B-2-B e-marketing and social media, complicated?

Many companies are trying to figure out the best approach and strategy to e-marketing and social media. There are a large selection of well working models and solutions for B-2-C marketing. It gets more difficult when we move to B-2-B. Even today, some companies have difficulties to keep the traditional company web-pages updated.

The B-2-B e-marketing and social media should always take into account the company size and the industry in question.

Here is a short list of basic recommendations for social media:

• Decide what medias to use and why
• Train your people
• Be active; fast responses and enough resources
• Guided, but personal communication
• Do not copy-paste anything
• Create value, don’t sell.

The old saying is still valid: Do it properly or not at all.

Using these basic guidelines, the company can improve the brand awareness and create positive word-to-mouth results.

That was the basics and the easy part.

Now we take one step further. The customers might exist out there, but how reach them, especially the desired ones? The customer is quite easy to define in B-2-C business. There are also good tools to target the right segments and groups. In the B-2-B, it gets again more difficult. The actual target is a company and usually just a few individuals inside the company. What is the target company’s policy towards social media? Are the targeted individuals even using social media? If the answer is yes, are they using it as a person or as an employee? Could the solution be mass e-marketing? Absolutely not. The B-2-B mass marketing hasn’t worked earlier with traditional B-2-B marketing and vice versa, it most likely doesn’t work with social media. It will most likely undermine company’s brand and image.

How to convert the e-marketing to actual sales? From likes and followers to Euros? The same question has been related to marketing since ages, long before social media. If the social media is not a sales channel, which is the most efficient way to get concrete results? Blogs, lead generation, subscriptions and downloads are good way to start.    

The next challenges are how to define right KPIs and how to calculate ROI? What is the actual value of positive word-to-mouth or positive thoughts? In theory, the company could have a perfect e-marketing and social media strategy and activities, without any positive income. There are ways to calculate ROI with social media analytics tools, but usually these measurements are for masses, not for target customers. There are also tons of different things you can measure about your social media actions internally and externally. The company should set at least some metrics that indicate if you are turning profit and combine several KPIs into one that is more meaningful for the company and relevant to the industry.

Let’s take the final step and combine the social media with products, services, information and connectivity. In B-2-B, this trend is called digitalization and one variation of this is IoT (Internet of things). In the latest IoT development, also the animals and people are added to the IoT ecosystem, not only machines. The importance of relevant information is increasing all the time. The information availability, analytics and sharing are the main drives. In practise, social media can be used as an information platform. There are an endless number of combinations and possibilities to design new business and new business models. The challenge is the phase of the change. New innovations, social media and platforms are coming to the market all the time. 

Complicated, yes extremely, but also very interesting. There are opportunities to create new innovations and design new business models. The best players can achieve significant competitive edge for themselves.