Ramkumar

Why use social media for b2b marketing? Social media today is the most used medium for communication and transfer of information and knowledge between businesses of all kinds. It’s become generally accepted that social media channels provide an excellent way for businesses to reach out to consumers, but many companies remain unaware of the potential that social networks provide in business to business (B2B) marketing efforts. The truth is that as businesses have become more present and active on social media, the utility of those networks for B2B marketing has grown in parallel. Marketing isn’t a child’s play and in order to make marketing effective one needs to understand the market in depth, the product or service to be marketed and the end consumer. Also the tastes and likes of the recipient business need to be kept in mind. Social media is the effective tool to reach the large numbers of businesses worldwide since the whole world has now become a smaller place due to the spread of social media like facebook, twitter and Linkedin to every nook and corner of our planet. Social media can be more effective compared to television or other forms of media since it is fast and covers wide geographical area. Millions of businesses worldwide are hooked to the social media via internet wherein they can get up-to-date information about a product or service in seconds. Such is the reach of the social media that any product or service can be marketed with ease and deals between two businesses can be struck within seconds. For instance LinkedIn is a social network specifically built for professionals that is focused on developing business relationships, making it a natural place to begin social B2B marketing. If your business doesn’t have a company profile on LinkedIn, it’s missing out on excellent connection opportunities. LinkedIn company profiles allow businesses to highlight their products, services and available job opportunities, facilitating outreach to new talent and partners. Another social media platform apart from Linkedin is twitter which is also a useful tool as far as B2B communication is concerned. It may be a fast-paced, short-form communication channel, but that enables businesses to make consistent, repeated impressions on other industry members. Business professionals are active on Twitter, using the network to discover industry news, events and other relevant content. The expansive nature of Twitter makes it a great place to develop new business connections. Eventually I would reckon that a strong social presence is necessary for any modern business to optimize its discoverability and outreach efforts, including B2B marketing. Best b2b marketing campaigns While it’s easy to think of memorable examples of successful business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing campaigns, it’s much more difficult to think of B2B marketing examples that get people talking. Why is that so? Perhaps it’s because of the myth that B2B marketing is either dull or boring, that creativity has no place in this business. But that practice is changing quickly. As the following examples show, B2B marketers are using consumer insight to create marketing campaigns and strategies that are fun and just as engaging as many B2C marketing campaigns. Here are three B2B marketing examples that illustrate how companies inject life and creativity into their campaigns.  1. Tetra Pak demonstrates its marketing and product expertise. To highlight the merits of a new design, Swedish food packaging company Tetra Pak recently launched a whimsical B2B marketing campaign. The design, called the DreamCap, sits at a slight angle for easier drinking and fewer nose-to-container collisions, according to Direct Marketing. Despite the innovativeness of its new cap design, however, the company decided not to focus on its technical aspects alone. We didn’t want to tell the prospective clients about a package. We want to talk about what millennials are doing, thinking and buying, and offer a solution to meet those needs,” says Larine Urbina, communications manager at Tetra Pak U.S. and Canada. “We want to demonstrate our broad expertise in marketing and product formulation, not just sell a package. To do that, the company sent select prospects colorful, fun mailers that take people to a mini-adventure. It includes a foldout that mimics the Instagram look and feel, directing prospects into a portal that offers additional design concepts and product features. We want prospective clients to be able to envision their product in our package, knowing that they need to stand out to the millennial market,” Urbina says. “And we are consciously aware that many of these marketers are millennials themselves. The hyper-targeted campaign was highly successful, gathering more than 500 responses from its target audience. Urbina’s advice for other marketers? “Whoever you’re marketing to, even in the B2B space, everyone’s a consumer and you need to keep it interesting.” 