B2B Social Marketing—Yes, it is important!

Awhile back, my fiancé started a new job as a marketing communications manager in a B2B company.  During his first week on the job, I remember talking about the responsibilities he was given, one of which was to focus on the social marketing aspect for his product lines. The first thing out of my mouth was “why would you waste your time and money on that? It just doesn’t make sense, I wouldn’t want to read a tweet about products that I could not care less about…” At the time, I was being a bit naïve and thinking that my past experience makes me more educated in social marketing than him. Which now, after only 2 months of working on an SEO team, I realize—shamefully, I may add—that I was wrong.  Really really wrong.  Social marketing for B2B is becoming even more important in the marketing process these days.

I understand that social marketing can be foreign to a lot of people, especially B2B, which makes it even harder to understand the power it can have on your marketing strategy. It’s becoming more apparent that a lot companies are cutting marketing cost and reallocating it online marketing spending.  If you are like me, you are probably asking, “why?” Well I hope that after reading this you will have a clear understanding on why social marketing is it’s important for B2B companies.

For B2C, social marketing can be a lot easier to comprehend mainly because ROI can be tracked more precisely.  B2B on the other hand, has a lengthily process that is more complicated—purchase decisions are usually a group effort, the investment is usually a bit larger, and the process may be a bit longer. All things aside, B2C and B2B still share one thing in common—they both need to reach an audience, build a relationship and help the consumer make a final purchase decision.

Social marketing provides a vertical that can reach a larger audience allowing for a quick exchange of information, such as consumer experience, expert knowledge, company information, or other industry knowledge.  This information ultimately provides the end consumer with unlimited resources at their finger tips. From a business perspective, social media allows you to share your expertise and knowledge; it provides an easy way to hear the voice of your consumers, it allows and promotes easy communication with customers, and it can also open the door to new prospects.

It may seem overwhelming at first, but here are a few ideas to help you on your way:

• Develop a strategy: Set Goals, Dedicate Resources, Prioritize Opportunities, Develop a Road Map, Measure, Revisit your strategy. For more information, read more on the  7 Steps For Developing A B2B Social Media Marketing Strategy
• Create pages on the social media sites: facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Keep updates frequent and make them compelling. Link the sites, so updates can be automatically posted on the other sites, making the process streamlined and less time consuming.
• Start an informative blog about your industry. Be sure to update at least once a week.
• Keep content, posts, updates informative and helpful.  It’s not a sales pitch
• Add the social site links on you homepage, on the bottom of emails, in newsletters etc.
• Quality vs Quantity- If you don’t have the resources to do a full social marketing approach, only focus on a few different verticals that make sense for your company. Don’t stretch yourself too thin.

Today, social marketing is changing rapidly and it’s important to stay on top of things. Everyone has a different approach to B2B social marketing, so do what makes sense for your company and your industry.  Be sure to keep up-to-date on the latest trends and ideas, Social Media B2B.com has been a great resource for me!

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