Business-to-Business Social Media Marketing Basics

Posted in Features, Social Media

Social media is common for consumer sales but Kipp Bodnar and Jeffrey L. Cohen, say business-to-business (B2B) marketers are missing out. See what I learned during HubSpot’s “How to master B2B Social Media Marketing” webinar today.

Case Study: BreakingPoint - Performance & Security Testing Products for Networks

  • Claims a 2,800% ROI on their web marketing efforts to close millions in sales from online leads.
  • Blog with categories that fit their user types.
  • Informative presentation decks on SlideShare.
  • Website has calls to action for webinars.

Action Steps for B2B Social Media Marketing

  • Categorize your customer personas. You have many different types of customers that want different types of content. These customer personas become the categories that you wills structure your blog and content around.
  • Gather your expertise. You already have white papers, articles by experts, and in-person seminars. Now it’s time to bring that information online. If you don’t have in-house experts, find the thought-leaders in your field and contract them to create content for you.
  • It’s imperative to connect with as many people as possible in an age where everyone is connected to a potential customer.
  • Share lots of links. The shelf life of a link is about 3 hours.
  • The 10-4-1 Rule. Share 10 links to third-party articles per 4 links to your own content/blog posts to 1 link to your landing/converting page.
  • Place Calls-To-Action everywhere.
  • Like Gate your Facebook page.
  • Test and iterate.
  • Report your results (see next section).
Calculating Return on Investment
  • TLV = Total Lifetime Value. Partner with your finance department to calculate the average purchase value and number of purchases for customers.
  • COCA = Cost of Customer Acquisition. Cost of the marketing activities that earned you the lead.
  • Agree on attribution. Many factors may contribute to the final sale. Do you attribute the customer to the first action they took with your company like following you on Twitter? Or do you attribute the customer to last action they took before purchasing like attending a webinar.
Case Study: Dyn – Managed, Outsourced  & Anycast DNS

  • Social Media amplifies the effectiveness of offline marketing, it doesn’t replace it.
  • DNS is traditionally a bland topic. They decided to create a campaign around “DNS is Sexy” with a hashtag.
  • They handed out 5,000 T-shirts at a trade show with the tag line.
  • They threw a “Dyn-tini” cocktail party. Most trade show parties have half or less of people invited actually come. Dyn claims that 95% of the people who they gave tickets to actually attended the party.
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