Social Media for B2B
(Note: This is a reprint of a post I wrote over on the Hill Holliday blog.)
Enquiro Research recently reported that 93.1% of business technology purchasing decisions are researched online. Not surprisingly, the use of search (and predominantly Google) comprises a significant share of the online research performed.
More interestingly, however, is the fact these same business buyers are startlingly active on social platforms. Forrester recently published the results of a survey of the online behaviors of business technology buyers, which found that they more socially engaged online than the average adult consumer.
Almost all respondents maintained at least a passive level engagement with social media: 91% of buyers in the business-to-business sector reported reading blogs, consuming user-generated video, or listening to podcasts. But social participation among B2B buyers runs much deeper — nearly half (43%) reported actively creating content on social platforms themselves. This figure is nearly double the average among all US online adults.
Social media is staged to play an ever-increasing role in actual purchase influence among business buyers. Groundswell co-author Josh Bernoff sums up the situation in a recent blog post: “What does this mean for you? If you’re a B2B marketer and you’re not using social technologies in your marketing, it means you’re late.”
Just Because It’s Free Doesn’t Mean It’s Easy
Street teams are a tried and true promotional tactic; yet in the ad above, Western Union shows us it can be hard to give anything away to strangers on the street — even cold hard cash. But leave it to marketing “amateurs” at the Hope Fellowship Church to come up with a simple but ingenious ploy that I was helpless to resist.
I was approaching the entrance to the T the other day when a woman standing just outside asked me if I’d like a free granola bar. Never one to turn down free food no matter what it is or how recently I’ve eaten, and thinking that this was a sampling promotion, I said sure. So she handed me a plain old Quaker Chewy granola bar. Umm… OK?
But I soon realized that this unassuming woman was in fact a master of sleight of hand, as I discovered under the granola bar in my hand a business-card sized note:
There you have it: Free Food + Soft-sell Message = Everybody Wins. Put another way: you can hand me flyers all day long, as long as there’s a chewy granola bar attached to them.
Eye Tracking In Practice (Squidoo)
I stumbled onto this video via an old blog post from Seth Godin. If you have the time and the patience to really focus, it’s a fascinating look into how eye tracking works. Not something most of us come across every day.
Forgive Me a Moment of Pride
It’s not every day you have a reason to publicly say, “I’m honored to work with the people I do.” This is one of those opportunities.
(To be clear: I had absolutely nothing to do with the TV spot in question — it was produced years before I joined the team. But I’m proud to work with the people who are responsible for it.)
Mobile Integration: A Huge Missed Opportunity for Pepsi’s New Campaign
By now you’ve seen them everywhere: brightly colored billboards featuring the new Pepsi logo inserted into exclamations like “HOORAY!” and “HOWDY”. I like to imagine the strategy behind this campaign went a little something like this:
Step 1: Come up with a long list of words that contain the letter “O”.
Step 2: Take over as much out-of-home inventory around the country as you possibly can, to show off all those “O”-words you came up with.
Step 3: Activate your campaign with an integrated mobile partnership with Pongr or Mobot. Incentivize “collecting” cameraphone shapshots of all your different creative units, via a contest or retail promotion. Tie it all together with a (post-moderated, please) live feed of all the submitted photos on a social media-enabled branded microsite. (Oh wait, you already have one? Go ahead and use that.)
Except Step 3 never happened. Tens of millions of dollars of media put against a national OOH branding campaign with no message and essentially no brand mention — fine. But why not set aside a few grand to take your advertising beyond mere impressions?
This is a plea for better integration in advertising. Who will answer the call?
Best Ad of ‘09?
I announced the Worst Ad of 2009 not long ago, but I thought it would be a while before I could name a contender for the title of Best Ad of ‘09. But here it is. These are currently running all over Boston, mostly in and around public transportation. In case you can’t make out the photo, the copy reads:
We Delete Users Unfit To Date!
www.PlentyofFish.com
100% Free Dating Site
Whether or not you take issue with this judgmental philosophy, you have to admire the direct approach: “Value proposition; memorable URL; category and cost” — BAM. Not a bad way to set yourself apart in a sea of competition (you have heard of Darwin Dating, haven’t you?).
Reminds me in spirt of the winner of the 2008 Jamie Scheu Integrity in Advertising Award. Bravo.
Future Politicians… Good Luck.
My Social Graph Is Getting Weird from Jeremy Fuksa:Creative Generalist on Vimeo.
“How can you avoid your past on Facebook? … It used to be that you could grow up, and get a career, and mold yourself into the type of person you wanted to be, and no one would ever be any wiser.”
Forget Superior — Is Your Product Even Positively Good?
The following quote comes from one of my all-time favorite books, Ogilvy on Advertising, and is attributed to Joel Raphaelson:
In the past, just about every advertiser has assumed that in order to sell his goods he has to convince consumers that his product is superior to his competitor’s.
This may not be necessary. It may be sufficient to convince consumers that your product is positively good. If the consumer feels certain that your product is good and feels uncertain about your competitor’s, he will buy yours.
If you and your competitors all make excellent products, don’t try to imply that you product is better. Just say what’s good about your product — and do a clearer, more honest, more informative job of saying it.
If this theory is right, sales will swing to the marketer who does the best job of creating confidence that his product is positively good.
Ogilvy concludes, “This approach to advertising parity products does not insult the intelligence of consumers. Who can blame you for putting your best foot forward?”
I often wonder how many people in advertising today would still find the scriptures of the King of Madison Avenue relevant, if they have read him at all.
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