16. Tactics
- 17. Listening
- 18. Shouting 1. Build a mobile-friendly, sharable website 2. Write compelling content which includes calls-to-action or calls-to-engage 3. Build an engaged audience Great resource: http://writtent.com/blog/25-phenomenal- resources-help-market-blog-better/
- 19. Conversation
- 23. What works for you?
- 24. Mindshare • Limited energy amongst our prospects • Guy Kawasaki – how much is too much? • smh.com.au – people do engage with relevance Further reading: http://www.forbes.com/sites/insead/2013/06/21/social-media- in-b2b-marketing-publish-or-perish/
- 25. Interesting reading – Building an audience: http://socialmediab2b.com/2014/04/b2b- audience-development-marketing/ – B2B Marketing Research (2014): http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/10/B2B_Research_2014_CMI.pdf – 5 Simple Steps to get into B2B Marketing: http://www.fastcompany.com/3026450/dialed/5-relativity- simple-steps-to-b2b-social-media-marketing-success – 4 things social media can do for B2B: http://au.marketo.com/marketing-topics/b2b-social-media- marketing – Examples of B2B in different social media: http://socialmediatoday.com/jenniferhanford/2094261/five- fantastic-examples-b2b-social-media-marketing All logos used in this presentation are the property of their respective owners.
- 27. What role does social media play in B2B? A big one. Adam Frank Principal Consultant, InsightfulCRM April 2014 au.linkedin.com/in/adamthefrank/
Editor's Notes
- About MeI’m in sales / consulting – not a social media strategist, analyst, specialist, manager – my job is in helping businesses recognise why they need a customer relationship strategy, and then delivering that for them – social media for me is something to aid in that objective.
- 1 - We’ll look at what social media is 2 – What it means to be social, share some thoughts about how to go about that3 – Mind share – a few general thoughts about that
- QUESTION: What is social media?CLICK to build.
- - Meetups / blogs – social media is all of it, all the non-traditional connections - User generated content / consumer-generated media has been around for 20 years – think Geocites
- I’ve heard of a lot of people saying that social media is designed for B2C models. Sell T-shirts on Facebook. QUESTION: Is social media better for B2C?
- B2B sales process is all about relationships. Does someone go on Facebook to find out if their friends recommend the new flavour of Coke? Maybe.Does your customer google everything they can about a new enterprise software suite, before engaging them further? Almost definitely. 60% of the buying cycle is complete before first contact.
- Social media thrives on content marketing.Does Apple publish interesting business-focused articles that are relevant to my interests on a regular basis? No.B2B specialists have been building databases for their own newsletters and magazines in an attempt to develop thought leadership for years.
- Social media marketing benefits from strong persona development – knowing the types of people you want to sell to and tailoring messaging to that. This goes well beyond a broad demographic of 18-49 year olds who are based on the North Shore.
- Montell Jordan
- Social media strategy should support the broader business goals – e.g. increase sales, decrease churn, improve customer satisfaction – there needs to be some kind of sponsorship from the top, typically a CEO, who says “Yes, we are doing social media”, which empowers. Time and money without strategy will almost certainly lead to poor ROI. Resources – lack of time is the #1 challenge small businesses face in producing engaging contentResults measurement – lead quality / quantity, social media sharing, web traffic/time spent on website, feedback from customersOne of the most important things here is to look at the results and change. If you find that particular tactics work especially well for your audience, then you modify your tactics accordingly. You can’t do that unless you are measuring!
- I have a process engineering background .. So I think of maturity models.
- CLICKCLICKCLICKCLICKMaturity model for capability – it is a well understood principle in organisational development that shows two thingsBusiness problems can be represented as a multi-coloured set of stepsYou don’t need to do it all at once
- There were almost too many attempts at social media maturity models out there – a lot of them seemed like they were based upon an “ideal world” of resources…QUESTION: If we were to make one now, what would we use?CLICKStart by listening – and measuring. How many leads come off your website at the moment? What is your net promoter score? We’ll look more at measurement shortlyCLICKI say shout… because the first time you post something, you might feel like you’re shouting into a big wide open space. It also doesn’t cost much to tweet and post links to your own press releases and then eventually to your company blogCLICKConverse – this could also be described as ‘engage’. This is where a social media strategy has the biggest impact, and the biggest investment – whether it is participating in groups, creating thought leadership articles .. Being able to communicate effectively with prospects and customers without even planning to, could be considered a nirvana of social media strategy.
