The Web is awash with articles exalting the benefits of social media, so it's more than a little ironic that B2B marketers still find themselves searching online for social-media information that speaks to their unique needs and challenges.
Even though B2C companies get the lion's share of coverage, B2B organizations of vastly different sizes and in various industries are making striking gains in employing newer Web technologies to increase their market share and solve revenue challenges.
Developed especially for B2B marketers, this article provides social-media case studies for companies ranging from industry veterans SAP and BusinessWeek to newer and smaller firms Equation Research and Radian6.
As a bonus, the marketers behind each winning effort share key Tips to help other B2B marketers develop social-media programs.
1. B2B Skills Training: SAP's social-media footprint brings customers back into their ecosystem, decreases purchasing cycles
SAP is the largest IT vendor in the world—and, interestingly, also the globe's No. 1 training organization. In 2008, SAP Education needed to attract more skilled business and IT professionals to the SAP ecosystem for their skills-training needs. And to help accelerate the knowledge of new workforce participants, SAP had to find faster, more flexible and time-sensitive ways to reach, train, and enable professionals.
Learning on Demand by SAP, with the new feature of offering individual courses or full catalog subscriptions, was born from this need.
To promote this initiative, SAP needed a strategy that would allow it to communicate and connect with prospects outside of the sales process. Marketing turned to social media in order to create a dynamic "digital footprint."
The effort consisted of Facebook-related groups, a fan page, and highly targeted Facebook ads. SAP further expanded the effort with a Twitter account, a Slideshare space, LinkedIn groups, and a YouTube channel. The company established a content-driven strategy that provided value, built trust, and promoted peer recommendations.
The payoff of this social-media strategy, as executives found, lies in the purchasing cycles: Rather than multiple touch points being activated during the purchase process, such as direct email, personal sales, and telesales, over 75% of sales conversions are occurring after only two website visits—with almost 90% of purchases made within four days.
Tip for B2B marketers: Apply B2C disciplines within B2B frameworks
Joe Westhuizen, VP of education strategy, stresses the value of experimentation: "Don't be afraid to apply B2C disciplines within a B2B framework. Try a range of tactics but use your analytic tools to watch them closely. When one takes off, get behind it with your other marketing channels. For example, if a direct marketing promotion is strong, amplify it with social media. And if a social media promotion works, amplify it with promotional codes, direct mail, or online videos."
2. B2B Media: BusinessWeek increases user engagement by enabling professionals to contribute any business-oriented content
Founded in 1929, and online since 1994, BusinessWeek is a global source of essential business insight. While its goal centers on increasing user engagement around business-oriented content, its social media strategy is perhaps the most profound example of this game-changing Web 2.0 environment: Through its main social-media product, Business Exchange, users are encouraged to contribute and collaborate around business content from any media outlet—not just that of BusinessWeek.
Enabling users to post and share news articles, blog posts, research studies, and content they find meaningful, users can suggest and populate new content topics, create user profiles, and discover other people with similar business interests. In March, BusinessWeek also began to allow users to simultaneously post their Business Exchange reactions on articles and blog entries across their LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.
The media player assesses its social-media ROI by tracking levels of user interaction and engagement across comments posted on BusinessWeek articles and blog entries—figures that have increased 25% over the prior year.
Equally compelling, tracking the content that users share through Business Exchange gives BusinessWeek a newfound level of insight into specific content preferences of its core audience. Users have created more than 1,600 business-oriented topics and adding hundreds of thousands of content links to date.
Tip for B2B marketers: Forget the numbers—focus on engaging people
True to publication's focus on engaging users, Ron Casalotti, Director of User Participation, explains, "There is a tendency for those new to social media to fixate on the number of people (e.g., followers, fans) associated with social media sites to the point of equating success with quantity. Don't fall into that trap. The key is in engaging your users on a meaningful level and on a 1:1 basis. Be out there, be real, be responsive, be transparent and the numbers will follow – organically."
3. B2B Research Services: Equation Research leverages a crowdsourcing strategy to build brand and the prospect pipeline
A full-service research execution and strategy firm, Equation Research sought to use social media to grow a permission-based network of sales prospects for its offerings. But instead of spreading its attention across multiple efforts, Equation focused on one distinct program and unique strategy: letting the very market that it was targeting with its services to determine the questions that the "2009 Marketing Industry Trends" study would ask.
In a practice termed "crowdsourcing," Equation invited the online marketing community to create the questions of the study and then funded and prepared the research and findings for the community. The crowdsourced study proved so popular that it is now slated to be fielded annually, and it will be extended to smaller, targeted research programs designed by and for specific audiences (e.g., casual-dining restaurant marketers).
Overall, the effort was a tremendous brand-building success, with Equation Research's study appearing in numerous articles, including coverage in some of the most popular marketing publications and blogs. Noting a 200% increase in website traffic from the effort, Equation also built a permission-based marketing pipeline from scratch, with over 300 new prospects opting in.
Most striking, from a new-business perspective, the program provided a five-fold increase in the amount of leads generated over Equation's other marketing programs.
Tip for B2B marketers: Create real value for audiences before expecting value in return
Reflecting on Equation's foray into social media, Chris Burke, director of business development, recommends the following: "Use Social Media as a way to create new streams of value for audiences, not as another means to broadcast a marketing message. Especially when targeting B2B professionals, the first step in engagement should be asking the question, 'How can we add real value to the conversation?'"
4. B2B Social Media Monitoring: Radian6 creates a community of leads by adopting a social-media culture across the organization
Helping companies listen to the online discussion around their brands and industry, Radian6 provides a Web-based social-media monitoring platform for marketing, communications, and customer-support professionals. Advocating that businesses need to build a social culture, not just promote one or two social media "personalities" in order to be truly effective, Radian6's entire leadership and communications teams are active in social channels.
Whether on the company's blog, across several Twitter accounts, or via hosting "T webinars" (webinars that allow for real-time interaction through Twitter), Radian6's strategy is to use social media as a means to be accessible, helpful, and engaged with the people who drive the company's business.
Plans are also underway to create an expansive library of content: videos, webinars, whitepapers, case studies, blog posts, and podcasts. All those resources are designed to help inform, educate, and provide useful information to its target audiences.
Radian6 does track and measure leads, referrals, and recommendations, which are how it acquires the bulk of its business. Its lead-conversion rate is significantly higher than the industry standard, and the online posts/mentions about its brand have been tracking overwhelmingly positive for the life of the company.
Unique, however, is that Radian6 isn't looking at ROI as others traditionally might, because its entire marketing and communications approach is based on social media. It was founded as a community-centric business, focused on the growth and engagement of its user community through relationship-building and social-media outreach, with engagement both online and offline.
Tip for B2B marketers: Listen first... and for various reasons
In line with the company's focus, Amber Naslund, Radian6's director of community, advises: "Listen first and always. Listening isn't just about who's talking about you directly. It's about hearing the needs of your community, finding the conversations you want to be part of, and understanding how the competition is faring on the Web. There are free tools available and more in-depth paid solutions, but either way, listening is what forms the foundation of any solid and sustainable social-media strategy."
