Social Media
Without a doubt, this is social media’s time. Yet a lot of people fundamentally misunderstand the role it has to play in B2B marketing. While B2B social is tilting toward consumer type practices in some respects, there’s not much convergence in sight if you examine the changes in the broader overall context of the marketing mix. Functionally, social media parallels public relations closely. Both help establish new and better relationships with customers and their influencers; both help you to persuade; both support information sharing; both are essential to any attempt to develop thought leadership; and both are primary mechanisms for distributing all that great content produced from content marketing programs.
In both social and mainstream media, the more you listen, the more successful your strategy becomes. You can’t be opportunistic and aggressive in outreach without listening to your constituencies 
and hearing what’s important to them. That’s the whole point of social media, and the basis for audience and community engagement. It’s the same with traditional trade media, which is one of the many reasons why people with public relations skills so often excel at social media marketing.
Based on our experience, we suggest an integrated outreach approach for our clients. One that recognizes the important dual roles that mainstream and social media play, and how they impact each other. One that coordinates efforts across both channels and between agency external and staff internal activities. This requires doing our homework to identify and prioritize target influencers across many groups that may be reached socially: media, bloggers, VIPs, potential partners, industry standards groups or analysts. And remaining alert to the need for mid-course corrections and continuous improvement.
The Social Media Marketing Imperative
Just as with other B2B marketing initiatives, social media’s job is to support a number of tasks and achieve milestones that ultimately contribute to customer acquisition and retention. Some of these tasks, like real-time customer support via Twitter, for example, are functions for which social media’s superiority is unquestionable. Others play supporting roles with the broader goals of lead generation, helping to move prospects through the various phases of their buying cycles—which, let’s remember, are almost always collaborative group purchases, which is one of the big things that makes B2B different.
In the B2B technology sector, PR and social media today are inextricably linked. They are the two main methods of customer marketing outreach (advertising, events and webinars notwithstanding). Make no mistake, despite attempts to demonize outbound marketing, outreach is very much alive and necessary in B2B marketing today. Inbound techniques done well are great as far as they go. But without any outreach at all, much of Content Marketing would be ineffective—amounting to leaving pieces of bait in random places hoping that fish will swim by. Or think of it this way: there’s an unmistakeable outbound aspect to all viral marketing and proactive sharing. And in B2B markets, sharing in the hundreds (as opposed to millions) can have a significant enough effect to be considered viral.
We can help you approach social media in a way that increases overall effectiveness, by optimizing its design to be integrated with your content marketing and public relations efforts.
