How to do social marketing for B2B products

Community marketing is when people with the same or similar interests or certain interests gather together through a certain platform to meet the needs of both parties through product sales or services. Many companies now attach great importance to community marketing, which can reach customers more accurately. The author of this article analyzes how To B products can do community marketing. Let's take a look.

1. What is social marketing?

Social marketing is developed on the basis of community marketing and social media marketing. The user communication in social marketing is closer than the former two. Common successful cases of social marketing include: Fan Deng, Xiaomi, Xiaohongshu, etc., and of course WeChat group marketing.

1. Characteristics of social marketing

As long as people engage in social activities, they will form communities, so communities exist naturally. Building a community should not be about forcibly forming a group; instead, it should be about identifying the characteristics of natural communities, determining whether this group meets the marketing conditions, and then uniformly managing these groups and implementing marketing activities.

Taking WeChat communities as an example, we don’t gather some people together for broadcast-style promotion just because we want to sell something, but we gather some people together after we identify them as having the same purchasing intention for the next step of marketing conversion. The essence of community commercialization is the act of using social relationships to conduct commercial activities, with social relationships and clustering attributes coming first and commercial activities coming later.

2. Advantages of social marketing

1) Dissemination

Communities have three major functions: communication, social interaction, and transactions, so they can easily become the source of viral fission.

Pinduoduo’s viral effect is obvious to all:

Pinduoduo was founded in 2015 and completed its initial huge accumulation of traffic through radical viral user fission; this traffic brought the number of annual active buyers on the Pinduoduo platform to 418.5 million in 2018, and the year-on-year growth rate of various core indicators was above triple digits.

After a large amount of traffic poured into Pinduoduo, its users spontaneously organized WeChat groups such as “bargaining groups” and “watering groups”. Pinduoduo has formed many self-service marketing communities based on WeChat. These communities are not only highly active, but also extremely accurate.

2) Social

The "deskmate" function in the Scallop Check-in System extends the deskmate relationship from reality to the Internet, allowing users to study in pairs and supervise each other. Many users have found new like-minded friends through this function, and some users have successfully "recommended" the product to classmates and friends through this function.

Although Scaly lacks the concept of "group" and is not a typical social marketing case, Scaly has broken through the dilemma of only being able to carry out social activities through highly disruptive channels such as BBS, instant messaging, WeChat, and QQ, and has made learning a habit, enhancing user stickiness.

3) Trading

Luckin Coffee has secured a stable private traffic of 1.8 million by establishing more than 9,100 communities, which contributes more than 35,000 orders every day. Luckin's community marketing has achieved more than 100,000 orders by sending reminder messages within the customer base.

Compared with non-social users, the consumption frequency of community users increased by 30%, the number of weekly repurchases increased by 28%, and the MAU increased by 10%; Luckin's order contribution came first from the APP, second from the mini program, and third from the community.

2. How to do social marketing for B2B products

1. Determine whether the business is suitable

Many businesses are not suitable for social media marketing. For example, for businesses that require one deal at a time, exchanging information among customers is a big taboo. If social media marketing is used to allow customers to establish communication channels, problems will easily arise.

Many traditional industries have followed suit in doing community marketing, but the effect is not obvious. This situation is very similar to when the O2O trend emerged a few years ago, a large number of industries began to try the online-offline model, and projects such as O2O car wash, O2O manicure, etc. appeared, all of which failed miserably. If you have tried social media marketing for a while but it didn’t work, please immediately analyze whether your business is “compatible” with social media marketing.

There are still many products that are in a growth stage and are inherently unstable and cannot withstand the test of the community. As the saying goes, good news doesn’t travel far, but bad news travels far and wide. If you start social media marketing when your product is not good enough, it is very easy to overdraw your “positive influence”.

Overdrawing "positive influence" manifests itself on the one hand: if the product is in a good state, there will be an 80% chance of a transaction after the product information reaches the target users. Now, because the product is not good, users directly give up buying it and are no longer willing to learn about it. On the other hand, the energy of "negative influence" is always greater than that of "positive influence", and the speed at which bad word of mouth spreads in the community is much faster than your marketing information.

Before doing social media marketing, be sure to avoid the temptation to "march before the food and supplies move."

2. Identify the source of traffic

Currently, the main sources of traffic are public domain traffic and private domain traffic. For products that use public domain traffic, a mature, high-traffic platform is the first step to success; the second step is to create good content such as short videos, live broadcasts, public accounts and self-media.

A characteristic of toB products is that the average order value is often not low, and customers make decisions slowly, so it is difficult to get thousands of orders in a live broadcast like fast-moving consumer goods. However, this does not mean that toB products do not need to be live-streamed; both live broadcasts and short videos are currently popular information channels and do not essentially have industry attributes.

toB products can use short videos as a substitute for TV commercials, using excellent content to let potential customers understand the products and thus generate purchasing desire.

Most toB companies prefer to do private domain traffic. Although it is slow, the sales channels are actually in their own hands. Building a private domain traffic pool is a "technical job" and also a "luck job" - some people can get 30% fan conversion with a hit article, while others have worked hard to write hundreds of original articles but only have a few hundred readings. Many self-media people say that there is a routine for hit articles, but more facts have proved that it won't work without a little luck.

There can be no community without traffic. After clarifying the source of product traffic, it is necessary to continuously gather "popularity" and expand community traffic. You can find some operational books on how to obtain traffic to learn about the methods in between. I will not elaborate here.

But it is worth mentioning that although the traffic is good, you should not be "greedy". Traffic without a threshold will inevitably fail to establish a high-quality group. Some channels may only "attract" zombie fans and non-target fans; the operating data may look good for a while, but it is actually meaningless. It is difficult for you to convert a "fake fan" into your own customer.

3. Building communities and marketing

Now that traffic is coming in, how do we build a community?

The first step is "labeling": not every traffic is your accurate customer. In order to carry out more effective and targeted marketing, you need to classify and label these people; there is some kind of classification logic behind the marketing group 1 and marketing group 2 you enter, which may be grouped by channel or by interest.

The second step is "chatting": the best way to break the silence of the community is to start chatting. You can do a simple welcome to new members, or you can provide morning news, or you can post some resources that everyone is interested in. In short, it is to create interaction in the group.

The third step is to find KOC: KOC, or key opinion consumer, generally refers to consumers who can influence their friends, fans and generate consumption behaviors. KOC can exist naturally, for example, you find a well-known person in the industry to endorse your product and share the usage experience in the group; KOC can also be created by you. Although this user is unknown, he often shares his usage experience in the group and takes on part of the "teaching" role, becoming a product "geek". Then congratulations, you have a loyal KOC.

Step 4: Start from the first step and repeat over and over again; when the pre-sales group becomes the after-sales group, you still should not stop doing social media marketing, because you don’t know which customer will recommend and spread your products. Good products must be matched with good after-sales service, otherwise sales will only be short-lived. Building a community is like making friends with customers. Only by paying attention can you know what customers really want and what products and services they are willing to pay for.

Author: No Question West East

Source: No Question West East