New media marketing strategy for B2B!

B2C companies have many ways to use social media, but for B2B companies, it generally lacks novelty, and the business departments have always questioned the value of social media operations to the business. However, if social media is operated properly, it can have a significant effect on B2B corporate marketing.

1. Social Media Marketing Strategy

The social media marketing strategy is to use relationship chains to increase breadth, establish public accounts to increase depth, and build a bridge between the company and fans. Social media marketing has changed the nature of B2B corporate marketing. It has transitioned the product supply method from the industrial chain to the relationship chain. Social marketing has changed the traditional advertising methods of online media and print media, and instead used social relationship chains, customer reviews and other methods to influence customers. This method has changed the basis for customers' purchases, from advertising influence to human influence.

So how can B2B companies leverage the power of social media and integrate social media marketing into their overall marketing strategy as one of the effective marketing methods?

1) Strengthen fan interaction and gain fan support

The interaction between enterprises and fans on new media can be manifested in the following ways:

Regularly organize fan interaction activities, such as giving away books, tickets, holiday cards, testing games, etc., to make fans more familiar with the company and improve their favorability;

Responding to fans' messages in a timely manner and quickly resolving fans' questions requires that the company's new media operators have high internal coordination and external adaptability capabilities. Because in B2B business, fans' messages are often more professional, and sometimes they ask technical questions. New media operators need to obtain consulting information in a timely manner and coordinate relevant internal personnel to give corresponding answers or solutions to avoid fans making negative comments and causing other fans to misjudge the brand.

Let fans participate in the product experience, listen to fans' voices before developing or optimizing products, let fans feel that the company values ​​them enough, and build closer relationships.

Targeted information push. Most new media accounts can set preference tags for fans. Companies can push content that is valuable to others based on the content tags that fans follow, win good fan experience, and increase the added value of corporate accounts.

2) Use content as bait and leverage social media through fission gameplay.

Fission communication is a relatively popular social communication method in 2018. Companies have repeatedly used fission to achieve low-cost customer acquisition effects. Fission is a way to obtain traffic based on the user's relationship chain. Stanley Milgram, a Harvard University psychology professor, discovered the "six degrees of separation" phenomenon in 1967, which states that no stranger is more than five people away.

This phenomenon fully demonstrates that "weak ties" play a powerful role in society. The social fission communication method utilizes the social relationship chain to obtain huge traffic for the enterprise.

An example of fission is: a company spreads activity information to 6 users, and through a reward mechanism, guides these 6 users to spread the information to their respective social circles, prompting at least 5 friends to leave information or register. If the requirements are met, rewards can be obtained for free or at a super low price. The six users each trigger five friends to register, totaling 30 second-degree disseminations, and these 30 friends each trigger five friends to register, which is 150 third-degree disseminations. By extrapolating forward, the company will obtain huge traffic through fission. If it is done well enough, the customer acquisition cost will be very low.

Figure: Fission model diagram

Companies can use the free conference code of a paid conference held recently as fission bait, create fission posters, and guide users to share it in their communities. By attracting more than 5 friends to register accounts and spread it in their communities, they can get the free conference code. At present, there are also many fission gadgets and social operation service companies based on fission, such as Jianfeng Operation Selection and Professor Xu Zhibin's Jianshi Technology. They have done a lot of research on community fission and mini-program ecology based on social media. You can pay attention to it and check it out.

3) Reward mechanism + full-staff marketing, making every fan a marketing staff of the company

Based on the SCRM system mentioned in the first point, companies can guide existing fans or employees to help the company spread product information by setting up reward mechanisms, such as point prizes, cash red envelopes, product discounts, etc. Through data monitoring and attribution, they can identify which fans or employees bring newly registered users or new customer leads. After accumulating to a certain level, corresponding rewards can be obtained. This full-staff marketing approach activates the value of old customers or existing fans, and by bringing in new customers, it can inject more potential customers into the company and discover more business opportunities.

Total employee marketing is very important for B2B companies. If a company’s employees do not do marketing for the brand and do not love their company, then the company is a failure in a sense. The company's brand marketing personnel and corporate management team need to continuously build employees' brand awareness, allowing each employee to exert their brand marketing initiative and help achieve the company's marketing goals.

