Sam Williams-Thomas, CEO of OgilvyOne expains how B2B marketers can improve their customer engagement in four simple steps
Social offers a huge opportunity for B2B marketers for one simple reason: the biggest influences on us at work are our peers. So social channels, where we interact with our peers are potentially an incredibly powerful way to unlock customer engagement.
To understand these opportunities better OgilvyOne established the Social Value Benchmark – a process to assess companies’ social activities against their direct competitors based on public information.
Assessed on 1,672 datapoints for eleven B2B companies this research had some surprising findings:
- Social is most actively used in the early stages of customer journeys with a score of 68 per cent at awareness falling to 13 per cent at the point of purchase. Social is still implicitly seen as a broadcast medium, and so is used relatively traditionally by most marketers.
- Even though B2B buyers routinely connect with their peers in forums, and are happy to talk to brand experts as well, most companies are reluctant to leave the social ‘safe zone’ and speak with customers outside their owned social channels. Unless a company has had a very successful programme of engaging its customers, the vast majority of them are likely to be found outside its owned channels, so this both misses significant opportunities to increase reach and often means ignoring questions or discussions where a supplier can add value using their technical expertise.
- Channel disconnect is a common phenomenon, with a colder tone on the company website compared to social. Often companies, and their internal experts, have excellent testimonials or reviews from their customers in social channels, but do not use these outside social channels.
- Very little effort is made to engage in social channels after purchase, with an average loyalty benchmark score of only 11 per cent. Many organisations simply don’t have any plan to engage their customers in social after purchase.
B2B marketers can quickly improve their customer engagement with a few simple steps:
1. Every social strategy should start from the business strategy, rather than a social channel. ‘What can we do on LinkedIn?’ is essentially a meaningless question compared to questions like: ‘How do we use social to drive advocacy from satisfied customers?’ or ‘Which parts of our customer journey are our customers active in social?’
2. Content needs to be optimised to a purpose such as lead generation, or improved relationships with individual customer segments, rather than social platform metrics like Retweet.
3. Social needs to be integrated with customer engagement programmes rather than having two separate streams of activity. Very few organisations currently use social to cement loyalty even through activities as simple as having a separate Twitter feed or LinkedIn group that only customers can join. It’s increasingly easy to track the impact of social content so that for instance, you can understand when your salesforce’s tweeting of your latest publication is driving leads that subsequently convert.
4. While most companies examined have good levels of customer satisfaction, very few are prompting their customers to advocacy. Not only are customers more credible than what you say – but they often add granular details about the quality of your products that either you may not appreciate or are particularly relevant to their personal networks. While many marketers think of reviews as something primarily relevant to hotels and restaurants, endorsements from clients in social are potentially powerful weapons for B2B marketers.
