8 Reasons to use social media in business-to-business marketing

– Where traditional marketing requires payment for each contact or impression, social media allows you to use your personal network, or that of the organization, as leverage. By informing or reaching 100 relations with a relevant message, you enable them to share this message with people from their own network. The viral effect that a message can thus receive results in a tremendous multiplier, making a well-thought-out but relatively small effort have large consequences.

2. Affinity – Social media focuses on building relationships, contacts, and authority. The stark difference between business and consumer marketing contrasts with the fact that social media is fully integrated into consumer marketing. Especially in the business market, where years-long and intensive interpersonal relationships account for a large part of the revenue, social media should have been adopted the fastest.

3. Measurability – The saying “half of our marketing is wasted, we just don’t know which half” is familiar to many and embraced as a fact in traditional marketing. With social media, all efforts are fully measurable through a number of (free) tools. Feedback – The nature of social media ensures you receive immediate feedback from your most important target group, the consumers of your product or service. Because the traditional sender and receiver relationship dissolves in social media, you gain valuable information directly from your customers. This creates the desired and necessary dialogue between you and your target audience.

4. Visibility – In the online world, it is a foregone conclusion that ‘social results’ will prominently appear in all search results very soon. This is also proven by the recent announcement from the world’s largest search engine, Google, that information from its own Google+ network immediately influences the search results. This means that if people share your message on social media, it will appear higher in the search results.

5. Expanding the target audience or market – You have been active in your market for years and know your target audience like the back of your hand, but using social media opens the door for new contacts that do not fit within your market definition. Maybe you will find a completely different industry where there is a huge demand for your product, or part of it, or a consumer thinks of an application for your product that you and your engineers never considered.

6. Track Record – The internet forgets nothing, and for many companies, this is a reason to stay far away from it. But whereas a company used to be as good as its last job, your achievements are now forever visible. By building a solid online track record or portfolio, you ensure that customers, now and in the future, get the right impression of your company.

7. Customer Demand for Presence – Just as the fax was imposed upon you years ago – you simply couldn’t avoid it – we now see the same movement happening with social media. In your market, there are people already actively using social media, and they expect to find you there too. Your customers demand to be in contact with your organization in the way that suits them best. Perhaps social media is now only preferred by 1 in 10, but we can say with certainty that this number will increase, and it’s better to be prepared.

Hopefully, these are sufficient arguments to justify the choice to utilize social media within your organization. Of course, many questions remain, but email was also not integrated into your company within half a year. Consider at least the following issues:

• When is it a success / What do I want to achieve?
• Which means do I use?
• Which social media channels do I use?
• How do I determine the result or the ROI?
• How do I evaluate our results?