The impact of social media on B2B marketing
Image Source – Jason Howie (CC License)
Social media is now considered as one of the major components of a business-to-business marketing strategy. However it still remains a surprise to see that a lot of companies still underestimate this important marketing component. To some entrepreneurs, social media marketing is the “next big thing,” a transient yet powerful fad to be taken advantage of while it’s still in the spotlight. To others, it’s a buzzword with no practical advantages and a steep, complicated learning curve. If you think that social media marketing is just simply adding a Twitter or Facebook logo on your marketing collateral, then you still have a lot to learn.
There is one basic rule with social media content, if it is not relevant or interesting think twice before you post. In that respect social media can be a very powerful tool in the telemarketing tool bag, where you have a specific message or piece of information you want to broadcast which is then part of a telemarketing campaign script. There are many ways that you can use social media for your marketing that goes beyond the basic remits.
Company Brand Awareness and Loyalty
Social media can have a very powerful effect on your companies branding image, negative as well as positive. Always make sure that your company’s social media profile is branded properly. Make sure that your profile’s theme is also related to your company and the product or service you are offering. Every opportunity you have to syndicate your content and increase your visibility is valuable. Your social media networks are just new channels for your brand’s voice and content. This is important because it simultaneously makes you easier and more accessible for new customers, and makes you more familiar and recognizable for existing customers. This is especially true for
a launch of a new product or service, where some market recognition is vital for any combined lead generation strategy.
Search Engine Traffic
SEO is the best way to capture relevant traffic from search engines, but the requirements for success are always changing. It’s no longer enough to regularly update your blog, ensure optimized title tags and meta descriptions, and distribute links pointing back to your site. Google and other search engines may be calculating their rankings using social media presence as a significant factor, because of the fact that strong brands almost always use social media. As such, being active on social media could act as a “brand signal” to search engines that your brand is legitimate, credible, and trustworthy. That means, if you want to rank for a given set of keywords, having a strong social media presence could be almost mandatory. Again this is very relevant to any new startup company, which quickly needs to develop its online credentials to ensure its sales activities have a credible point of reference.
Use a Microsite
We often advise our clients to use a microsite to combine all their social media activities. Again this really a very important element for any telemarketing campaign, as a potential prospect has a place to go and look at any information related to the campaign and see all your current online activities. Here you can have your feeds from Facebook and Twitter, a Google News RSS feeds for some press releases and company news, RSS feed from the blogs and any YouTube videos. You can also use this portal as your homepage as your call-to-action area or for social media for your offline activities, which again might well be linked with some telemarketing activity eg. conferences, trade fairs etc.
Higher conversion rates
Effective social media marketing will result in higher conversion rates in a few distinct ways. Perhaps the most significant is its humanisation effect; the fact that brands become more
humanised by interacting in social media channels. Social media is a place where brands can act like people do, and this is important because people like doing business with other people; not with companies.
Additionally, studies have shown that social media has a significantly higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing, and a higher number of social media followers tends to improve trust and credibility in your brand, representing a form of social proofing. As such, simply building your audience in social media can improve conversion rates on your existing traffic.It will also has the additional benefits of being: Cost effective, increases inbound traffic, enriches customer experience’s and insight.
Conclusion
Keep in mind that integrating social media is a lot more than just adding it to the basic business-to-business marketing programs. The social media must be in the middle of every aspect of the business including customer service, marketing research and product development. It is important to know the audience and think of how you can extend the conversations from online to offline. And this is where b2b telemarketing and social media can make such a potent impact, as it can really take the “cold” out of cold calling.
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Tags: B2B Marketing, Lead generation, Telemarketing
Andy Dickens
Andy Dickens is a veteran of IT Sales, used to leading by example. He is the CEO of Virtual Sales Limited (VSL) who offer telesales, telemarketing, lead generation and appointment setting services to B2b businesses. He previously was Sales Director EMEA for Red Hat and before that ran sales at Visio before it was acquired by Microsoft.