In my new advisory role for the member
s of MENG I have been getting a bunch of questions from the members that are making great fodder for blog posts. One question has popped up a few times to I thought it was worthy of some research and comparative analysis to give you a very clear answer.
The question is – What is the appropriate level of budget to support social media for a B2B company?
I actually tried to tackle this question a few times on my blog before. First was the post on the Media Budget Ratio (MBR) for a B2B company. Which prompted a question by Scott Zosel about how much should you allocate for Social Media in your budget – and so I created the Social Media Budget Ratio (SMBR) post back in 2008 which was good but it lacked historical data like I have now.
So here is my take …
According to the IT Services Marketing Association (ITSMA) which, full disclosure, I am a member and an avid fan of their work. They recently put out a 2010 Budget and Allocations trends document which surveyed the membership to gave you the chart above.
If you blow up the chart you can see that Social Media as a percentage of your overall interactive spend has grown from 13 percent of budget to 14 percent of budget for B2B Technology Marketers. Which I found interesting so I decided to dig into my own spreadsheets and I was able to verify that I currently have 15% of my interactive spend going toward Social Media – right in line and, as you might expect, at the higher end of their range because of my fascination with this particular channel. As far as the rest of the percentages in the survey I can say I go much heavier on things like webinars and flash demos (which I am counting under corporate website spend).
But don’t forget one of the most important costs associated with Social Media and that is Content Creation which can be a small incremental cost if you do it right. Take for example your classic white paper. Why not create a blog post, Twitter tweet and even a podcast or video on it to help promote it and activate the social spheres on your latest content at a fraction above your content marketing spend.
Social Media done right should help you amplify what you already do as well as listen and engage in those conversations about your brand that you want to take part in. A healthy piece of my SMBR is devoted to listening which will be the topic of the next blog post.
I want to roll the clock back a few weeks to the announcement of an initiative by Facebook called – Project Titan.
At the time that I saw it and tweeted about it (of course) it really hadn’t hit me just how important this could be to any business. What seemed like a pretty basic message about an upgrade message of their current email system which is rather archaic (you know, the one that makes you delete messages one by one!) to a full POP/IMAP supported email account, which means users will be able to configure it with any e-mail client, including Microsoft Outlook, Entourage and Apple’s Mail applications.
But what does that really mean. Well first that means that Facebook will issue 400 Million email account – which is no small feat. Second those email accounts will be tied to your Facebook profile Vanity URL in my case PaulDunay@facebook.com. Third, Facebook says they will enable this feature for Pages (the business version of your Profile). And fourth those Page email addresses will be tied your you Page Vanity URL such as Avaya@Facebook.com (which by the way they significantly lowered the minimum number of the Fans you need to get a Vanity URL from 1000 down to just 25!)
Facebook made its initial announcement of Project Titan to the market on February 5th and was candidly thought to be a Google Gmail killer. So 3 days later on February 8th Google announced Google Buzz! This is clearly an all out war between Facebook and Google. Facebook quietly surpassed Yahoo last year to become the second largest website (according to Alexa.com) and is slowly closing the gap with Google which is now less than 10 million unique visitors per month!!
The point here for B2C and B2B Marketers is that as Facebook makes their platform rich in interaction and captures more users and hence more conversations about your brand – you will need to be there and engage with their user base. I still get questions from B2B firms asking if they should start a presence in Facebook and the answer is unequivocally YES. Facebook should be your social media hub of everything you have from company news, announcing events, offer tutorials, highlight videos, conduct polls and create community around discussions. But now with this new email feature you can upload your email lists and invite them to truly engage with you on Facebook.
If Facebook can create this type of rich interaction with their Fan Pages and now their email systems – then why would you need an external email vendor? Did I forget to mention all of this is FREE!
