Posts Tagged ‘business-to-business’

Solution to the Pains of BtoB Complex Sales Process is a Good Social Marketing Lead Generation Program

January 31st, 2011

Most people don’t think BtoB Complex Sales when they think of social media, but social’s ability to target with laser-like precision, enable buyers to self-educate, and allow for a variety of different buying paths; BtoB complex sales may become easier, in the long run, to demonstrate social media’s ROI in terms of marketing and lead generation.  

We pulled together the common challenges and opportunities that we have seen for BtoB customers specifically. Many of these overlap for BtoC, but given these tend to be more transactional; BtoB or complex channel sales processes have more specific pains associated with the need to build multiple relationships with much greater strategic impact within a sale. The number of moving pieces can be much more visible and more easily managed via a social lead generation programs.  We thought this list might help a sales & marketing executive realize they are not alone in their challenges and begin to help them build the foundation for a business case for social marketing.

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Posted in Archive 2011

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Enterprise Social Media and Online Communities Have a Long Way to Go

October 14th, 2009

I get a lot of industry articles and reports emailed to me… a lot… I think it is a reflection of the interest that is being generated around the discussions that we have on how to apply social media to business. Some of this has been documented in this blog, but much has happened so fast and furious over the last few weeks that we haven’t been able to catch up. A couple of reports that are worthy of your review as stand-alone pieces of research, but taken together validate the conversations that we are having…

1. Deloitte’s Tribalization of Business Study on Online Communities – Really good metrics on community usage. Worth noting that many of their communities are smaller which also reflects their sampling business size. Additionally, very skewed to business-to-business which also is reflective of the state of the market. An analysis of the report finds that” 60% of communities are less than 1 year old & greater than 2/3′s of the communities have less than 1,000 members.”

2. 8 ways the American information worker remains a Luddite in ComputerWorld – October 10, Eric Lai – Quotes a Forrester Research Study around corporate technology usage. “Less than 20% of information workers said they visit social networking sites for work”

Take that into context around the amount of education that we have been doing with all size organizations on how to build effective social marketing programs, you can see that the market is just really beginning. We have been doing Social Marketing Assessments for companies to give a snapshot of how they are doing comparative to the market in terms of their social media presence. Really easy to play “gotcha” with most companies as they haven’t developed formalized blogger outreach and social media participation programs. As more companies realize that this will be a critical requirement for either maintaining market share and/or finding opportunities to reach potential buyers in a low cost way, you will see more companies do outreach on social media.

From there, the next logical step will be to build their own communities into their website to continue the conversation and begin the sales process within the confines of their websites. This gives more analytics, better influence over the conversation, and the ability to drive search engine optimization. Dynamic social media content is optimized better than static content pages.

Good news/bad news is that we have a long way to go & it may be a shorter process than many people expect….

Matthew Rosenhaft

Principal

Social Gastronomy

mrosenhaft@socialgastronomy.com

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Posted in Archive 2009

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