The American Marketing Association (2015) defined B2B companies as businesses that market their products to other businesses, in contrast to B2C organisations, which sell their products directly to individual consumers. In the B2B sector, there are less organisations involved in business transactions than there are consumers engaged in B2C interaction.
B2B marketing is different from B2C because its sales cycles is longer, many decision makers participate in the purchase decision, customers are more likely to be fact rather than emotion driven, and the end game is building enduring business relationships.
Setting specific goals helps B2B to gauge the response and Return on Investment (ROI) on social networks, as well as planning for future social media involvement. Research by the Content Marketing Institute has identified and quantified the importance of the following B2B goals.
The top three goals of creating brand awareness, educating audiences, and building trust focus on building better business relationships with customers, prospects, influencers, and the wider community so that your business becomes top of mind when it comes to buying decisions.
B2B brand building is more important now than ever because you cannot afford to reach multiple audiences with salespeople. Social networks facilitate communication with coherent messages, and recognition with target audiences.
You can measure brand awareness with specific metrics such as post reach, audience growth and audience reactions. And there are plenty of social media analytics companies that provide tools to help you assess the success of your B2B social media. I use Metigy but there are numerous others.
Educating audiences is an expensive but a worthwhile goal because it cements your audience credibility. Digital media for your educational content may include blog posts, e-books, research reports, price comparisons charts and how-to videos. B2B buyers tend to do independent research to ensure that the companies they support and buy from are credible.
With so much competition among B2B brands, anything you can do to build trust and improve your credibility is a plus. Testimonials, positive reviews, awards, customer milestones are some ways you can engender trust in social media.
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Maria Charlton
maria@mapamarketing.com.au