Development of an engagement policy in today’s multichannel e-marketing environment is equally critical to B2B as B2C enterprise in the bid to sustain brand credibility and trust rather than rely on a purely sales oriented approach.
Content marketing is playing a crucial linking role across integrated e-commerce platforms and is now seen as vital to establishing relevant and more meaningful connections.
Industry research has recently found that around eighty five per cent of B2B organisations claim to have a presence on Twitter, 77 per cent are 'LinkedIn', 67 per cent are 'on Facebook', and 66 per cent appear on YouTube.
Throughout 2011 and into 2012, Twitter appeared to be the most popular of the above named social media channels, which all saw seeing increased adoption of between 30 and 45 per cent.
However, of the nine out of ten organisations who now say they use content marketing because they say it is the most effective, spending is still only between 10 and 25 per cent of their overall online marketing budget.
While on average, B2B might employ up to eight different content marketing tactics to achieve their objectives, just under 50 per cent of B2B organisations take the traditional view that email delivers the highest quantity of leads, with over half saying budgets will increase for this specific channel. Email marketing is still very much the most popular form of communication in B2B applications, and 40 per cent state the key objective is always to ‘create leads for sales conversion’.
Yet the bespoke web solutions of multichannel e-marketing now raise the creation of prime content to become the essential tool of social engagement and business connection. To be seen to be ‘relevant’ to a prospect is more crucial to today’s online existence and site authority than traditional push marketing campaigns.
The creation of B2B content serves as vital proof that an enterprise personally and individually understands their target market audience and shows that they actually know how to create compelling segmented customer experiences.
In the B2B environment, knowing and understanding who your customers are, how they make buying decisions and what type of information they need is also essential to making a successful connection. Typically there are three different categories of buyers, all of whom might be involved in the purchasing decision.
Each category of company buyer should be addressed with individualised content appropriate to their role, although it is likely that there will be a concern to satisfy all of the following criteria:
Analytic Purchasing:
The chief concern is whether a product or service under consideration can answer current or future specific company needs.
Technical Purchasing:
The desire for a smooth and disruption-free transition means an emphasis on how well a product will work or fit within their personal or company’s current technology environment.
Economic Purchasing:
The focus is on ensuring a high return on investment is able to be achieved in the shortest possible time period.
Content is in the driving seat on every media channel and quality is now the litmus test which determines success or failure. Regular, fresh content must always be relevant to changing prospect needs at various points along the B2B purchasing cycle, and delivered on the appropriate channel.
For B2B engagement to be effective in the multichannel age means knowing how to select, search, listen and engage with timely, relevant content.