A recent Cone Inc.’s Social Media in Business study found that 60 percent of consumers believe they are already interacting with companies on the social Web. Nearly all participants — 93 percent — believe all companies should have a presence in social media. And 85 percent believe companies should not just present information via social media, but use it to interact and become more engaged with them. And the payoff for such engagement is evident in the 53 percent who already say they have developed a stronger connection to a brand through social media encounters.
But the question has long been 2 fold: 1) How do you create engagement and 2) How do you measure it. Hopefully this will give you some insights into how my team creates and measures engagement at Avaya.
Creating Engagement
Over the last few years of writing this blog I have talked a lot about the virtues of creating a steady stream of content that is consistent in its frequency to bring people back to your site time and time again. You can call it Inbound Marketing (like the folks at HubSpot do) or you could call it Content Marketing (like the folks at Junta42 do) but whatever you call it this is the basis for all your online activity. Over the last month or so we really have gotten our content engine humming producing not only some great thought leadership, eBooks, blog posts etc which we use as social “objects” but also we held (what I believe is) one of the largest Virtual events ever with On24. Their platform is good up to 20,000 people and we had 24,000 signed up for our January 19, 2010 virtual event. Sure we were worried what would happen if everyone showed up – but luckily that wasn’t the case but we did test the upper limits of their system! With all this create content both in object form and recorded form from the virtual event we were really able to ramp up the number of conversations we were having out on the socialsphere as you can see from the snapshot taken from our Networked Insights dashboard which is comparing the month of December to the month of January.
Measuring Engagement
Years ago on this blog I remember saying “measuring engagement is hard since there is no one button you can push as a marketer to measure it”. Well I have since learned otherwise from the folks at Networked Insights who not only measure the number of posts in one period versus the number posts in another period but they also measure the tone and sentiment of those posts giving you an indication that (in our case) sentiment is trending in a positive direction!
As you may know already, blogging is a quantity game. 5 of the top 10 media properties are blogs and all of them are multi author blogs which post several times per day. Social also acts in the same way – the more your engage the more people engage back. So one of my team’s objectives this year is not only to create more social content but also to move the needle on engagement and sentiment. Stay tuned to this blog for more updates and to see how we are doing that!
So in my last blog post – Going Mobile with B2B Marketing we discussed the basics of the mobile market and where to focus our attention as a B2B Marketers.
Now we want to move into the content. I would say that if “Content is King” on the internet “Context is Queen” on mobile. With only 160 characters for a mobile message you better be on target 100% of the time. Also a good best practice is to include opt out text in the message with brings it down to about 140 characters (sound familiar).
The #1 thing that people search for on their mobile devices is Location based information. This is why aps like Yelp and foursquare are so hot now.
I picked up this acronym from Mitch Joel author of Six Pixels of Separation its called NOW – you want your mobile content to be:
- Nearby (location based)
- Only (available for 2 Hours only or some time based special) and
- Wow (not ho hum)
Remember you are going to want the experience to be very seamless for the user with NO behavioral changes. Mobile is a much more personal medium that is carried with the person all day long – so you want that content to be spot on!
As I mentioned in my Top 10 predictions for 2010
– I think the Mobile Marketing in 2010 will become more mainstream.
As a marketer I always like to play the “odds not the lottery” and to me when you have a market of 3.3 Billion Handsets worldwide (half the population) versus only 1 Billion PC’s with Internet access playing with a 300% larger base is pretty safe bet.
So then it becomes a question of where to start with Mobile and I have been working on this for a while now incorporating Mobile into some of our campaigns. Note: Avaya sells mobile solutions to businesses so I feel its my role to live by example and demonstrate to our potential clients how this might work.
Mobile campaigns that I have used typically have a higher response rate – I have seen our SMS messages get a 15-20% response rate which is huge if you think about that compared to standard banner ad response rates. The reason is that a message on your mobile device are more personal and are typically not avoided by the recipient. You really have a shot at getting some attention.
