2015 Top Trends in B2B Social Marketing

THE 2015 TOP B2B
INSIGHTS AND TRENDS REPORT
SOCIAL MARKETING TRENDS
1

INTRODUCTION
Social media has been a powerful B2C
marketing channel for nearly a decade, but
only in the past several years have B2B
marketers started to truly adopt platforms like
LinkedIn, Twitter, Slideshare, Quora, and
others, and incorporate these social channels
into their digital marketing mix.
Businesses across all verticals, from Insurance
to Telecom, Manufacturing to Oil & Gas,
Chemicals to Information Technology, are
seeing how these social channels can build
trust between customers and brands in an
increasingly self-guided buying journey and,
more importantly, drive leads through to sales.
In this Insights Report, we’ll explore the top ﬁve
trends in social marketing for B2B brands.
These trends are actionable and meant for
immediate integration into a marketer’s digital
strategy.
Without delay, dive in and explore the rich
insights contained within this Insights Report,
then please feel comfortable reaching out to
the team at Socialight Media Marketing with
any questions.
EXPLORE THE REPORT…
2

1. STRATEGY
With the evolution of social channels,
buyers’ expectations, and trends in online
purchasing habits, how are B2B brands
redesigning their social marketing strategy?
3

EVOLUTION OF B2B SOCIAL STRATEGY
Social media marketing has been climbing
the priority list for B2B marketers for over 6
years now, since Facebook first launched
business pages back in 2009. Before that, any
effort put toward ‘traditional’ social platforms,
such as corporate forums and blogs, was
usually the pet project of an innovator in the
marketing, IT, or communications
department. Little in the way of marketing
strategy was applied at this early stage.
These past six years, however, have seen
visionary B2B organizations adopt far-
reaching social strategies that incorporate the
business’s goals at the highest level, and
which involve integration and communication
between an array of different departments,
from marketing, to communications, to
human resources, and, most importantly,
sales.
Which of the following digital
channels does your organization
tap into for marketing its product?
Website
Email
Webinars
Social Media
SEO
Blogging
SEM
Display
Mobile Apps
91%
89%
77%
76%
64%
62%
59%
57%
28%
State of B2B Product Marketing 2015 - Regalia Research
4

SOCIAL + SALES
In 2015, we will begin to see the early majority
begin to invest time and resources in designing
a social marketing strategy – one that isn’t built
on superﬁcial KPIs (like comments, retweets,
and likes) but is, instead, driven by real
business metrics, from inbound leads, to
content downloads, and, ultimately, sales.
5

2. TARGETING
What types of content are buyers looking
for online? Targeted, relevant, engaging
content that is related to their current stage
within the B2B buying journey.
6

HYPER TARGETED SOCIAL CONTENT
The convergence of several maturing
marketing trends will make targeted, relevant
content now mission critical for B2B
marketers. First, buyers are hit with nearly
3,000 marketing messages per day in our
saturated, digitally connected and mobile-
ﬁrst world; from TV, to banners, to social
media – message blindness starts to occur.
This means that content must be hyper-
relevant to your buyer’s mindset; not your
generic top-of-mind content. That generic
content is out the window; no one is seeing it,
clicking it, or acting on it.
Second, the evolution of marketing
automation platforms means that you can
know more about your audience, their
patterns, and their buying stage than ever
before. This means that you can segment
your audiences more granularly than you
could in the past. With these new micro-
segments, your business should be able to
create and distribute content that is
inherently more relevant to those buyers
because you understand them and their
stage in the buyer journey at a deeper level.
7

RELEVANCE
Third, these same automation tools make it
possible for you to test messages, content, and
sequences, and when used in tandem with
your new micro-segments, you will be able to
optimize your entire lead nurturing process.
With these three trends converging, B2B
marketers can deliver the most relevant
content, at exactly the right time, on exactly the
right platform. Now you’re cooking with
gasoline.
8

3. PROCESS+TECH
How will new technology and its adoption
within the marketing and sales
departments change the way that brands
interact, and measure that interaction, with
their buyers and inﬂuencers?
9

When it comes to the process of managing a
brand’s social media channels and aligning
their marketing strategy, no two are alike
because no two businesses are identical. The
overarching construct for how marketing and
sales interact is fairly generic; however, in
practice, it is incredibly diverse.
Add that to the fact that the sheer number of
channels that both marketing and sales
actively use across their disparate activities
has exploded over the past ten years.
B2B marketing isn’t just websites and email
campaigns, and sales isn’t just a phone and
an email list. How does content on the brand
or target’s LinkedIn page inﬂuence the way
that sales approaches a lead? How do the
interactions on Twitter impact the way that
marketing qualiﬁes a lead for sales? What’s
the process for routing engaged prospects
from Quora into the CRM?
The channels have grown exponentially, yet
there is nothing connecting these activities so
as to ensure measurability and ROI.
PROCESS & TECH TAKE CENTER STAGE
10

