Success in B2B social media marketing is like success in every other endeavor. It requires thought, planning, time and effort. Your social media plan must:
1. Include input from Sales. If you haven’t already, align Sales and Marketing. You can’t afford not to. Sales should be immersed in the conversations taking place with prospects offline. That information is critical to success in migrating, extending and amplifying those conversations online.
2. Be no longer than six months. You can’t plan beyond that. The conversations you need to be having with suspects, prospects and leads is influenced to a significant degree by the environment. Things change in a hurry. Your plan should define how you’ll adapt, not predict the future.
3. Develop and define target personas. Who are you trying to reach? What are their interests, needs and wants? If your content isn’t relevant and useful to that person; it won’t be consumed, remembered or acted on. You have to know, specifically, who you’re engaging in conversation. What’s relevant and useful to one person is irrelevant and useless to the next.
4. Include search engine optimization (SEO), link building, and probably paid search, too. Place your QUALITY content where your targets are congregating online; and take the extra step to PULL others to your blog and website. If they can’t find you on Google, you don’t exist.
5. Have a content strategy that doesn’t assume ‘existing resources’ will do the development. Beyond the strategy itself, this is the most important piece of the plan. Hire someone (either permanent staff or an outside consultant) as a dedicated resource… someone who is an expert at content development. That means not only an excellent copywriter, but one who has SEO skills, and one who understands how to deploy multimedia to communicate your messages quickly, clearly and persuasively.
6. Include distribution, outreach and socialization… the mechanics of how you’ll get your quality content in front of your target audience (which includes not only prospects, but influential people in your industry, in the blogging world, in the media, etc.); and give them the tools they need to comment and distribute.
7. Build in an analytics plan. List key performance indicators (KPIs). What are your goals? They should include traffic, blog comments, retweets, and conversions. This last, conversions, are where the rubber meets the road. What action(s) do you want your targets to take after consuming your content? That must be clearly defined up front. Google Analytics will give you reams of data for free. You don’t want reams of data. You want the half dozen or so stats that will give you a good idea of how well the plan is meeting its goals.
8. Serve existing customers. It’s easier to keep existing customers than it is to obtain new ones. Does your social media marketing plan lay out how you’ll keep your current customers informed and happy? Social media isn’t only a marketing tool. It’s also an excellent research, customer service and PR tool. Make sure your plan leverages it across all those departments.
9. Include Facebook along with Twitter, LinkedIn, and Foursquare. There are so many people on Facebook you’d be crazy not to try to reach .01% of them. Also look at niche social networks that may aggregate your targets. Once the content is developed, there are tools that automate the process of distributing to these platforms.
10. Follow through. After the content is distributed, you have to follow through. Your social networks must be monitored; and questions and comments must be answered. That’s the essence of conversation. Listen.
11. Build your house list. It’s your most valuable marketing asset. Your plan should include integration of the various social media platforms into your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
12. Include a feedback loop. You developed relevant and useful content for your target audience. You distributed it. You socialized it. You listened and gathered intelligence re what your target thinks of your messaging. You’ve seen which content drives traffic and conversions, and which doesn’t. Feed that information back into the plan. Tweak, and repeat.
13. Be reasonable. There’s a perception that social media is low cost. The price of admission is practically zero, but social media marketing is a process. It requires a significant investment of time. You must listen, participate, and converse over time. Budget money and other resources accordingly.
14. Do the math. The easiest way to check on #13 is to do the math. Your social media plan should put a dollar value on a customer, and provide a worst-case cost estimate for acquiring that customer. Your customer acquisition cost, using social media, should be no more than a few percentage points of the lifetime value of that customer. If it isn’t, something is wrong with either your plan or your pricing.
Tags: acSellerant, b2b, B2B marketing, b2b sales, business to business marketing, content strategy, digital relationships, execution, LinkedIn, sales enablement, social media, social networking sites, Twitter, useful and relevant information
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Hi Bob – Excellent list, thanks. I have seen a lot of arguments on LinkedIN groups about whether social media will “pay off.” In my experience, that’s like asking, does going to a trade show “pay off”? The answer is, it does, and you can prove it using Analytics and your CRM to set and monitor goals and track leads through to closed sales. Great that you add integration of CRM into this list… but oddly, I see a lot of clients who actually have a CRM, but don’t integrate it into their website and their sales process online. Odd.
Thanks, Scott. Interesting that you mentioned trade shows. There is a correlation. If you exhibit at a trade show, but go there without clear goals… just haphazardly display some banners, hand out brochures, and collect business cards in exchange for swag; when you get home you’ll find all that time, money and effort was spent for nothing. If you want traction, prospects, leads, digital relationships, visibility… whatever from social media; you need to define that up front and put some discipline, feedback and metrics into the process. One of the ways to do that is to integrate SM with your CRM. Why wouldn’t you?
Thanks again.
I could not agree more Bob,
B2B social media and social marketing has given a quicker ROI than any other form of advertising and marketing. If you spend time on both of these areas correctly, then you see an almost immediate ROI. We believe in this so much that we built the Live MarketPlace and have added this functionality into it.
This new form of marketing has returned some of the personal relationships back into business that has been missing for way too long. Years ago we dealt mainly with local companies within our own little town or city and now we deal with businesses globally. If it was not for social media and networking we would all be disconnected and individuals, now we have the ability to work with customers we at least have some type of personal relationship with. Very good points in this article, and we try to follow them all. Keep up the great work.
Its a good list. Every company entering social media should take a look at it. The only thing missing is a discussion about executive involvement. While there is often organic social media activity (and success) in a company, there is no social media strategy until the top executive understands and supports it.
Great post, Bob. I like that you’ve addressed this like any other (important) business action–with a plan.
Your last three points are dead on and often overlooked when business owners venture into social media. I especially like putting a value onto the time you’ll spend and measuring it against the reward. It gives a good grounding for how much time and effort we should spend without drowning in a sea of possibilities. Placing a dollar value on the task, even if it is for your own time, also encourages you to find efficiencies to make the most of your investment.
Debbie
Hi Bob,
Good article. Thanks for sharing it.
Quick question. I’m confused by your second point, “Be no longer than six months. You can’t plan beyond that.”
If you have a clear communications strategy with a well defined point of view you should be able to build a much longer editorial calendar. You may have to tweak and adjust it to fit the stories of the day, but the plan should still be sound.
Why do you suggest limiting this to 6 months?
Jeremy
Thanks for the comments Debbie and Jeremy. Re the planning horizon – I’m referring to the dynamism of the economy, of the technologies (I work w/ B2B IT companies), and most importantly, the social media platforms and tools. The SM platforms and tools are in such a state of flux, it’s almost a 100% bet that new ones will come into the forefront within six months, older ones may wain, or they’ll morph into something different. I agree that your editorial calendar will likely stay the course, but your content strategy, which includes how content will be delivered, will almost surely change.
Thanks for clarifying Bob. I agree, distribution strategies are changing rapidly. This is one of the trickiest aspects of content marketing.
Not to go on a tangent, but I have some interesting trade show stories, like the one about the exhibitor who has two CDs of all the badge swipe information that he collected sitting on the corner of his desk. Has he opened them, followed up, etc. Well, no….. DUH!
Can you point us to some really compelling case studies on companies who have done some or most of this well?