B2B marketing leaders agree that social marketing is a great idea for consumer brands like Starbucks, but many are not yet convinced that social media is right for their companies. 

Selling to business is different than selling to consumers, right?

No one would argue that the B2B and B2C worlds are exactly the same.  Yes, the B2B sales cycle can certainly be long and complicated.  And, yes, selling expensive customized capital equipment to executives is different than selling fancy espresso drinks to consumers. 

However, social marketing isn’t solely about engaging with consumers and selling everyday products. 

Social marketing is about relationships, and where are relationships more crucial to business success than in the B2B world?  B2B marketers can adeptly use social marketing to build closer ties between clients and their company, clients and customer service, clients and product development, and yes even between clients and prospects.

The unique aspects of B2B marketing present a tremendous opportunity to attract and retain customers through the effective use of social marketing.

Why is social marketing right for B2B marketing? 

• B2B has a smaller, more focused customer base.  This makes it ideal for targeted social marketing.

• You often know your customers and prospects by name.  They may all even know each other.  This small community is ideal for the development of communities and user groups formed around niche products, services and markets.
• Relationships matter more.  Because of the longer acquisition cycle, and the routine requirement for product or service customization, building and maintaining relationships over the long term is typically the goal of B2B organizations.
• The B2B world is driven by reputation and word-of-mouth.  Social marketing is the ultimate word-of-mouth marketing.
• B2B relies more on non-traditional marketing like targeted print advertising, direct marketing, digital, word-of-mouth, reputation management and events rather than mass media channels.   Social marketing fits well with this more targeted marketing approach.
• B2B relationships often require strict confidentiality since critical information may need to be shared between numerous parties.  B2B communities and content must therefore balance the need for confidentiality with the typical openness of social marketing activities.  B2B communities require detailed industry and product specific content, as well as moderators and participants with deep industry and product insights.

Social marketing is right for B2B marketing because your partners—whether they are customers, suppliers, dealers, or franchise owners—are often geographically dispersed and difficult to organize without an online community to build connections and leverage the power of your relationships.

Ultimately, engaging and nurturing customers through social marketing will help build long term, mutually beneficial and profitable relationships.

The recently published Strategic Framework for Applied Social Media serves as an excellent back-drop for discussing our Marketing Imperative: “creating awareness, growing sales and taking market share.”  We presupposed in our earlier discussion that some definite value levers supporting marketing can be positively affected through the use of Social Media:

• Improving the efficiency of creating brand awareness & customer attraction
• Gathering insightful, segmented market intelligence
• Quickly identifying market trends
• Multiplying the effectiveness of campaigns
• Building brand-centered community to increasing customer loyalty

We’ll be talking about these on and off here and ultimately starting a discussion for each business imperative elsewhere on this site.

Let’s take the first value driver for Marketing.

Improving the efficiency of creating brand awareness & customer attraction.

The most expensive aspect of marketing is acquiring and re-activating customers. This means gaining awareness and providing relevancy to affect a sale or conversion. Social Media venues are gathering places for a targeted purpose, allowing companies to take their brands where it makes the most sense. This lets companies more efficiently reach the demographics that best fit their product, service, or need. The location of a company's content has become just as important as the content itself. Traditional models are too focused on broadcasting brand promises where the message is not wanted or heard. Integrating a corporate blog to social media sites where the content is relevant, however, creates a rich brand experience.

SEO and SEM techniques are now complemented by the fact that search engines also read social media. These sites are updated frequently by users, often affecting the conversations that a company participates in being picked up and transmitted to the search engines more effectively. This paves the way for a host of solutions that leverage social media to drive awareness. Unfortunately, there is a temptation to apply traditional marketing measures like cost-per-click to rationalize the effectiveness of social media campaigns. Cost-per-click (CPC) is the amount an advertiser pays each time a user clicks on their advertisement. Google AdWords has a pricing system based on clicks. Even though early research results imply a better CPC return for social media, I have to completely disagree with the premise here.  There can be little debate that the cost-per-click for social campaigns is a less relevant measure. PageOne PR recently published some comparative CPC results that further confuse this point:

      Excerpt taken from PageOne Public Relations at

Limiting social media to traditional measures reduces its context from being truly social. As the social context develops, relevant measures, and the way they relate to Sales & Marketing, will become evident. Think of things like the number of times someone tagged, commented, favorited, or embedded information about your company, brand, product or service. What about the number of fans, followers, and friends? What about the number of discussions that they are participating in? These are better measurements for the social context. These are truer indicators of the quality of awareness that companies are seeking. Relevancy now becomes implicit. If we can devise social campaigns that trigger these behaviors, then we will be well on our way to driving awareness from the audience we are targeting, reaching them in a more efficient manner and converting more like-minded peers.

I'll close with this. The majority of marketing executives now recognize many benefits of using Social Media. 

So collectively, we are seeing results. We know that Social Media has made it less expensive (and easier) to reach consumers. We know that we can now use Social Media to tailor messaging across a range of consumer groups, venues, and advertising channels. We just aren't completely tuned in yet to the measurements that are the new indicators of success. We mentioned some here and we'll continue to explore this topic in future posts.

Paul Stillmank

7Summits