Technology decision-makers use online resources such as community sites and social networks to make buying decisions more than ever. They read product reviews from real users, engage in online discussions, and connect with other actual users.
Here’s a comparison of how the era of marketing campaigns will fade away:
2012: We have an e-book people may be interested in, so we send it out as part of a campaign. Results: We get a list of contacts for sales to call until the list is depleted.
2013: We join in real-time conversations where marketers know the person already is interested and then use tools to monitor social media and become aware of what’s in the news in general. Results: We find out what people are talking about online and offer a solution.
Hybrid marketing
Traditional marketing campaigns now give way to a more real-time focus on getting maximum exposure through online social media. Becoming more real-time means adding to the mix tools such as:
Increasingly popular B2B online review sites in which B2B customers write product reviews, just as we do as consumers for electronics, hotels, and restaurants, on sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor.
Engaging in discussions happening now about your products. These are taking place in LinkedIn groups and other social media channels.
Responding to customers in community sites, whether they are “on-brand” (hosted by your company) or “off-brand" (hosted by a partner).
As you can see, Forrester found the top types of content that buyers look for are peer experiences and product reviews. Expert opinions come in behind them at number three.
Sources of Influence
B2B social marketing key points
The strategy for B2B social marketing requires a few shifts in the traditional marketing of the past.
Spend time focusing on the right networks and communities where you can find users discussing your products and services.
Focus on reaching prospects when they are genuinely interested in your products. That means less spamming them and more engaging in the discussions they start and the questions they ask.
However, do not abandon some of the customer relationship management processes you already have in place. You still need to leverage email campaigns, track contacts, and facilitate your marketing processes.
Focusing more toward online social media leverages more value for stakeholders.
Vendors: Getting secure customer testimonials for their products, vendors can influence high-quality prospects that are in the buying process. Input from current users helps in the planning process.
Prospects: Prospects find others who have already completed the selection process and get unbiased information from real users. They can create a vendor short list pretty quickly and easily.
Customers: Customers evangelize products that have helped them succeed and can be seen as thought leaders to help peers. They also network with other professionals in their vertical markets.
Joining online communities puts you in a perfect situation to have real-time engagement with the users of your products and competitors -- helping you to better distinguish between prospects who are ready to make a decision and those who might need more information about how your product fits their needs.
— Russell Rothstein is co-founder and CEO of IT Central Station. Follow him on Twitter @RussRothsteinIT.
There's a really neat tool from a startup called Oktopost www.oktopost.com that does the integration between social media and CRM. They've provide turnkey integration straight from twitter/LinkedIn/FB with salesforce.com. I think these kind of integrations between social media and CRM are critical.
That will be a significant development in efforts to monitor conversion rates from initial contact with a prospective customer and actual sales being made. Was wondering how a web-based feedback or a discussion (on social network) will be uploaded on a non-web-based CRM with reference to a specific customer.
True. Though the task of responding to complaints should be delegated to a specific function like sales department but it should be not be confined to them. How about company's CEO or Sales VP responding personally (obviously not frequently) to complaints of customers. This would be an ideal example of leading from the front and imagine the enhancement of brand image due to small contributions like these from the leadership.
WaqasAltaf and magneticnorth: I don't believe that social has to change the nature of handoff between marketing and sales. Marketing is still responsible for bringing in leads (through awareness, but also sometimes directly via lead gen) and then sales takes over from there.
My point that marketing needs to be "sales oriented" with its social media activities, is that there needs to be greater focus on ensuring that time and money spent on social media delivers leads to sales - not necessarily *more* leads, as a I think social media can be effective in increasing the *quality* of leads even if relative numbers are not high (which is the case in B2B in many cases). But marketing's eye should always be on how the investment in social media improves the funnel.
As the market matures, we'll see greater integration between social media and CRM systems so you can track the source of a sale back to a particular tweet or LinkedIn post.
WaqasAltaf: so true. A company that replies to user reviews easily gets plus points in my book. Openness is something we value greatly these days, and being open to receiving complaints is a major thing.
Russell: that depends on the company. I've seen B2B companies with sales departments that are more mature than their marketing departments, especially in terms of training and funding.
My B2B clients have very small marketing departments, who'll surely be overwhelmed by all that work. But they do have huge sales departments with people hungry for new accounts. I think the key to making the above feasible for my clients is sales training on online marketing. That way, the marketing department simply guides everyone while the commission-based sales people do the legwork.
The ThinkerNet does not reflect the views of TechWeb. The ThinkerNet is an informal means of communication to members and visitors of the Internet Evolution site. Individual authors are chosen by Internet Evolution to blog. Neither Internet Evolution nor TechWeb assume responsibility for comments, claims, or opinions made by authors and ThinkerNet bloggers. They are no substitute for your own research and should not be relied upon for trading or any other purpose.
A recent Wall Street Journal article “The New Resume: It’s 140 Characters” describes how recruiters are increasingly using Twitter to post jobs, hunt for candidates, and research applicants. They’re fed up with traditional recruiting sites and floods of irrelevant resumes.
It's a brand new year, and B2B marketers should start it off on the right foot by building their products' good reputations. Here are three things you can do now to ensure that your product or service enjoys a prosperous 2013.
The majority of IT decision makers are turning to social networks to guide them in the purchasing processes, a recent study from LinkedIn and Forrester Research found.
Facebook's Graph Search may face some profound challenges and risks, first, because Facebook users haven't been thinking of their posts as product reviews; and second, because Facebook will now have to contend with the social-network equivalent of SEO "gaming" of results.
A recent release of the popular TweetDeck app for Twitter power-users gives new life to software that had previously taken a wrong turn. Here's a quick walk-through of the new TweetDeck, to show you why it should be at the top of your Twitter toolkit.
A growing number of HR managers are suspicious of individuals who do not take part in social media and view them as anti-social in real life as well as online.
As enterprises leap into the Web 2.0 world of blogging, commenting, and social networking, just 'being there' won't deliver ROI. You may want a 'Web Evangelist' to systematically harvest the feedback in order to polish your product or service.
More companies are trolling social networks to find and vet potential job candidates. Beware the pitfalls of blurring the line between personal and professional lives.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
your weekly update of news, analysis, and
opinion from Internet Evolution - FREE! REGISTER HERE
Wanted! Site Moderators Internet Evolution is looking for a handful of readers to help moderate the message boards on our site – as well as engaging in high-IQ conversation with the industry mavens on our thinkerNet blogosphere. The job comes with various perks, bags of kudos, and GIANT bragging rights. Interested?
To save this item to your list of favorite Internet Evolution content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
Email This