- QUESTION: does social media have an ROI?One of those comments I hear a lot – what do you think?Based on what we’ve discussed so far – the answer should be yes!
- Do you measure the effectiveness of your conferences? Of your advertising? Of white papers? If you’re already tracking the lead quantity and quality of new leads through these channels, social media should be no different.What did someone say when they shared/retweeted you? Positive slant?
- Is it time for nitty gritty?Let’s look at some things you can do that follows that rough social media maturity model
- Listening can be hard. Tools like HootSuite can make it a lot easier – making monitoring for mentions of your own brand, your competitors, suppliers, products, and most importantly, your customers. It’s not important to have an answer for everything initially – simply being aware of the conversations that take place, and the material out there is important enough on its own. Although you own some media channels, like your blog, you don’t own them all – it’s better in general to find other things for prospects to read about, rather than trying to panic over deleting material that is public.
- There are a gazillion sites out there telling you how to write a great blog. I’ll share the slides afterwards – that link at the bottom is one of the best curated lists of those sites.The basics are… basic though. Your site needs to be fast, responsive, and easily sharable. Don’t make your users work hard.You need to write great copy. This has always been true. Your copy needs clear calls-to-action, or calls-to-engage – make sure your content has a purpose that you can measure – otherwise, you don’t know if it worked!You also need someone thinking about building an audience for that copy – all the great content in the world does no good if there are no eyeballs. Consider a CMO being accountable for building a fantastic audience for your content, so that when the marketeer publishes that next great article, you know its going to a good home. Easy ways to share content is to encourage company employees to retweet or repost articles on their own Twitter/LinkedIn profiles – it’ll increase the reach of your articles, and if your employees share contacts, those contacts will find it hard to miss your article with the “Your network has been talking about..”
- Conversation – or engagement
- Show, don’t tell Find where your prospects congregate – where their social media presence is strong – is it a particular LinkedIn group? Monitoring specific hashtags or Twitter handles? Be there. Have meaningful and relevant things to say. If you don’t have the content to be there – then build the expertise to play there, because if your competition can, these companies will not be your customers much longer. Look for areas where your prospects should be – seek to develop credibility by providing value – don’t focus on selling- Look for areas that your competitors AREN’T. No competitors on YouTube? Go for it- Cisco, who sell networking stuff to businesses have 60,000 subscribers to their Youtube channel now. A company called Constant Contact – they do email marketing software – their product is pretty intangible. Yet, they have over 20,000 followers on Pinterest – from photos of life in their office, tips on how to be more effective or even email marketing humour!
- How closely do you watch your prospects / customers?What do your prospects and customers already retweet and share? What is richer and more compelling about that content than yours?
- Use your own voice. I’ve heard a lot of people say they struggle with trying to play to a company line when on LinkedIn and Twitter. You know what? Your company can have a company Twitter handle. There are LinkedIn and Google+ pages for businesses. So if you’re posting out there - be yourself. Be authentic. Be genuine.
- QUESTION: What is working for you? What isn’t?
- The typical teenager has a 1000 friends of Facebook,QUESTION: Can anyone hazard a guess as to how many are likely to be real friends?Studies suggest no person can have more than 2-3 best friends across their life. They don’t have space for it. It’s a limitation of head and heart. Funnily enough, your prospects have limits too - they are already following people. Do they have space for you and what you want to share?Guy Kawasaki – QUESTION: Does anyone know who this is?this guy has a 24/7 social media machine pushing out content. It’s really interesting stuff… but there’s too much of it. Instead, there are people who are sit there trying to curate what he posts.Comments on SMH – this is commentary on news articles – some of them get hundreds of comments in a few hours, particularly if there’s something about Tony Abbott in it. You might nt have the same size of readership… but in general, we are willing to comment.
- I used some of these articles in prep for this morning – I will share the slides on Slideshare later today and post it to the Meetup – so you can read more about it.
- Final thought from me – people buy from peopleAt the other end of every B2B scenario is another person. Everything that rings true about how you relate to someone in person, what a normal conversation is like .. It all applies to social media too. Don’t be creepy, be useful. Don’t be boring, be relevant.
- Thank you all for comingIf you’ve enjoyed this, things you can do for me. Follow Insightful on LinkedIn, or subscribe to our blogs Link with me directlyIf anyone you know is in the market for sales, marketing or CRM technology, tell them about us.