4) Online activity design based on social media

Based on the community effect of social media, companies can design relevant activities that suit different target customers, such as live voice broadcasts in online social groups or online meetings. iHeima is an entrepreneurial media. Since 2016, they have established a WeChat community for entrepreneurs and investors, and broadcast live voice messages in the community every week, where investors or senior entrepreneurs share their entrepreneurial stories. The community activity is very high, and everyone speaks enthusiastically during the event and downloads materials after the meeting. Based on WeChat, they have achieved the connection between investors and entrepreneurs, and at the same time realized the brand value of iHeima to target customers.

Enterprises can conduct online meetings based on service accounts. Online meetings can echo with product introduction modules, so that customers can experience products or services in real time while watching video conferences.

2. Professional Media Marketing Strategy

The professional media marketing strategy is to transfer knowledge and build executives into KOLs. Different industries have different professional media. Here we mainly talk about new media forms. Most of these professional new media have UGC and PGC, and also support companies to establish their own media accounts to publish content, but this type of media has very high requirements for content review. For example, the product operation media Renrenshishipinmeng has a rejection rate of about 60% for corporate submissions, most of which fail to pass the review because the content contains too many advertising elements. Therefore, when spreading business through professional new media channels, it is necessary to convey knowledge rather than advertisements.

1) Provide knowledge rather than advertising, and build corporate executives and core technical experts into KOLs in the field

Generally speaking, new media can open corporate self-media accounts. What companies should pay attention to when operating self-media accounts is that self-media accounts are "media" and the premise for good operation is content. All hard advertisements or content with a strong advertising flavor will have side effects on self-media operations. If a company wants to promote a product, it does not necessarily have to promote the product itself, because potential customers do not need the product itself, but a solution to their problems.

Enterprises can put it at a higher level and operate their own media with the purpose of "providing knowledge that can solve customer problems", which will allow the self-media to grow spontaneously like a snowball. At the same time, content needs to be created within the company, allowing company executives and core technical experts to participate in content creation and build them into KOLs in the field.

2) Strategically cooperate with professional media to achieve accuracy and jointly create high-quality content

The foundation of the media is content, and the core is to grasp both ends of the content, one end is the content consumer, and the other end is the content supplier. Therefore, major new media will support content creators by providing funds, traffic, etc. to attract high-quality content creators to create content on their platforms. In March 2016, Tencent launched the "Mangzhong Plan", allocating 200 million yuan to support content creation. A year later, they launched the "Mangzhong Plan" 2.0. Tencent announced that it would provide 1.2 billion yuan to support content creators. In just one year, the number of penguin accounts on Tencent Penguin's self-media platform increased from 13,000 to 200,000. All kinds of media have put a lot of effort into the content production chain, and PGC and UGC are important creators of content for each media.

For leading and popular media such as Tencent and Toutiao, the content creation teams of B2B companies act more as PGCs, opening corporate self-media accounts, providing high-quality content, and using content to drive business traffic.

In the professional field where B2B companies are located, there are many professional media. Companies can cooperate strategically with such media to jointly mobilize content creators. On the one hand, the media can take the opportunity to interact with creators, deepen relationships, and lay a solid foundation for content creation. On the other hand, companies can use the power of the media to gather self-media authors who are valuable to the company and help the company.

3. Business transformation strategy using new media

User data on corporate new media platforms are scattered across various platforms. The company does not know the connections between users on different media platforms, nor can it manage and reach users on these new media platforms in a unified manner, which increases the company's operating costs and makes it difficult to reflect the business value of new media.

As mentioned earlier in the data-driven B2B marketing strategy: data-based marketing goal setting and growth system construction, companies can build their own SCRM (Social Customer Relationship Management) system, or use the SCRM SaaS platform to embed different media sources of the content disseminated by the company, identify the sources of users settled on different new media platforms, and unify them into the SCRM database.

The mainstream SCRM platforms on the market can support enterprises in data monitoring, label setting, behavior analysis, activity analysis, and unified management and reach of users from various channels such as SEM, SEO, conferences, social platforms, content knowledge, etc. Enterprises can have better insights into users, judge user value based on user activity, interactive behavior, etc., and formulate further conversion strategies and new media strategies.

Author: B2B Marketing Circle

Source: B2B Marketing Circle