SOCIAL MEDIA FRIEND OR FAUX?
The thought of Social Media may bring to mind an array of ‘how’s your Monday looking?’ out of office holiday snaps and photos of the Neighbour’s, Sister’s, Cousin’s dinner. However, social media’s benefits are constantly overlooked for B2B businesses.
However, aside from the realm of personal oversharing on certain platforms, in a B2B context, Social Media remains a viable communication platform that many businesses are currently overlooking.
Social Media’s benefits include:
Real Time Communication.
The digitalisation of today’s society has shaped us into very impatient people – and when we as consumers want something, we want it now. The same goes for communication between businesses. Your marketing collateral may be as clear and precise as you could have written it. However, some prospects will always require additional information on your services – for a project they needed to complete yesterday. Social media enables real time communication for these quick queries, and promotes engagement with your business.
By opening yourself up to engagement online, you also open yourself up to feedback – which when positive, can significantly reinforce your reliability and produce the results of a digitalised form of word of mouth. In the event this is negative, you have the opportunity to action and rectify the complaint in real time.
Competitor Insights
For any marketing strategy to be effective, it must have a consideration for competitors and their activity. By utilising the insights into their activity on Social Media, you gain a real birds eye view of a) who they are communicating with, or attempting to, b) exactly what they are offering and their unique selling points and c) what differentiates them for you?
Without this information, that can often change rather rapidly, how can you successfully compete and build a stable competitive advantage?
Futhermore, if your competitors have an active social presence and you don’t, are you not actively providing them with a competitive advantage over you?
Traffic Driving.
You’ve no doubt invested significantly into your website, but it is rendered somewhat useless if your audience is not actively engaging with it. When used correctly, Social Media can be the stepping stone to attract the attention of your audience and guide them to find out more on your site.
Measurability.
Many businesses utilise a variety of marketing communications platforms, take billboards as an example. Sure, you could consult your incoming leads on ‘where they heard of your services’ but would you have any idea on the amount of people that had seen your campaign and or gone on to find out more on your services? Impressions, click through rates and engagement can all be monitored with Social Media.
Cost Effectiveness.
Social Media is effectively a free platform. To engage with the volume of prospects using any other channel would require a significant amount of budget. The cost of social media only really comes from the resource you assign to manage it.
While as we know, from the Neighbour’s, Sister’s, Cousin, anyone can post a tweet here and there.
But to strategically utilise social media, encorporating the platform as an extension of existing marketing communications and to produce engaging content on a consistent basis can often prove a challenge for Sales and Marketing teams with various other tasks that tend to take priority.
This is where Momentum are perfectly equipped to provide this service as one of our various outsourcing solutions.
See our social page for more information.