Social Media and B2B: Good Excuses to Get Started

By Christina Capadona-Schmitz | Posted Apr 23, 2010 | 3 Comment(s) | Filed in: Social Media

There are many reasons that B2B organizations avoid monitoring, participating and publishing in social media:

• I sell [insert your niche product or professional service here]. Why would someone want to be a friend or a follower of that?
• My customers don’t use social media.
• I work in a highly regulated industry.
• We block social networks at our business.
• I don’t have desire or time to do social networking or blogging.
• I don’t want to know what people are saying about us online.
• We tried that before and had no ROI.
• Business is good.

For people in the PR and marketing industries, the ever-changing environment drives us to focus our education efforts on newer or bigger topics, and some may think that the conversation of B2B and social media is a dead one. In this case, I think it’s important not to leave the mass market behind. 

A natural question asked by B2B marketers, such as at the end of social media presentations and Webinars, is “this all sounds great, but how can this work for MY business?” It’s easy to understand how B2C companies can engage customers and build loyalty through channels like Facebook and Twitter. In some cases, the customers themselves create social media pages to pay homage to these brands.

But it’s not so simple for B2B marketers, and despite all the data to prove its value, and all the opportunities to connect with audiences in new and powerful ways, many companies continue to come up with endless excuses to justify being inactive.

While we may not all be social butterflies, we are all certainly consumers of information, and have the need for our expectations to be met and exceeded by the organizations we do business with, and of those we recommend to others.

As it stands today, the question for businesses thinking about using social media has changed from “what’s the ROI?” to “what’s the cost of doing nothing?” Once you take the mystery out of social media, and take a fresh look at your marketing efforts, you may find that the risk of standing on the sidelines any longer is too great. So instead of focusing on reasons why not to take action, here are three good excuses to get started today:

The Good Excuses

1) Position yourself/business as an expert and thought leader

Communicating expertise is critical in the B2B space. In building leads and loyalty, your key differentiator is sharing useful, compelling content that demonstrates your knowledge and expertise in your service area. Especially in the professional services realm, you are literally selling yourself and your staff first along with your offerings. Without an online and social media presence, you’re missing a huge opportunity to take a leadership position for people searching and connecting with peers online.

2) Connect with your highly targeted, highly involved audiences

Your target audiences may be smaller than B2C counterparts, but considering that you built a business around the needs they presented in the marketplace, there’s a good chance those individuals are motivated and passionate. Social media gives you the ability to connect on a personal level, and reach your audiences with the niche content you know they need. This helps with building loyalty for past and existing customers, and also in lead generation and nurturing.

3) Help manage your online brand

In B2B, reputation is everything, and word-of-mouth referrals are now happening online. You can’t always rely on brand recognition, targeted product placement, and the consumer-generated social shrines that can come from larger brands. You have to claim your own identity online, and social media enables you to publish the web content you want associated with your brand. It also gives you the ability to join the conversation, address positive and negative customer feedback, and maintain an overall awareness of how your brand is perceived online.

What's the Alternative?

Cold calls, trade publication ads, direct mail, tradeshow marketing . . . have you noticed a decrease in the effectiveness of these programs?

Think of your social media strategy as an integral part of your marketing campaign: the sales team connecting with prospects on a personal level through social media engagement, combined with the inbound marketing power of search engine optimization to help people find for your brand online, and the sharing of compelling content marketing pieces to solidify your leadership position.

There are resources and case studies out there, but in order to understand the true potential for your company in social media, you have to take stop making excuses and take that leap. There is a world of opportunity waiting for you online.

Links of Interest

Manydoors.net, Bruce Wilson, http://manydoors.net/2010/02/24/generating-b2b-sales-leads-using-social-media/

Forrester 2009 report blog post "The Social Technographics of Business Buyers" http://forrester.typepad.com/groundswell/2009/02/new-research-b2.html

SearchEngineLand.com, Galen DeYoung, http://searchengineland.com/a-six-step-content-marketing-check-up-for-b2b-marketers-32799

PaulGillin.com, Paul Gillin, http://paulgillin.com/2009/01/b-to-b-social-media-yes-you-can/

Capadona-Schmitz is an assistant vice president and consultant at PR 20/20, a Cleveland-based inbound marketing agency and PR firm. She can be found on Twitter @ChristinaCS.

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