AGENT OF CHANGE
This is where process and technology come to
the rescue. The right processes must be
strategically put in place that enable the
marketing team to pull key insights from their
social channels and disseminate to the rest of
the organization, from sales to human
resources to public relations to research &
development and even executive leadership.
Swim lanes, checklists, insights templates, and,
yes, intranets and instant messaging tools are
critical for an organization to stay agile and
connected. And these tools enable marketing
to become the agent of change.
MARKETING
PROCESSES
Listening
& Monitoring
Tool
Presence
Management
Tool
Reporting
& Analytics
Tool
11

CLOSED LOOP MEASUREMENT
Then, the technology serves as the glue for
the system. The intranets and instant
messaging tools are connected to social
management platforms, which are connected
to social CRMs or marketing automation
systems. This ensures not only consistent and
perpetual tracking of activities, but also
measurability across activities and
departments. Once in place, the number of
disputes between marketing and sales about
the quality of leads plummets because the
teams have collaborated on the criteria and
the systems are in place to automate the
handoﬀ.
The marketing team can get real-time
feedback on messaging, product, features,
and more to send to R&D. B2B community
managers can assess, triage, and route
product/service issues to the right customer
service people to ﬁx the problem or address
the challenge, and KPIs are consistent and
measurable because the teams are using
tools that integrate with one another and
track activities across the organization. It’s no
surprise that the marketing automation
industry is at $2B this year. Look for all mid-
market and enterprise B2B organizations to
take a long look at process and technology
this year as it relates to marketing and sales.
12

4. MOBILE
Smartphone and tablet market penetration
numbers are ﬂattening, and mobile devices
have reached ubiquity. How are you
interacting with your B2B customers across
all touchpoints during the buying journey?
13

THE RISE OF MOBILE DECISION MAKERS
The ‘year of mobile’ that marketers had been
touting for nearly 5 years truly came in 2014.
Web and search traffic from mobile devices
outpaced desktop for the first time in history;
marketers knew this was bound to happen, it
was just a matter of when. In the past 24-36
months, most B2C marketers have been
steadily preparing by optimizing their web
presence, shifting media budgets to mobile,
building apps, and generally taking a more
mobile-first approach to their content
strategy.
That being said, we have not seen the same
urgency from B2B marketers during this
span, and this is not totally unreasonable. As
a B2C marketer, say Coca-Cola, I need to be
top-of-mind more often, and I need to be
present earlier, and more frequently, in the
buyer journey. I could, of course, purchase a
can of Coke at any point of the day, on any
day of the week, throughout the year. So a
B2C marketer who understands that most of
their customers’ time is being spent on the
web will naturally begin to shift their digital
presence to be more mobile centric.
14

BUYING CYCLES
B2B purchasing decisions are long. They’re big
investments. They demand lots of research.
They require demos, and trials, and case
studies, and negotiations, and bulk order
processes, and custom manufacturing. That
kind of intensive buying decision doesn’t
happen while your customer is commuting (i.e.
also on their phone), kicking back in front of
the TV after a long day (i.e. also on their tablet),
or in any other not-at-their-desk situation, of
which there are an inﬁnite number where they
decide to interact with their mobile device.
Or does it…
15

B2B marketers must understand that while
the buying journey is much longer, this also
means that there are many more
opportunities that you can provide relevant,
contextual, targeted content to those buyers
when they may be receptive to it. Today, that
time is always. The place is everywhere. Even
if your buyer isn’t placing a multi-million
dollar order from their phone while stuck in
traﬃc, they may see that whitepaper you just
published while they scroll through their
LinkedIn app. They may see that ad for you
while they catch up on their trade pubs.
They just may click through to learn a little
more about your business while they’re on-
the-go. At the very least, if your content is
compelling, they’ll bookmark it or save it for
later. When they’re at their desk. Trying to
make that purchase decision.
THE IN-BETWEEN OPPORTUNITIES
16

MOBILE TACTICS
How do today’s B2B marketers put this into
practice? For one, start with your web site,
microsites, and other digital properties. Ensure
they’re mobile-optimized or responsive. Google
actually favors search results where pages and
content is mobile-optimized because it creates
a better experience. If your content is relevant,
and the experience is optimized for a
smartphone and tablet, then your visitor is
going to stay longer, engage more, and google
will reward for that in the SERPs.
Is your website mobile friendly?
If ‘No,’ do you plan to invest this year?
64%
36%
YES
NO
78%
22%
YES
NO
2015 State of Digital Marketing - Webmarketing123
17

