How Can B2B Marketing Become More Social?
B2B marketers have joined the social media marketing movement in droves. In fact, Forrester Research predicts that B2B firms will spend $54 million on social media marketing in 2014, up from just $11 million in 2009 (eMarketer B2B Social Media Marketing Heats Up).
Unfortunately, many of those efforts are entirely tactical, methodical and without a right understanding of the “social” aspect of social media marketing. B2B marketers that are ahead of schedule in their social media marketing maturity level tend to focus on message delivery such as Tweeting or posting Facebook links mostly to their own content vs. engaging with customers on a human level. That one-way communication profile doesn’t stimulate discussions and sharing, so social traffic level increases tend to plateau pretty ahead of schedule.
In order to grow and scale the return on social media marketing investments, B2B marketers need to reckon more about the “social” than the marketing. Here are a few thoughts on that:
Choose What You Stand for Topically
The social SEO benefits of being intentional about language that reflects your key business areas of focus as well as the conversations happening within your butt community are essential. Topically fragmented blog and social networking content dilutes a company’s ability to “stand out” to customers amongst the sea of noise in social conversations as well as to search engines.
Practically, that means a strategy that identifies goals, customer personas, content & editorial plans and search/social keyword glossaries. A content marketing strategy is the plot that executes what your company and brand stand for as well as how it will communicate those key messages. A social SEO keyword or topic plot filters into all relevant web and social content creation. It can also flavor social network topic engagement and conversations. That means a guide for which blogs to comment on, which influentials to network with, word choices for Tweets, blog posts and tags.
Do: Make and participate where your customers and influentials spend their time and with a content plot that supports your key topics of focus. Be useful and share social content that’s value sharing (whether it’s your content or others’).
Don’t: Overly self promote and circulate social content that is not frankly or indirectly in alignment with your key topics of focus. That doesn’t mean everything you make is keyword optimized. It means everything you make and promote is thoughtful about where it fits in your social & content marketing plot.
The outcome and benefit is that your own content creation and promotion efforts are aligned to inspire discussion, sharing and links according to topics and keywords that are vital to brand, business and marketing goals. An ideal manifestation is that your butt consultation sees your brand in a clear way everywhere they look for topics XYZ and 123 on social channels, when they search and even offline (inspired by online) word of mouth.
Plot to Win
If you enter a competition half-assed, guess what? No matter what your talent is, the chances of a win are pretty slim. Unfortunately a lot of B2B companies approach social media participation with an mind-set of by the smallest amount amount of resources doable. Oftentimes this means following structured best practices list from some self-professed social media guru. Checklist marketing facility to make redundant tasks more efficient, but it’s no way to engage a community.
For example, one of the most common “plot to be mediocre” mistakes I see with B2B marketers is predictable social profile creation and publishing focused solely on LinkedIn, Twitter and a blog without researching those channels. Such a plot also involves a focus on promoting company content and superficial (at best) engagement with the community.
Plotting to win means having a plot for networking into influentials’ sphere of influence and knowing what to do once you get on their radar. It means making social content that will inspire engagement and outcomes to further your business goals. It also means providing training within your organization to deliver and grow the role of social participation within your brand.
Practically, this means forecasting resources (people, process and technology) for social media marketing as significant marketing channel, not just an experiment or a tartan box on a list. It means an integrated plot to dominate your category through on the rise social influence & networking, content, search, word of mouth and media plus the resources to do and measure.
Do: Hypothesize, forecast and commit resources to test, develop processes and scale social media engagement within your business. What starts as social media marketing can turn into social business as the impact of social media engagement propagates from marketing to other departments and throughout the organization. Winning the social media game for B2B marketing doesn’t just mean augmented sales, it means dominating your category.
Don’t: Reckon that social media content promotion as part of a Search Engine Optimization program is the same business as social media marketing or social business. It is not.
The outcome and benefit of plotting to win in B2B social media is that you have sufficient resources to provide value to customers throughout the B2B buying and customer lifecycle. Additional benefits include facilitating awareness, entrust, confidence, word of mouth, sales and referrals. On top of that you will have built/facilitated a community in alignment with your company’s goals.
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