Social media is now an essential element of many companies' marketing programs, but how should social media marketing and advertising be planned, executed, and measured.
Yesterday, I was at the San Francisco headquarters of Racepoint Group (RPG), a public relations agency that is very effective at combining traditional PR with social media. I’ve worked with RPG at a couple of my prior companies, and I was introducing a present consulting client and RPG to each other.
We all had heard a couple of reports about Facebook on NPR that morning: GM Will No Longer Buys Ads On Facebook, and Pizza Delicious Bought An Ad On Facebook. How Did It Do? Both reports raised questions about the value of Facebook advertising. A quote from the GM report, attributed to the Wall Street Journal, stated:
"Asked about the move, GM marketing chief Joel Ewanick said the Detroit auto maker 'is definitely reassessing our advertising on Facebook, although the content is effective and important.' Content refers to the unpaid Facebook pages many companies use to promote their products.
"GM, started to re-evaluate its Facebook strategy earlier this year after its marketing team began to question the effectiveness of the ads. GM marketing executives, including Mr. Ewanick, met with Facebook managers to address concerns about the site's effectiveness and left unconvinced advertising on the website made sense, according to people familiar with GM's thinking."
The report on Pizza Delicious details how Facebook advertising performed for a New York-style takeout pizza vendor in New Orleans. After targeting people who had other New York likes failed to produce results, Pizza Delicious targeted New Orleans fans of Italian food. As the graphic shows, Pizza Delicious got close to 20 times the number of Facebook fans it usually gets in two days.
Unfortunately, the new fans didn’t turn into new customers. According to the report, “After a long night of asking every single customer where he found out about Pizza Delicious, not one said it was through Facebook.” The report concludes, “Maybe at some point, the new Pizza Delicious fans will show up and buy some pizza. But social advertising is so new that nobody knows for sure. It's still unproven, untested and largely unstudied.”
After this interesting diversion, we returned to the specific question of how to use social media effectively in a B2B, rather than B2C, marketing program. Social media can be very effective in the first two stages of the three-stage B2B buyer’s process. In the first stage, buyers want to understand opportunities and gain more knowledge about solutions. Videos, podcasts and white papers that describe the opportunities and solutions can be effectively distributed through social media channels. In the second stage, buyers want to define their specific problem and evaluate different solutions. Case studies that show how companies have used your solution to solve their specific problem can be effectively presented in different media (video, audio and print) through social media channels. Social media is less effective in the final stage of the B2B buyer’s process, when the buyer is selecting the best option and negotiating terms.
Research by SiriusDecisions shows that while B2B buyers spend 80% of their time in the first two stages of the purchase decision process, and only 20% in stage three, sellers devote 80% of their marketing resources to stage three and only 20% to the first two, most formative, stages. In my experience, social media is best used in the first two stages of the B2B buyer’s process using the following guidelines:
A Social Media Strategy – Understand how social media can best serve as part of your larger B2B marketing strategy. I described this in a previous post Groundswell: A Guidebook for the Social Media Journey.
Understand How Your Audience Uses Social Media – When developing a B2B social media strategy in 2009, I reviewed research from Outsell that showed while 50.8% of scientists and engineers had Facebook accounts, and only 28.0% had LinkedIn accounts, the target audience firmly segregated their use of the two: Facebook was almost exclusively for personal use, while LinkedIn was used for business. Although LinkedIn had lower overall use, it was, by far, the best choice for B2B purposes.
Think Like a Publisher – In The New Rules of Marketing and PR, David Scott Meerman describes the content that is best suited for social media, “What works is a focus on your buyers and their problems. What fails is an egocentric display of your products and services. When you understand your audience, you can construct an editorial and content strategy just for them. In order to implement a successful strategy, think like a publisher.”
Integrate Social Media into a Unified Digital Marketing Operation – A unified digital marketing operation integrates social media along with other new and traditional marketing techniques in a manner that aligns with the B2B buyer’s three-stage decision process and allows you to measure the effectiveness of all marketing and lead generation channels.
