Make the most of B2B social media

Social media is massive and growing: if Facebook were a country it would be the third-largest on the planet; the number of tweets per day doubled in the last nine months; people upload 48 hours of video to YouTube every minute.

But it has yet to catch on properly in the B2B world only 14% of B2B executives in the US are engaged in social media in their company, and it’s likely that that figure is even lower over here — despite the benefits it can bring.

We’re at the forefront of B2B social media, for example developing and delivering BT Global Services’ social media offering to its business customers. And in our experience here’s the why, what and how of B2B social media.
Three reasons WHY you should be interested in it are:

• It can increase your profitability.
• It can improve your organisation.
• Your customers and prospects do, or soon will, expect you to have a social media presence. If you don’t, your competitors will.

Here’s WHAT you should do with social media:

• Recognise that it’s a different medium and needs a different mindset and approach.
• Integrate it rather than thinking of it as a stand-alone activity.
• Use it to create awareness, build trust and generate demand.

And here’s HOW you should go about it:

• Get the right content in the right places at the right time. Focus on the Big Five.
• Manage the distribution effectively and efficiently to keep the speed up and the costs down.
• Monitor, report, improve.

Get in touch, we’ll tell you more and help you make the most of social media.

If you can guarantee one thing it’s that you have competition out there, with beady eyes fixed firmly on the business you want. So you need to get the right information about how you can help across as clearly as possible, cutting through the competition’s noise.

It’s partly about creating a presence (at events, on the web or via social media for example), building profile in places where your target audience look for knowledge or support.

And it’s also about establishing a dialogue with your target audience. Remember, awareness is a two-way thing; you want them to know about you, but you also need to know about them and show this in everything you say and do, talking about how you can help them to be successful. For example, catching interest with an eNewsletter that you then nurture into a request to know more.

Once you have that dialogue going, you can use it to create awareness of needs your audience were previously unaware they had — new technologies, unexploited efficiencies, better ways of working.

Get awareness right and you have the basis for a profitable business relationship.

Here’s a taste of how we create awareness — increasing blog views by 1,300%

A blog is a great way to boost awareness of what you can do for customers. Update it regularly with thought-provoking and informative articles and posts, combine it with a selection of ways to keep existing readers and attract new ones, and you have a cost-effective, current vehicle for building conversations with your target audience.

We took over the management of a blue-chip telecoms company’s blog in January and, within six months, had boosted monthly viewing figures by approximately 1,300%.

Get in touch and we’ll talk through the best ways to get your business known out there.

You’re asking a lot from your target audience — business, budget and professional confidence. Why should they put their faith in you to deliver?

Because they trust you.

Getting to this point takes time and commitment and is interwoven with the process of building awareness; trust needs to be built, layer by layer, and you need the right strategy and processes in place to create it and then maintain it.

Yes, some elements of trust are intangible but, in business, you build trust by providing reassurance that:

• You can do what you say you can, consistently, and to an exemplary standard.
• You are reliable and in it for the long haul.
• You have the expertise and experience to provide genuine help.

Building trust is about getting this information across to the right people, in a format that means your sales force can use them with specific contacts (targeted) and you can also make them widely available, perhaps via your website, to boost general perceptions of trust (a more scatter-gun approach).

Here are a few ways you could start to build trust:

• Case studies highlighting existing customer satisfaction
• White Papers sharing and demonstrating your industry expertise
• eNewletters showing your understanding of their business world
• Brochures, events, videos and webinars offering solutions to specific business needs
• Using social media to join in their industry conversations.

Maintain trust to maintain business

One of the main reasons customers take their business elsewhere is because of a lack of trust. And this lack of trust is mainly to do with the organisation’s behaviour and poor communication.¹

Plus, studies show that it's less expensive to bring existing customers back than to attract new ones.

Get in touch and trust us to tell you more.

¹According to a four-year research study into 600 businesses mirroring the UK business spectrum.

Your target audience wants relevant and specific information about how you can help their business be successful, delivered in a way that’s professional and works for them.

Your salesforce wants effective tools, achievable goals and a bit of healthy competition to spice up their day.

And you? You need to make this happen; it’s your job to ‘tool up’ your salesforce so they can get the sales your business needs. Teacher, cheerleader, strategist, market analyst — all roles you need to take on to get your salesforce ready to deliver.

But it’s worth it; there’s no limit to what a well-briefed salesforce working within a clearly defined campaign can achieve. We know this, because we’ve done it, halving campaign costs and doubling revenues.

Here’s a taste of how we brief channels

We’ve worked with a group of desk-based sales professionals in a blue-chip company for many years and we gained our reputation by taking over a monthly campaign, restructuring the approach and adding creative flair.

As a result, revenues more than doubled, campaign costs fell by 50%, and seven out of eight salespeople preferred the new way of doing things.

To get the most out of your sales channels you could think about:

• Using your launch to educate as well as create focus and enthusiasm.
• Producing collateral that supports business-focused sales conversations.
• Low-cost but highly-effective ways of motivating your salesforce to achieve and your target audience to respond.

Get in touch and we’ll talk you through how the right briefing process can translate into increased sales for your organisation.

Getting your message to the right people — the decision makers, the budget holders, the strategists — is what turns interest, awareness and trust into hard sales. And targeting those people successfully is where the right, cost-effective mix of contact methods comes in.

Identifying the right people to target can be tricky; it might be a question of looking carefully at data you have in-house, or you might need to buy-in a good-quality list of contacts.

Who you’re talking to and what you’re talking about largely determines how you approach your targets — a show-and-tell type of product or service will work better with webinars, videos and face-to-face showcase events, for example; less hands-on products and services can get their benefits across via brochures, microsites and opportunities to talk.

And it’s essential that you always balance what you spend on the campaign and the returns you get on that investment. We encourage our clients to set up mechanisms to measure RoI and then we use every tool at our disposal to help them achieve excellent RoI results.

Here’s a taste of how our targeted campaigns bring returns

We used an eNewsletter to reach out to cool targets for one of our clients, a leading technology manufacturer. We used an easy-read mix of recent research and helpful tips on how to deal with current issues in an attractive format, sent it at the right time with an effective subject line.

As a result, our client got a response rate 70% higher than any response they’d had from a straightforward email campaign, resulting in potentially valuable hot leads wanting to try out their products.

Get in touch for a flavour of how we would target your ideal audience.

It’s famously ‘good to talk’ but, to get the most out of contact with a prospective customer, your salesforce needs tools to back-up their conversations and help them close the sale. They need tools that sales prospects can refer back to and that:

• Give more detailed information
• Share other customers’ experiences
• Show pictures, diagrams and visual input.

Whether they precede or follow up a sales conversation, brochures, emails, presentations and videos give your salesforce opportunities to reinforce their messages with customers, moving them closer to agreeing a sale. And they give you the opportunity to decide the look, feel and tone of the materials, keeping your ‘conversation’ with your customers consistent with your brand.

We hone our effective B2B tools to strike the right chord with your customers:

• Engaging brochures
• Tightly-argued leave-behinds
• ‘This is us’ introductory videos
• Customer case studies — video and written
• Presentations for your people to give, specialising in making the complex simple (but not over-simplified)
• Presentations for your customers to access on-demand via your website
• Emails, one-offs designed to warm up or follow-up on specifics
• Email campaigns to engage, inform and create leads.

The right tools close sales; get in touch and let’s talk about the tools you need.