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Related Posts Related Websites ]]> http://www.richardbuettner.com/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-02-14/feed/ 0 B2B Social Media Marketing for Brand Awareness and Thought Leadership http://www.richardbuettner.com/b2b-social-media-marketing-content-for-brand-awareness-and-thought-leadership/ http://www.richardbuettner.com/b2b-social-media-marketing-content-for-brand-awareness-and-thought-leadership/#comments Fri, 12 Feb 2010 12:47:00 +0000 Richard Buettner http://www.richardbuettner.com/b2b-social-media-content-creation-and-promotion-for-brand-awareness-and-thought-leadership/
B2B Social Media Marketing for Brand Awareness and Thought Leadership

Let’s look at some definitions first:

Thought Leadership: “exploiting a company’s unique position in its market to generate valuable insight and advice on issues your customers and prospects care most about” and Brand Awareness: “measures consumers’ knowledge of a brand’s existence. At the aggregate (brand) level, it refers to the proportion of consumers who know of the brand”.

B2B sales cycles though are by nature longer and more complex. As customers move through the funnel there are 4 phases: awareness, interest, desire, action. All of these phases can be support and optimised by social media marketing. For brand (or awareness) building and thought leadership B2B companies need to help buyers research early in the sales cycle (awareness and interest), demonstrating that they are trusted advisers who understand the prospect’s problems. By using thought leadership to engage prospects early, one can build awareness and increase chances to get on the radar screens of the people who matter (including editors, analysts, investors and prospects, buyers). In social media thought leadership can be seen as a preliminary stage of brand building and is earned by constant and active social media content contribution and sharing of visions.

Thought Leadership / Brand Awareness and Inbound Marketing

How can Social Media or Inbound Marketing help to bring a company’s visions (or its products or services offerings) to the attention of consumers? The answer is “’content marketing” (marketing formats that involve the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current and potential consumer bases). Here B2B marketers use the sharing of content as a means of persuading decision-makers to turn their once-proprietary informational assets into available to selected audiences (the selections would be a result of social media monitoring where one can determine where the communications take place, the key discussion points and the most influential participants).

Generate Awareness
How it works? - go to where your prospects hang out online and have an active and engaging presence there. Of course, and this is preached on a daily basis in social media circles, create valuable content. Without delivering value to your audience you jeopardise your marketing activities by turning into a marketer attempting to sell another “high ROI” “cost-efficient” business tool and you will get in return the inevitable “so what”? And content is by no means publishing a slick press release once a month but can be a simple video (I like the “plain English” ones) showing the benefits of your product or interviewing the key stakeholders (staff or existing customers) can become an invaluable resource to any visitor in awareness or interest phase of the sales funnel. Also remember not to tweet about what you had for lunch.
Content Dissemination
The next important step in creating consumers’ knowledge of your brand existence is disseminate the content through all possible social media platforms / channels. There are many mechanisms to do so: each has its benefits and efforts required:
image thumb B2B Social Media Marketing for Brand Awareness and Thought Leadership

Source: Marketing Sherpa

Get a Blog?

So, your average Social Media Guru normally tells you to “get a blog”? Obviously a classic inbound marketing tool, however a good way to find out what works best for your industry/purposes you might want to try Foresters’ social technographics profiling tool. Combined with the results of the social media monitoring you’ll get a pretty clear pictures which platforms to use to gain the most of your social media efforts.

As a rule of thumb atomized, distributed content on different platforms work much better than siloed, “big” content like white papers. And if your content is good and valuable as well as properly disseminated you will be found.

Become a Thought Leader

How do you position yourself as Thought Leader? Social media is about people, not logos. That’s why the most powerful form of social capital is personal, not corporate. Hence this democratisation of content allows every tiny start-up to become thought leader or a rock star in its particular area. Bearing in mind the definition “…to generate valuable insight and advice on issues your customers and prospects care most about” its clear that one of the big benefits of social media in B2B is the ability to establish and foster expertise within a given industry or niche. The same tools and services that social marketers use to generate awareness are also available to anyone with wisdom and vision to share. As eMarketer points out, establishing and conveying thought leadership is a valid and promising opportunity in social media.

108696 B2B Social Media Marketing for Brand Awareness and Thought Leadership

However to become a thought leader in social media you have to be on. At the end of the day content is king and you earn the business and relationships you deserve.  Obviously as a marekter you want to sell your stuff so the temptation is there to become overly promotional in your inbound marketing activities. My advice would be find a meaningful mixture of: promotional – educational – informational and entertaining content. Use an independent tone of voice, support the content/story with data and articles and make use of existing customers or influential third parties. It’s that easy…

Another interesting approach I found is one coming from the socialmediatoday blog. I agree on what they say about the four P’s of marketing: Product / Price / Placement / Promotion are made for B2C and don’t really work for online B2B marketing.

