From Marketing-Gimbal:
(In 2009) the use of social media will become a more prevalent part of most B2B marketing strategies. It has to be. The value of creating a two way communication channel between you and your customers is too great to ignore any longer.
Social Media is an excellent channel to market to consumers. It is also an excellent channel to market to smaller firms, because they behave like smart consumers: they often have only one or two decision makers, they make relatively fast decisions, and they prefer to have some type of relationship with the seller.
Social media marketing fails when selling to a larger company: the bureaucracy, process, and speed at which an enterprise firm purchases are all designed to strip away the emotions one can use via social media. Paradoxically, it may be larger firms rely more on relationships; these relationships, however, are stronger and have more history supporting them.
So how can you use social media to market to enterprise firms? Rather than focusing on the messaging (social networking and virally focused communications), focus instead on the strategy:
- Find your niche(s). A diverse sales force brings with it a diverse list of clients. Thinking about focusing on the Manufacturing industry? If you examine your customer data, you may find a strong niche in the Southwest Manufacturing firms, or perhaps you will find Medical Suppliers are a much stronger niche. By applying technologies to your own information, you can leverage your strengths to target specific markets.
- Create more better content. I think Ed gets this right: “in the 21st century marketing is really about content publishing.“ Using your niches, you now have the opportunity to create highly targeted, relevant content. This may mean more case studies, but it also means buying a flip camera and recording impromptu customer interviews; essentially, you will be using relationship marketing, but leveraging the trust between your prospect and your current customer, without deluging your current customers with hundreds of phone calls requesting references.
- Defend your brand. Because of the risk of fallout, enterprise customers are probably not going to initiate a tweet or blog post about your brand. Still, there will be some conversation somewhere; it is therefore important to monitor all channels for mentions of your brand, including Twitter and LinkedIn.
- Optimize your web presence. It goes without saying that your website should be quantitatively optimized to increase traffic and drive conversions. Less obvious, but equally important, is the need to understand what your traffic really wants, and deliver it to them. For example, you may find yourself on a plateau of a 3 percent conversion rate, and extrapolate how much revenue you can drive by increasing that to 4 percent. But this implicitly assumes all traffic wants to convert. What if a survey of your traffic found 20% was on the verge of buying, and looking for information to help with negotiations? You could create pages touting the high price of ownership of your competition, thus driving down their profits. What if a survey found 10% were looking for information to give to their bosses? You could create collateral specifically focused around this segment. The point is, you probably don’t know this today, because you don’t implement surveys. Fortunately, like they are fast, friendly, and free.
In short: social media messaging is great for individual or partner decision makers. If a committee is involved, avoid Twitter and focus on strategy.
