In Part 1 I wrapped up with, “The big question is, what does social media marketing do for B2B?” Not surprisingly, it all depends on who you speak to and what a company is expecting out of marketing.

Marketing’s main focus is the ability to drive three things: Awareness/Thought Leadership, Relationships, and Leads. Social media marketing appears to have success in some areas, but lagging in others.

Awareness/Thought Leadership

Paul Dunay writes in his Daily Fix for Marketing Profs that social media marketing outperforms traditional marketing effort. “(Unaided) awareness from podcasts were 68%, compared with 21% for streaming video and 10% for television.” Whether it is because there is a novelty and newness to social media or there is something intrinsic to how it conforms to a more natural interaction remains to be seen. But, currently there are obvious lifts in driving awareness and in turn thought leadership though social media marketing.

Another advantage seen of social media marketing tactics is the ability to leverage SEO to drive more traffic towards websites. It is one aspect that ties into established metrics so that benefits are clearer and in terms that marketers understand and familiar with.

Relationship Building

Tim Whiting, Integrated Marketing Leader at Motorola, provided an excellent framework for how he approaches social media in a discussion on LinkedIn. Engagement, Connection, Intelligence. From this perspective he sees this as a cycle by creating mechanisms that entice customers, allow you to have venues to converse, then following up on that with a way to measure progress and success. Tim is finding that the benefits of social media is connected to loyalty and advocacy. His experience seems to bare out with trends in consumer benefits where customer service leverages social media tools to improve customer satisfaction and mitigate churn.

In a previous article, I also provided the example of IBM Cognos and their success in building relationships specifically using Twitter. Overall, the ability to reach out to customers and get them to interact with the brand has been a positive experience.

Lead Generation

The challenge, as yet, appears to be lead conversion. This is either due to the infancy of social media tactics within B2B, or it is more difficult due to those that engage are not qualified to enter the sales pipeline.

Forrester found that 25% of B2B marketers cannot connect social media marketing tactics to sales pipeline.

In a recent discussion with the head of business development at a information services company, those that engaged in discussions on blogs and LinkedIn tended not to be good candidates for opportunities. The reason was that in many cases those that engaged were not really customers but consultants or agencies that gave perspective but weren’t in need of services and solutions. They piggy backed on others’ marketing efforts. Another issue is that for B2B service providers, social media gave too much away for free reducing the ability to sell services. The take away seems to be that marketing needs to improve its ability to connect with the proper audience and strike the right balance between thought leadership and planting seeds.

As I researched lead generation in social media I found a lot about tactics to use, but very little in terms of success. Marketers claim they are generating a high volume of leads. However, when I speak with sales executives, they have not seen the value of these leads or leads have not filtered their way into the pipeline. Sales is currently not convinced that social media efforts drive revenue.

Warm and Fuzzy

No one can dispute the value of social media marketing in B2B and certainly the increased focus, even without budget, is a strong indicator adoption and use. So far, though, social media marketing helps in the traditional space of the warm and fuzzy aspects of marketing. This may work in the short term as a way to show initial success, but eventually it will need to convert leads to sales before it will be taken seriously and have longevity in the B2B marketing mix.

Part 1

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