9 Essentials of Business-to-business Social marketing

Foreign, business-to-business socialization marketing has been relatively mature, and domestic business-to-business marketing is relatively "young", but with the rapid development of new media environment, as well as people's lives and work style changes, business-to-business socialization marketing must have a very broad development space. The compilation of this article is not to help the reader solve the number of substantive issues, only in the hope that the reader of business-to-business socialization marketing some in-depth thinking and discussion, and even practical feedback.

For many business-to-business marketers, the immediate challenge is not knowing what they are doing with social media. Of course, your business is likely to have Facebook and LinkedIn pages, and someone on your marketing team (probably you) will be posting it every day, but how can these actions help you achieve your marketing goals? or how do you find business-to-business sales leads?

The difference between business-to-business socialization marketing and business socialization marketing

Don't be surprised by the problem, because many people don't know much about business-to-business marketing. Many business-to-business marketers are trying to achieve measurable results in so-called social media marketing campaigns, so how can they be achieved? First, it must be clear that if you follow the social marketing routines of business-to-business marketers, please stop, mainly due to the following 6 reasons:

1. You are a business-to-business enterprise, not "Starbucks"

Instead of having tens of thousands of Facebook fans or Twitter followers, you're more likely to need only hundreds of or thousands of customers, potential customers, and influential people to build rapport with them through social media. So be clear: you first have to find your target audience and actually interact and communicate with them, rather than attracting a large number of customers aimlessly.

2. To forget the way to send coupons, the most important thing is to provide useful content to customers

Continue to try to distribute coupons to customers so they like the pages of your business on Facebook? Don't think about it any more, but you can try to get leads to download your product white papers, enroll for a free trial, and sign up for your company's webinar. That is, you need to provide them with useful and attractive content, so that they are more willing to leave their personal information (or share your product information with others) to help you carry out more in-depth marketing activities.

3. Let Zappos focus on its customer service, what you need is to obtain a partner-type customer

As a social media marketer, it's understandable that you care and respond to customer queries, which is why you have a social media account management team. But you are a business-to-business company, rather than simply responding to a customer's Twitter message about the wrong shoe code, as Zappos (a U.S. shoe-selling web site). You should be committed to using social media to develop a "partnership" relationship with existing customers and potential customers to help the sales team work.

4. It is right to know what the potential customer is feeling about the brand, but it is more necessary to focus on what they are talking about.

They're talking about tough issues, and your business plan can help them out?

What questions do they ask and what can be answered by your new product white paper?

What topics are they interested in and what will be discussed by your upcoming webinar?

And who in their social networks can help introduce your sales team?

All of these require us to listen carefully, and then really solve them.

5. Funnel Marketing to a certain extent than brand awareness

Don't misunderstand what I mean. Brand awareness is important, it can put your business into many customers to consider the scope of purchase, and can shorten the sales cycle, but brand awareness does not represent everything. In business-to-business marketing, you need to use social media to contact your potential customers, to communicate with them, to direct them to participate in your company's latest webinar, subscribe to your newsletter, and watch your new product promo, which is a process of customer transformation, The new sales leads will go into the Marketing automation system or customer management system to promote the deep layer of marketing and communication activities.

6. Listen and communicate patiently, you can't expect to get fans with a simple exchange of interests

On Facebook, if you send a gift card or an ipad to everyone, and basically anyone wants to be your fan, it's a great way to do business with business-to-business marketing, but it doesn't have to work for a potential consumer. Especially when it comes to talking about high prices and long sales cycles. So you should be patient with social media to listen to what your target audience is talking about, and provide valuable information to really help them (instead of selling their products to them outright), and communicate with them when they have a purchase intention.

A synopsis of marketing methods of business-to-business socialization

To carry out business-to-business marketing, you should try to use social media to explore potential customers, engage in two-way and in-depth interactive communication, and turn the potential customers into qualified sales leads.

1. Find your target audience in social networks

Take a closer look at the fans and followers of your company's social network, ask the sales team for a list of key customers, and then, as a business-to-business identity, use social media such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and google++ to find potential customers. These potential customers and people who are active in social media will be your target audience-you need to use social media to connect, listen, and communicate with your heart. You will find out which social platforms they use the most, what they read and share, and what thorny issues they are talking about, and so on, which needs and can be understood.

2. Engage in interactive communication with high quality content

High-quality content is the lifeblood of social media, which means it needs to cater to the needs, desires and interests of the target audience. First, look carefully at what your customers and potential customers see, share, and talk about in social media, and then summarize and refine the points to improve the content of the communication. At the same time, keep in mind that high quality content needs to be provided regularly and persistently, which involves knowledge of "content marketing" and should be studied carefully.

3. Convert leads into sales leads in the dynamic process of marketing

Now that you've tapped and communicated with potential customers on social networks, as marketers, you need to try to turn them into sales leads, and to provide the most relevant and helpful content to your target audience (Twitter is a good tool) to ensure that every message, Status and Bowen provide traceable content, as well as links back to the landing pages optimized for sales transformation, and Google Analytics, bity.ly, and Awe.sm can perform these tracking tasks well.

Realize that using social media to explore, communicate with potential customers and turn them into sales leads is unlikely to happen overnight, but as the marketing campaign progresses, you will be able to get a group of socially responsive social audiences that meet the needs of corporate marketing, They will continue to bring qualified sales leads to your sales team.

It's written in the back.

For business-to-business Marketing, we must first have a deep and clear understanding of the connotation and characteristics of business-to-business, which is the foundation of business-to-business Marketing. Like offline marketing, business-to-business marketing should grasp the core of the two points: "High-quality content" and "partner-type communication", and finally return to the brand and customer two-way value interaction.

At the level of marketing strategy, we should consider the national conditions. In China, where business-to-business social marketing is less sophisticated, in addition to some specialized business-to-business marketing platforms, there is a greater need to focus on popular social media, because whether it is a professional salesperson or a purchaser, the average person is also active in the general social media, and in China this " In the "Society of Relations", business-to-business Enterprises must grasp every point of contact with customers, not limited to the enterprise brand name of the social account to carry out interactive communication, but also need to be specific to the Sales manager, customer managers and other personnel in the social media and customer partnership with the construction and development of the relationship, Narrow the distance between the brand and the customer.

At the same time, no marketing can be isolated, business-to-business socialization marketing, including online marketing, service marketing and experience marketing to create the spread of noise.

Because of the difference between Chinese and foreign languages and cultural differences and the limited ability of individuals, the article compiled may be difficult to show the original charm, the reader can view the original. I hope all of you business-to-business social marketing followers and practitioners to share a lot of views and experience!