2. Xerox uses humor to drive rebrand American company Xerox is no longer just about hardware, it is using a marketing campaign called Work Can Work Better to highlight its business services, which now make up a significant portion of its revenue. The campaign goal is to evolve the Xerox brand in a way that more accurately reflects the role Xerox is playing in the world today,” says CMO John Kennedy, in an interview about the campaign. “Xerox has universally been associated with one specific category, which is all about the technology. The business has evolved into one of the largest business-services providers, competing with IBM, Accenture and other business-service outsourcing firms. Humor plays a major role in the campaign, which includes TV spots, print ads and even a rebrand of the company website. The 30-second TV ad shows a business executive in various settings being bombarded by jargon including the cringe-worthy “bigger data.” Finding the right solution shouldn’t be so much work, according to the ad, and that “Work Can Work Better.” So far, the Xerox campaign seems to be working, gaining positive coverage from publications like Digiday,Forbes and MediaPost. 3. Adobe leverages content hub to shift buyer perception Insight Community of the Year finalist Adobe made its name in the desktop publishing business. It needed to expand market perception beyond desktop publishing when it acquired Omniture, a marketing analytics company. In particular, the company needed a way to regularly engage marketing leaders, Omniture’s main target audience. In an article for the Harvard Business Review, Mark Kovac, a partner at Bain & Company, shares how Adobe used content marketing to engage this audience. Adobe came up with a solution by using Omniture’s website CMO.com to help reposition its brand as a precursor to generating demand,” Kovac writes. “It gradually turned CMO.com into a powerhouse of original and curated content that’s highly relevant to heads of marketing. Today, CMO.com is recognized as one of the leading content marketing hubs in the world, allowing Adobe to keep its brand name top of mind among businesses that need marketing solutions. Conclusion The success of these campaigns is rooted in an understanding that B2B buyers have the same appetite for useful, interesting and authentic marketing as everyday consumers. These initiatives are successful because they demonstrate deep customer intelligence on the people they’re trying to target. Ultimately, success in B2B, just like in B2C, is highly dependent on an accurate and genuine understanding of your target audience. Future of business to business marketing A company will never succeed in marketing if it continues to embrace the past without looking forward to the future. In essence, you need to constantly look where you think the puck is going instead of sitting back and hoping the puck will come to you. The good news is that keeping up with the trends and future of marketing is becoming easier and easier. Sure, it’s happening more rapidly but the connectivity of brains from around the world and the mass distribution of thought is making it easier to stay ahead of the curve. It’s definitely no easy task to identify what trends are going to shape the future of business but it’s definitely a lot of fun. Over the last few years, the entire sales and marketing process for B2B and enterprise organizations has shifted. These companies are no longer armed with information that is hidden from the public and sales teams are no longer in the driver seat. Leads and prospects now hold the power as information is more readily available and the increase in competition has resulted in a plentiful supply of choice. Beyond that, technology has completed disrupted the once linear buying process and behaviour of B2B customers and has forced marketers to become more strategic and efficient in their approach. Here are a few changes that are going to redefine marketing in the B2B space over the next few years: 1. Social Data leads to broader customer base One of the most powerful channels in B2B is found in the professional social network, LinkedIn. In a leaked report published on Business Insider, LinkedIn highlights it’s plans to build a $1 billion B2B marketing business by 2017. The plan is something that every B2B marketer should read and a forward thinking plan that highlights the predicted role that social data will play in B2B marketing and sales moving forward. Every hour, every day, every week, the amount of data being distributed and created on social media channels is growing. Whether we’re talking about the data associated with our existing relationships or data that highlights organizational trends, the future of business will be built on this data. Relationship data companies have already started to unlock the power of relationship data for sales teams, it’s time for relationship data to arm the marketing departments with insights that drive results. Imagine for a second that your connections list on LinkedIn becomes a CRM system. Imagine that you have the ability to tag someone on LinkedIn as a potential prospect and automate outreach and conversations with these individuals over the course of three to six months. For example, you can create your own system that automatically sends out personalized “Congrats On The New Job” when a user changes their position on LinkedIn and are able to test the different automated messages to see which works best. To take things a bit further, imagine you’re able to compile a significant amount of employees if you’re the admin of your company page. The insights you’re able to pull from this company page includes trends in what companies are adding your employees to LinkedIn and how many of your employees are actually leveraging LinkedIn to communicate potential prospects. On top of that, the company page shares broad yet actionable data surrounding the types of prospects that have looked at your company page in the last one year. All of this data ultimately arms managers and executives with the ability to better understand their workforce and develop strategies that will drive conversion. Furthermore, insights into what types of organizations are viewing your profile give you the ability to be more strategic in advertising. Layer in the ability to automate messages to these users when they visit your company page and you’re instantly presented with a quality opportunity to turn strangers into customers. 