YOUR SOCIAL STRATEGY IS MOBILE
Understand that social channels are mobile
channels. The lion’s share of time spent on
mobile devices is spent within apps. Which
apps? You guessed it; Facebook, LinkedIn,
Twitter, YouTube, and every other social app
you can think of. Having a social marketing
strategy is a mobile marketing strategy.
Start taking your most compelling B2B
content and chipping it into smaller nuggets,
easily absorbed and shared through social
channels. Create thumbnails for content
being shared out to Facebook, LinkedIn,
Twitter, and YouTube.
Build slide decks that can be published to
Slideshare or Scribd. Rethink your content
strategy to incorporate a longer, more mobile
buying journey.
And while the B2B space is just now seeing
how powerful the mobile decision maker will
become, it doesn’t end with the smartphone
or tablet. Going forward, both B2B and B2C
businesses will have to wrestle with
wearables as a channel. As Gartner has
forecasted, by 2020, consumer data collected
from wearable devices will drive 5% of sales
from the Global 1000.
18

5. SOCIAL ADS
The key social platforms are making it
mission critical to invest dollars to get
content in front of buyers and inﬂuencers.
How are brands using social ads to get in
front of more buyers at the right time?
19

NATIVE SOCIAL ADS BECOME CRITICAL
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to reach
buyers and influencers in the social space.
This is due not only to the deluge of content
that’s available to them, but also due to
algorithm changes that the big platforms (e.g.
Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) are making to their
news feed and stream products. This is, of
course, the main way that people who
subscribe to a brand’s social channel can
organically receive the company’s updates
and content, and the platforms are cutting
down on organic reach to encourage brands
to spend more on their native ad products.
This is the nature of the beast in social
marketing; the platforms themselves are free,
but using these platforms to maximize the
distribution of your content is pay-to-play.
The silver lining here is that these social
platforms have a staggering amount of data,
allowing B2B marketers to hyper target
buyers and influencers throughout the
buying journey.
4.25%
8.5%
12.75%
17%
2013 2014 2015 2016
9.4%
12.2%
14.3%
16.1%
Social Ads’ % of Digital Ad Spend
http://www.invesp.com/blog/social-media-ad-spending/
20

AD INNOVATION
And these platforms are rolling out new native
ad products, both through in-house
development and through acquisition,
regularly. LinkedIn, for example, acquired B2B
marketing platform Bizo in 2014 and has just
launched their Lead Accelerator product,
allowing advertisers on the LinkedIn platform
to reach buyers and influencers on properties
outside of the LinkedIn ecosystem. Facebook,
Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter all offer
sponsored versions of their standard updates,
and each has its own specific targeting
strengths and weaknesses.
21

Native social advertising works like any other
channel in your digital mix. You need to
budget for it, understand which platforms are
most effective for your business, customers,
and goals, and then you need to allocate
across those most relevant, highest priority
platforms. Once you’ve been able to get your
feet wet with native social advertising, you’ll
then be able to begin optimizing. There are
many tools on the market, such as Adspresso,
which allow for A/B and multivariate testing,
and you should constantly test hypotheses
with regard to creative, calls-to-action,
targeting, and bidding.
While many marketers will decry the fact that
the days of free reach on the social web are
over, B2B marketers have distinct
advantages, with smaller relative audiences,
savvy buyers, deliberate buying habits, etc.
However, with content being the #1 area of
focus and improvement on every B2B
marketer’s mind this year, driving qualified
traffic to that content through native social
advertising is critical to success in 2015.
HOLISTIC AD INCORPORATION
22

ABOUT SOCIALIGHT MEDIA MARKETING
Socialight Media is a B2B social marketing
consultancy whose clients include mid-sized
organizations in an array of verticals, including
industrial manufacturing, healthcare,
environmental services, and construction,
among others. We connect social and sales
through technology and processes.
Our mission is to help businesses connect with
their buyers using the new digital toolkit
available to today's marketers. Our service set
starts with strategy, and focuses on social
presence development, community
management, listening & monitoring,
measurement & analysis, and content services.
Socialight Media was founded in 2008, and is
powered by a team of consultants who bring
unparalleled experience, having collectively
worked with nearly 10% of the Fortune 500.
Find out how we can build you a social strategy
that builds trust and drives leads to your sales
team. For more detailed service oﬀerings,
please contact us today.
Tweet to @AskSocialight
23

2015 Top Trends in B2B Social Marketing

More Related Content

What's hot (19)

Similar to 2015 Top Trends in B2B Social Marketing (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

2015 Top Trends in B2B Social Marketing