B2B Marketing’s Social Media Benchmarking Report reveals marketers have no social strategy. Maxine-Laurie Marshall delves into the findings
If you fail to plan then you plan to fail’, right? Or perhaps, you’re of the opinion ‘life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans’?
It seems B2B marketers are split almost evenly between the two ways of thinking. Forty four per cent of marketers surveyed for our Social Media Benchmarking Report said they either didn’t have a strategy for carrying out social media activity or didn’t know, while 55 per cent did have a strategy.
It’s fairly simple really. If you don’t have a plan, a strategy, then how can you expect any decent return? You won’t even know what sort of return you’re looking for. And senior executives are looking for a return: 72 per cent of respondents’ senior management teams wanted social activity to demonstrate ROI.
The good news is marketers can see the problem; 24 per cent said being more strategic in their social activity would help improve impact. So how can marketers be more strategic with social?
Neil Major, strategy director at Yomego advises marketers to stop thinking of social as new and different: “Social media is mature now – it’s not going away and the value is becoming clearer. Thus normal business rigour should return – start with your business and/or marketing objectives and work out how this applies to social channels and activity.”
Sarah Purvis, marketing and communications executive at Cube3, warns people need to have a joined up strategy: “Social media activity needs to link with every other area of your marketing plan and business objectives. Treat your own business as if it were a customer. Use analytics to measure your engagement levels and the success of your strategy and aim to improve, month on month.”
Outsourcing
There’s always the option of turning to a specialist agency for help with social. However, there is reluctance among B2B marketers to outsource social media activity. This year 74 per cent of marketers said they rarely outsource social media marketing activity to third-parties, a similar figure to 2013 and 2011 when 73 and 70 per cent respectively said they would rarely outsource.
On the surface the reluctance seems like the right reaction, social is a very personal channel, and in order to get the brand voice correct, it’s often best to come from the brand itself. Something Debby Penton, director at tech PR agency, EML Wildfire agrees with: “Our advice would be: don’t outsource social media if you don’t have to. It is more cost effective to do it inhouse. Paying agencies to tweet for you doesn’t make sense when you’re trying to build a direct connection with your audience, and you’re unlikely to have such a large volume of interactions that you can’t handle the workload.”
However, she adds: “The agency relationship works best when helping set up a social media strategy, content calendars, training internal people and providing the content that can be used to engage your audience.”
Generating sales
The benefits seen thanks to social are shifting. In 2013 the emphasis was on brand positioning, driving web traffic and thought leadership. This year there has been a significant increase in the number of people naming lead generation and driving sales as important objectives for their organisation. This shift has to solidify social as a beneficial channel for the minority still questioning its relevance in B2B. Instead of being seen as a ‘fluffy’ channel, marketers are using it to deliver leads and sales. Perhaps the constant pressure from senior management to show return from this channel has pushed marketers to do exactly that. Amanda Kouwenhoven, head of engagement at content marketing agency Axonn Media, believes: “The main difference nowadays is that there are more businesses using social properly, people have a better understanding of social media and what it can achieve and talk of social ROI has also become an increasingly popular topic in mainstream media. Together, these changes have led to widespread awareness of social performance and a greater demand from everyone for measureable results.”
And LinkedIn was the social channel that came out on top for delivering those measurable results. It was named as the most effective channel for generating leads and revenue. Unsurprisingly then, the professional network was the most used network for B2B marketers, with 94 per cent of respondents having a presence. Twitter was pretty close behind with 89 per cent of respondents having a presence. The much criticised Facebook is still holding strong in the top three most popular social channels for B2B, with 77 per cent of respondents having a presence.
Google+
The other contentious social channel for B2B is Google+, the channel everyone is waiting to sky-rocket into relevancy but we’re all just sat around in circles getting a bit bored of waiting for the party to start. Over the last year we found those respondents with a Google+ page has increased from 36 per cent to 61 per cent. A significant increase. However, before you start planning your next, or first, hangout, be aware that there are still more respondents who don’t have a presence compared to those who update their profile regularly. Thirty nine per cent of respondents still don’t have a presence on the network, while only 26 per cent update their profiles regularly. The other 35 per cent merely have a profile. So is Google just holding marketers to ransom and forcing them to have a presence on the site because it benefits SEO?
