Social media has worked exceptionally well for B2C businesses. It is a remarkably versatile medium for promoting business to the public. It works for B2B as well but it seems that not as many B2B businesses have embraced social media. That must change. Here are the reasons:
1. People continue to block interruptive marketing attempts and this becomes increasingly so day by day.
2. Because of the blocking, direct marketing efforts become more and more difficult to execute.
3. Direct mail is not often looked at think of the last direct mail piece you acted on.
The old saying, “what goes around comes around’ is causing a great amount of difficulty for B2B marketers. Think about it…if you screen your calls and email, you can better believe that others are doing the same. The fact is that in screening, all of us pass up the opportunities to find really beneficial products or services that we need. The reason for this is that we find that most of the time we are not interested or we do not need the product or services being offered. This is precisely the reason that we view direct marketing efforts as interruptive.
Herein lays the importance of social media and blogging. Blogging is the perfect way to share incredible, valuable content and the social media is a perfect way to share your blogging efforts. This requires two things from B2B business people. First, they must participate in blogging and in social media and, secondly, they must have patience and be in it for the long haul. The sooner you begin this effort the better.
The ideal perfect world for social marketing would have all B2B businesses participating regularly. This would allow social media to be the source of business exchange… you may say to me duh! It already is. Well that is true, but for the B2B segment it is not nearly true enough.
At the very least, small B2B companies should be doing at least one thoughtful quality blog post per week and they should share it where their target audience is hanging out in the social media. Added to this, they should be giving at least two thoughtful and valuable posts per day on twitter and face book. What this does is build relationships and thought leadership over time. I want to emphasize the words over time. Social media marketing is definitely a relationship building process and this take time. Establishing yourself and your company as a thought leader takes time.
Also, keep in mind that you are building thought leadership and relationships with nothing but subtle references to your website and products or services if even that. If you provide excellent thoughtful content, people will take the imitative to find out about your business, what you offer and when they need it they will seek you out. You cannot, I repeat…you cannot…use social media to do the same old marketing of interruption and expect it to work.
Joe Machuta is an author, blogger and small business marketing consultant
Author: Joe Machuta
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: How Electric Pressure Cookers Work
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