2. Substantiated Tracking Hits the Real World Imagine you’re walking down the street and you see a digital billboard for the pair of shoes you’ve been looking at online. Imagine that the website you were visiting has the ability to track you in the real world because you happened to visit it using your mobile phone which is now traceable. Now let’s imagine that you’re walking into a conference and upon your arrival, you see a welcome sign from one of the brands competing for your business. And yes, it doesn’t just say Welcome To The Conference, it says your name at the end of the sentence. This is what the future of personalized tracking could look like. As a consumer, you might be thinking this is going to be invasive and creepy. As a brand or marketer, you need to think of the possibilities that this could open up for new touch points and new areas of conversion. In the future, the way we browse the web will be similar to the way in which we browse the world. The personalized experience we have online when we leave one website to the next will be replicated in the real world and shift from solely being a B2C opportunity to being an important driver of B2B success. 3. Big Data Starts giving optimistic results Today, one of the biggest challenges associated with big data is the marketing teams ability to assess and determine what information is worthwhile. A study from eMarketer.com found that 71% of marketers were interested in adding predictive analytics around the lifetime value of customers to their customer data profile – figuring out who would be their best customers moving forward and possibly even how to attract more of these customers. The most innovative and forward thinking companies are already using big data to learn about their customers and use this information to drive results. The majority of these organizations consists of SaaS products, social networks, mobile apps and other forms of software. The fact that these organizations are built on innovative technology makes it an easier sell and a more logical decision to capitalize on big data. That said, all B2B organizations can benefit from the power of Big Data when their plan is implemented correctly. For example, a HR firm could quickly leverage insights around their existing clients and the strength and weaknesses in their recruitment tactics. Big Data can uncover insights like what channels do the best recruits come from, what types of emails tend to perform better during the first contact or what type of clients tend to be the better fit for this firm. All of these insights will be captured by implementing the right technologies and. help companies ranging from Human Resources to Industrial Relations unlock insights about their organizations that they never seen before. 4. Growth hacking goes from B2c to B2B Above image is taken from http://rosssimmonds.com/marketing/future-b2b-marketing/ Many B2B marketing teams are still thinking about B2B marketing as a linear process between inspiration and acquisition. In reality, the process for converting a B2B lead into a customer is becoming more and more challenging as time goes on. The emergence of companies like DropBox and Yammer has resulted in blurred lines between products that solely serve B2B and those that serve the B2C market. As a result, organizations of all shapes and sizes must be aware of the challenges and opportunities that exist in a word where brands are more connected and consumers are more empowered. Welcome to the world of Growth Hacking. If you’re unfamiliar with Growth Hacking, it’s a term coined by Sean Ellis of GrowthHackers.com who defines it as being a person whose true north is growth. Surely, traditional marketers and marketing teams have always considered growth as one of their pillars of attention but a Growth Hacker has one singular goal.The true power of a growth hacker is found in their obsessive focus on growth. Presenting the opportunity to ignore almost everything else, these individuals can achieve the one task that matters most. Growth hackers are individuals who look for opportunities like tool development and content marketing and use them to help organizations succeed. Conclusion In the future, growth hackers will be an integral part of the B2B landscape as they also play a role in helping organization create an optimized sales funnel. For example, when a customer signs up for your product, how do you ensure word of mouth? If you’re like most B2B professionals, you simply ask your new customer to keep you in mind and get down on your knees and pray that they actually send leads your way. Everyone knows that referrals are the most important and most effective driver of new business. A growth hacker also understands this but has the skillset to craft more effective and efficient referral programs for your organization and company.