B2B marketers with highly complex products and services have been given a gift in the last few years in the form of Social Media.
In my opinion, Social Media doesn’t easily equate to Lead Generation for the complex sale. For example a prospect reading a blog entry doesn’t mean they want to buy anything, but it does mean they have engaged with your brand. In fact the stats show that certain forms of Social Media even out perform more traditional ones when it comes to awareness and recall. For example, unaided awareness from podcasts were 68%, compared with 21% for streaming video and 10% for television. Now that’s great recall!
B2B marketers need to set aside collecting metrics like page views, clicks, conversion rates and start nurturing individual leads by using the gift of social media they were given. Social Media is great for consideration so why not use it that way? Don’t measure your teams on page views generated from a campaign. Measure them on how engaged they can get your leads with your content and turn them into sales.
Sales generated from your lead nurturing program are the only real measure of engagement with your campaigns!
Tags: B2B, Social Media
Paul,
Right on target. The only caveat I add is don’t totally disregard page views. Although they might not generate leads, they do tell us what most interests readers and can be useful in shaping our content. Thanks Paul.
Well said. Sure it’s another annoying “unquantifiable” — but your targets aren’t worried about fitting your measuring criteria. You need to do everything that “helps.” The purchase cycle for costly equipment, software systems, etc is long, and actual purchases infrequent. Social media gives the marketer the perfect opportunity to maintain conversation and relevance with key audiences in between.
Hey, even the provider of a frequently purchased, low-cost B2B service (FedEx) found merit to “owning” virtual delivery on Facebook. (See our post on it, if interested.) It’s not a blog, but it does tap social media in an interesting way!
Paul,
Great topic. One I’m trying to dive into more myself. There are challenges to B2B social media strategies.
Jeremiah Owyang covered some of this in a recent post:
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/06/18/liveblog-whats-wrong-with-the-white-label-social-networking-industry/
Social Media is an exciting new frontier in marketing B2B Services. Using LinkedIn I have been able to acquire a large amount of business in software development/database development in a very short amount of time with my startup venture http://www.HiYaYa.com.
I am currently actively researching the best method to use YouTube for a service business and also for Ecommerce sites.
Great article and thanks Dust!n for the informative Web Strategist link.
-Nathan Lands
I agree – great topic. However, I find it hard to find some really value-adding ways of using apps like facebook in B2B Marketing. Most B2B services using this are really just fan clubs or a community for employees.
Any cool examples of how this can be used?