Instead the 4 C’s of B2B Marketing are:

  • Content – the creation of a steady stream of engaging content
  • Connection – connecting with the audience you wish to attract
  • Communication – communicating with them in an ongoing conversation
  • Conversion – and then converting them at the illusive moment of need

“Since B2B Marketing is arguably more of a marathon than a sprint in marketing – you need to always have your 4 C’s engine going – creating the best content, finding the connecting with your target audience, sustaining the communications pattern until they are ready to convert – this way you have a fighting chance at making all your marketing efforts count toward one goal – Sales!”

Two last words: Don’t forget the huge positive Social SEO impact your brand building efforts and social media activities have resulting in highly targeted traffic back to your site/blog and don’t forget to measure!

Thanks for reading this article.

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Google Buzz

Buzz is one of Google’s most viable and aggressive pushes into social networking yet. It lets people follow status updates and posts from their closest friends in a service that rests inside Gmail. Gmail’s massive installed user base, with 176 million unique visitors in December according to Comscore, gives Buzz a running start on building a social network.

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Social Media and Financial Services Best Examples

Traditionally the financial sector leads technology innovation and used to invest huge sums in systems and software. Looking at the engagement rate of social media and the adoption of multichannel approaches it seems this industry is not yet embracing social media marketing (see graphic below)  - was it hit too hard by the credit crunch? Obviously there’s room to improve when it comes to engaging socially with customers or community building since many participants in that market are perceived rather monolithic and imposing as opposed to caring and engaging. Caused by the economic crisis in particular Banks also deal with trust issues which probably accelerate a change towards an opening to social media in the  future.

social-media-engagement-by-industry

Social media engagement by industry

Nevertheless there are some success stories of how regulated industries like the financial industry can gain from social media and below are great example of sites in or about the industry from the world wide web.

Tracking social media participation

For some great insights and to get an overview of the adoption have a look at Visible Banking. It’s not very pleasing on the eye but is bursting with articles, interviews and a directory about social media initiatives of the financial services business. An example of its Twitter watch is here:

Visible Banking Twitter Watch #15 – November 2009: 877 Accounts / 46 Countries / 331,351+ Followers / 9,960 Lists – Top 10s Financial Institutions / Credit Unions / Insurance

Communities / Networks

HSBC appears to be the most innovative player with its HSBC Business Network and the “Little Black Book” microsite for First Direct customers to exchange recommendations. The HSBC Business Network is an online community for both customers and non-customers, allowing businesses and entrepreneurs to share information with and gain information from their peers. It is a good example of brands using online communities to provide a service that compliments and enhances their existing product portfolio.

The Little Black Book an affiliate of HSBC is a community where users exchange information not related to financials. But in in particular the page live.firstdirect is a remarkable progression towards social media openness and authenticity. It monitors and visualises live customer and non firstdirect thumb Social Media and Financial Services Best Examplescustomer feelings about the brand. This is a brave step in a sector where balancing customer satisfaction against profitable customer management has proved challenging to say the least. It currently says 74% of all live words are positive; hope remains that this is unfiltered information ….

Compliance and regulatory issues are amongst the major reasons the financial services industry is shying away from the openness and accountability of social media marketing. ComplianceOnline is a regulatory compliance solutions provider operating in the B2B arena. Operating in a highly fragmented and hyper-competitive marketplace the website has more than 2 million unique visitors per year and 500,000 registered users. By actively engaging users in a two-way dialogue the company behind the community MetricStream uses social media to ultimately create awareness and generate qualified leads which make up 30% of their total sales leads.

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Mobile

Another financial services company namely Nationwide Insurance provides a free, company-branded “Accident Toolkit” iPhone application for advising what to do after an accident. The app can call emergency services, collect and exchange accident information (even using the iPhone’s camera and GPS), connect with a towing service, and (for Nationwide customers) initiate the claims process, among other things. That is indeed social media.

Crowd-sourcing and Peer-to-Peer

Peer-to-Peer lending makes perfectly sense where there are enough people needing to borrow money and those wanting to lend. They are better off dealing directly with each other rather than using banks or other middle-men. Each, for a fee of course. Have a look at Prosper.com and Zopa.com to find out more about that great idea.

If you still have unfulfilled dreams make us of the social saving approach of smartypig. Its a bit of a crowd-sourced social network where, if you share your saving goal (dreams), friends and family can provide financial support. You can smartypig thumb Social Media and Financial Services Best Examplesalso add your personalized SmartyPig widget to your Facebook or MySpace page, blog or Website. Not to mention, you can start your own SmartyPig Friends Network. Cute.

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Twitter

Often quoted the Bank of America Twitter account is a good example how Twitter can be used to help, listen and learn from customers, even in a sensitive environment like sharing financial information over social media.

Other twitter based applications worth mentioning are StockTwits and AdviserTweets. More geared towards financial professionals rather than customers, they are innovative approaches of how social media can be utilised by asset managers or financial advisors.

Not so good examples

Just two examples I came across today. These are Deutsche Bank’s and UBS’ facebook fanpages. I am asking myself why and how they managed to get 1,700 users (by the time of the writing). There must be a reason why they don’t put any content on their pages. Is it regulatory reasons? Maybe someone can shine a light on this.

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