But that’s where it can also come to an end quickly. You must provide a truly valuable content or else you wont get a second chance. For someone to receive a “commercial” SMS message they must opt-in (true opt-in not – “hey look I got a bunch of mobile numbers lets send them all an SMS”). You are Legally required to get “express prior authorization” before sending any commercial message.
Once you have that you are good to go but there is an art to getting them to sign up in the first place and that has to do with content marketing. If you can hook them on the value of your content then its just a matter of getting them to agree to receive it in a new channel.
For some reason there is a lot of confusion about the word Content lately. Back in the late 90s when the internet was just heating up we all heard alot about how “Content is King”. But these days for B2B Marketers I think we need to take it a step further and say that “Content is Media”.
If you have been following my thoughts on the 4 C’s of Marketing – it all starts with content. Building a solid content creation engine is critical to B2B marketers today. Why?
Its the content that gives you the opportunity to have a discussion with the Media, its the content that gives you the opportunity to create conversations socially, its the content that gives you the opportunity to re-engage with leads in your system that you may be nurturing on that sames topic, and its the content that allows your sales team to start a conversation with their accounts about that topic.
If you follow Seth Godin at all you will know that Mass Media in forms that we are used to like Advertising isn’t working for or B2C breatherin. Sure anyone can take out an ad in a major publication but his point is more about the sustained effort over time to create a brand using advertising hasn’t worked for years and is just too expensive and too inefficient to build a brand.
I think B2B marketers really need to think and act more like a media house themselves. What is your publishing calendar? Can you stick to it? Does it relate to the major growth initiatives of your company? Your Content engine should be able to answer all these questions – and when you do then you will be able to use your Content as Media!
Trust is not a new thing when it comes to marketing and communications as evidenced by one of the most awaited studies in the communications world is always the annual Edelman Public Relations Trust Barometer.
Trust is not a new thing in the world of sales either – its a fact that people enjoy buying from people that they trust and in B2B Marketing part of our job is to shorten the time spent building trust so sales can have an easier time and focus on selling.
Social Media changes that and elevates Trust to the individual level. This is actually good news for the B2B Marketer. We get to help our thought leaders build trust virtually before they even walk in the door. Building demand for their unique point of view.
I think the element of Trust in B2B Marketing runs deeper and is more important than in B2C Marketing which makes it a really unique attribute when it comes to B2B Marketing since it is much more critical to the sale.
If you can combine the element of Trust across a wide range of fans, followers and advocates then you have a community. The word community is often overused now that Social Media has come along. But think of it here as an audience that you have built by creating and publishing attractive content that engages them with your thought leaders. Social Media gives you this great gift of the ability to create community because you publish content on a regular basis – think of the way publishers have created community around their brand and their editors – the same holds true for B2B marketers.
Other than selling to your existing customer base which is always the shortest time to cash sale that you can find in any B2B organization – I see not trouble envisioning that your community is the 2nd best place to find and create a sale. Prospects who have been listening to you, watching what you publish and responding to your content are already working their way up the Awareness to Consideration to Purchase cycle. Its just up to you to get them the right offer in order to get them to buy!
I picked this saying up from Gary Vaynerchuk’s new book called Crush It
.
I really liked the idea of content having dual purposes and not just the purpose of posting to your website or blog.
The lure part is really about a steady stream of content that is consistent in its frequency which is why as people come to depend on it brings people back to your site time and time again. You can call it Inbound Marketing (like the folks at HubSpot do) or you could call it Content Marketing (like the folks at Junta42 do) but whatever you call it its the basis for all your online activity.
The lasso part is really about an “away game” for your content. Gary defines in the how to build your personal brand sense of commenting on blogs and inserting yourself in to conversations. Which is a space that everyone can improve upon because it engages a new audience with the way you think. But also you can think of this as where you can use your content in other social spaces. Perhaps on Facebook, or syndicated to another group blog, or just other places to get you exposure.
The hard part is creating the content – the fun part is finding ways to get it seen by others and have them drive back to your site or blog and engage with you!
I often get asked the question – how do you keep up with it all?
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