While at the B2B Marketing Profs Conference, I came to a remarkably obvious realization (and one that had been beaten out of me within my previous b2b life). You need a personality, you need to add value, and you need to not want to make people want to gouge their eyeballs out if they read your material.
Guess what? Even if you are selling to companies, you are still selling to people. People who you're selling to want to read something or experience something cool or interesting, just like everybody else.
I know this is not established whatsoever and pretty much everyone who works in b2b will think that I am full of nonsense. I think you owe it to yourselves to at least try this out before selling it down the river, though.
When was the last time a b2b company made a major personality push? Usually those end up being a muddled "Even we don't know what we do" push, a la GE or Exxon. Vague doesn't sell. Specifics and individual attention to detail do.
How can you achieve this?
1. Don't sugar coat or use fluff. Not using the word "synergy" in any press releases is a great place to start. Not repeating the same word 15 times for SEO purposes might also be beneficial.
2. Ask for "real" feedback. People sometimes have a hard time telling you that you suck. Especially if you hand out an evaluation sheet, send out a survey, or try to take the lazy approach. Calling people or writing personal emails? Much more effective.
3. Don't try and be fun or edgy. If you can't pull this off you will look extremely stupid. Sometimes not being boring is about the business techniques/best practices that you employ.
4. Don't talk about yourselves and yourselves only. If someone does something cool in your industry talk about it and laud it. Giving credit to others is a great way to show the kind of work that you are interested in/may be already creating.
5. Be human. Everyone makes mistakes. Not everyone can admit that they do though. So ball up.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment, showing us some social love or subscribing to the feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.
tagged as b2b innovation, b2b marketing, b2b PR, b2b public relations, b2b social media
Hey Stuart,
Great points. The big issue is that most large corps' Marketing groups are trying social media, but with the exact same mentality and bureaucracy they use for doing brochures. Most don't have a social media policy. Most have at least three other groups (legal, prod mgt, etc) to go through before something is "approved".
Another hurdle B2B marketers have is that up until now, most of their experience has been around speaking at companies with point-in-time information that always has a sell in it. It's a hard practice for them to all of a sudden turn around and have discussions with people without a sales pitch.
Also to play devil's advocate; To date, most SM platforms have started off being built for people to connect in their personal lives. There was and is immediate value for B2C companies to connect with current customers and make new ones as the person they connect with is also the decision maker. In B2B, the same doesn't hold true. Yes, it starts to build relationships and yes, it will help them down the road, but I would argue that there hasn't been an SM platform or value proposition for B2B to come to the table until very recently.
If you look at the B2B companies doing well in social media, they're almost all small businesses. The large B2B corps are going to take time.
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
Like