Penton of EML Wildfire, agrees and puts the increase of B2B marketers with a presence on the site down to an effective user acquisition strategy by Google. “Many businesses are joining for the SEO benefits, some accounts have been activated due to YouTube presence and Google has other ways of getting people to join up too, e.g. Google Places for Business. This would explain the low engagement rates – people aren’t joining Google to be social, but for other reasons.”
Content on social
It’s almost impossible to talk about social media without mentioning content marketing, so while the topic of the next section will be no surprise, the statistics may well be.
Images have increased in importance and prominence when it comes to digital marketing and specifically social media. Pinterest burst onto the B2B scene in 2012, the top three social networks now all incorporate a header image and Facebook bought Instagram in 2012. When asked what content works best across social media, 55 per cent named video as the most effective and 47 per cent of respondents named images. However, when asked which types of content brands are sharing on social the majority named written copy (79 per cent). Images were shared 10 per cent less (by 69 per cent of respondents), then came headlines and videos, chosen by 64 per cent and 63 per cent respectively.
B2B marketers have been told again and again that images are preferable over copy so they automatically deem them to be more effective but words are still more popular among marketers. While it would be ridiculous to ignore images and video, it should indicate to B2B marketers that the humble written word is not done and dusted. Jeff Johns, associate director of Northstar Research Partners, explains why: “Text is less risky. While text can be offensive, images and video offer many more opportunities to inadvertently make an error. Do your characters have the correct mix of ages? Genders? Ethnicities? Have you included anything that could be culturally insulting? It is far simpler to ensure your written words are safe to disseminate.
“Text is more efficient. In today’s world, a brand must be ready to respond immediately to events, video (and even images) takes much more time to plan and produce.
“Text is easier to consume. We can break off in the middle of a written article for an hour or even a day, return and within seconds re-familiarise ourselves with the topic via a quick skim and continue on. Video simply requires more commitment – turning on the sound or putting in headphones and watching straight through – while text is more adaptable.”
Sanjay Castelino, VP of marketing at IT community Spiceworks, believes so. He says: “Industry-specific networks and communities will put a brand in front of its ‘audience of one,’ but the campaigns and social interactions must be authentic and provide value to users. Achieve this and vendors can become an integral and welcome part of communities.”
Industry-specific communities
Lastly, the Social Media Benchmarking Report revealed a potential missed opportunity for B2B marketers. Industry-specific communities are among the least used social platforms with only nine per cent of respondents having a regularly updated profile on one. In an era where ‘marketing to one’ is the aim, it seems like a no-brainer to try and tap into these already segmented groups. So are marketers missing an opportunity?
Perhaps these platforms are more daunting for marketers, by their nature they will be full of industry experts so generic marketing messages will not cut it. These communities are usually set up so peers can talk among themselves about a similar topic, they will be talking about industry trends and vendors. It’s almost like turning up to a party where everyone is talking about you but they don’t want to talk to you.
However, these social platforms are one of the only ones that aren’t saturated with other marketers and your competitors, so get your messaging right and you could see the benefits.
So a mix of good and bad news came from this year’s report. Marketers aren’t making time to build a social strategy, but it’s great they are starting to see social as a useful channel for building leads and generating sales. However, in order to see that number grow, there needs to be a plan in place. Marketers must think about social strategically. Many commentators made the point, social is not new, it’s not special. Marketers need to treat it like they would other marketing channels. You wouldn’t just pick up the phone, make a few telemarketing calls every now and again and expect good results. So don’t do the equivalent with social.
Social Media Benchmarking Report
This feature is based on statistics from our Social Media Benchmarking Report. The report is available for free to premium members and to buy for non-members: b2bmarketing.net/social-benchmarking-2014
