Too many B2B companies are flat out failing at social media marketing. It isn’t their fault. This isn’t an attack on the companies. Heck, they are at least brave enough to give it a shot. Instead this is an explanation for why a new marketing channel has been slow to grow in the B2B space. This shouldn’t be news to anyone though. Email marketing has been around for decades and many companies still don’t have that mystery figured out yet.
Instead of placing blame, let’s diagnose the reasons B2B companies aren’t seeing success with social media.
10 Reasons Why B2B Companies Are Failing With Social Media
1. Massively Under Investments In Content
In the old days of B2B marketing, space was the core limiting factor. Marketers needed to work in the size constraints of a direct mail piece to get their message across. On the social web, space is unlimited. Instead, attention is now scarce. To grab the attention of leads online, marketers need more content than ever before. One blog post a month isn’t going to cut it. With the need for multiple blog posts per week and daily social media messages many marketing teams find themselves under-equipped to keep up with the content demands. If you are a B2B executive shift some of your paid advertising budget to content creation resources ASAP.
2. Haven’t Used Paid Social To Bolster Organic Efforts
Advertising shouldn’t be a dirty word in social media marketing. Instead paid social media marketing efforts on platforms like Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook should be used to bolster your organic marketing investment. Use advertising to attract new connections on social networks. They will see the content you are sharing and engage with it to increase your lead generation.
3. Aren’t Focused on Lead Generation
Stop counting followers as your primary metric of social media success. Engagement is not a goal, it is a metric. Put a lead generation and revenue goal on your social media marketing efforts so that you can demonstrate the value in order to get additional budget consideration. Heck, we though this was so important, that we wrote The B2B Social Media Book.
4. Management Support Doesn’t Exist
Social media doesn’t succeed as a rogue one-man or one-woman project. Instead take our advice from #3 and build a model that projects social media lead generation growth over the next year. Share this with your executive team to get the funding and support you need to be successful.
5. Aren’t Looking At The Right Data
Social media is nothing more than another marketing channel. Stop looking at weak metrics like followers and engagement. Instead look at social media as you would any other marketing channel and look at key metrics like visitor-to-lead conversion rate by social channel, as well as visitor-to-customer conversion rates.
6. Customer Personas Aren’t Clear Enough
To win in the world of B2B social media you must clearly understand the daily pain that your target audience is facing. Your customer personas are critical to understanding this important information. If your social media efforts are missing the mark it is likely because you are failing to address your targets’ core pain. Revisit your customer personas with a new round of customer interviews to better understand the challenges they are facing.
7. Failure To Make The Boring Exciting
Your business is exciting. I don’t care what you do, someone in the world thinks it is important and awesome. Brainstorm with your team about some of the awesome, yet unexpected applications of your product. You never know, you might end up like BlendTec.
8. A Terrible Website
You could be rocking social media and sending tons of traffic back to your website but if your website sucks, it won’t do you much good. Conduct user testing on your website to make sure that it properly communicates your company’s products and services. Examine the conversion paths of your website to make sure that when someone arrives from social media, that they actually have a chance to become a lead.
9. The Belief That It Can Replace Everything
Social media isn’t a cure all. Don’t think that it can replace your other marketing channels. Instead, work with your team to get tighter alignment between social media and your other marketing activities.
10. Still Making Too Many Excuses
“Well social media doesn’t work for my industry.” “My business is different.” “We are boring.” “We have a different model. It doesn’t apply to us.” “We tried, but after a few weeks it just wasn’t working for us.” STOP IT!!!!! Quit making excuses. I hear these statements all the time from countless businesses. Never have I said “Wow, you are totally right.” Instead, I simply nod my head and then walk away thinking that this is another business who is condemned to failure because of a “can’t do” attitude. Don’t let this be you. Open your mind and attack big and bold ideas. You just might be inspired by the success you find.
Don’t fall victim to these mistakes and situations. Instead learn from them and crush your competition.
Photo: Flickr
