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Research Report October 2016
State of B2B Social Media
Marketing 2016www.regalix.com
Profile of respondents
CXOs - 11%
VPs - 6%
Managers - 44%
Others - 23%
Directors - 16%
Profile of companies
Service – 63%
Product – 37%
02
Geographical distribution of respondents
Revenue break-up of companies surveyed
46% - North America
54% - EMEA, APAC & rest of the world
$10mn to $100mn 59%15%26%
$100mn to $500mn
$1bn and above
03
Industry break-up
Information Technology & Services 33%
19%
12%6%6%6%6%
3%3%
2%2%
1%1%
Marketing & Advertising
Software
Business Services
Others
Media & Entertainment
Manufacturing
Internet
Telecommunications
Computers & Electronics
Education
Financial Services
Healthcare
04
“ It would be like flying blind into a storm if we don’t use social media to engage in conversation with our audience.”-survey respondent
05
Does your organization invest in social media marketing?
No 14%
Yes 86%
Primary reasons cited for not
investing were lack of clear
ROI & inability to generate
actionable insights from
social data.
A third of them, however,
felt their organizations would
invest in the next 12 months.
06
In your opinion, how important is social media in your organization’s marketing efforts?
Somewhat important48%
Very important52%
07
What do you hope to achieve the most through your social media marketing efforts?
Increase brandawareness
Post-sale engagement with customers
for cross-selling & building referrals are
missed opportunities that require more
attention from B2B marketers.
Gathering meaningful
insights from social media is
a challenge that agencies
need to help marketers
with to increase adoption.
Any takers?
Providing customer support is an area that will increasingly gain attention in the coming years; we know companies that are providing technical as well as sales support to their customers effectively through their social channels.
Increasecustomeracquisition / leadgeneration
Build customeradvocacy /loyalty
Increasecustomerengagement
Provide customersupport
Promoteproducts &services
Gather insightinto consumer
87%
50%52%59%
17%
57%
26%
08
Which of the following social media platforms proved most effective in meeting your marketing objectives?
LinkedIn Twitter Facebook YouTube Google+ Slideshare Instagram Pinterest Tumblr
LinkedIn continues to dominate the social space,
like it did in our last year’s survey, as the most
effective social channel for B2B marketers.
“Facebook is increasingly becoming like a complaint register
for us.... But that’s good! “- Survey respondent Sites like Instagram are
showing much higher levels of engagement than legacy sites
like LinkedIn, and marketers may need to consider this at the planning stage.
89% 78%
46%37%
19% 15% 11%6% 4%
09
Which of the following content types, in your opinion, worked well across different social media platforms?
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn
84%
70%
86%
49%
51%
47%
21%
73%
71%
69%
21%
84%
83%
53%
49%
57%
49%
53%
Videos
Interactive content
Gaming
Blog posts
Infographics
Lists
Blogs & Videos continued to find favor with
marketers. Given their contextual relevance, it
isn’t surprising to note that videos seemed to have
worked better on FB and blogs on LinkedIn.
10
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn
52%
28%
50%
47%
33%
56%
65%
51%
78%
91%
91%
78%
57%
26%
95%
GIFs
Research reports
How-to posts
Articles
Whitepapers & case studies
LinkedIn was the B2B
marketers’ medium
of choice for serious
business messaging
(read whitepapers,
case studies,
research reports and
the like) across almost
all product categories.
11
Does your organization invest in social media advertising?
No 33%Yes 67%
Given the content overload, it might become
necessary for brands to invest in advertising on social
to be heard over the din.
12
If yes, then which of the following social media platforms would you say delivered efficiently on your advertising dollars?
While LinkedIn & Twitter scored high on effectiveness, they seemed
to have underperformed when it came to delivering efficiently on
advertising dollars. Facebook, on the other hand, seemed to have
over-performed here.
58% 58%
39%
14%
6%3% 3%
LinkedIn Twitter YouTube Google+ Pinterest Slideshare
13
Do you share coverage of your brand by other online sites to drive referral traffic to your website?
No 35%
Yes 65%
Missed opportunity: A surprisingly large number of companies seemed to have missed out on what could be a very cost effective way of building traffic to their sites.
14
Is your social media marketing integrated with your overall marketing program currently?
Yes 81%
No 19%
Has increased this year from a lower figure of
12% last year as per our earlier survey; probably
a reflection of the fact that more companies are
investing in social media this year (86%) than they
did a year ago (82%).
15
Which of the following metrics does your organization use to measure the success of social media marketing?
Website traffic from social
Leads generated / conversions
Click rates
Followers / Likes
User engagement
Re-tweets / Shares
Reach
Virality of content
Share of voice
ROI
Customer engagement has
continued to play a secondary
role to revenue metrics; we hope
to see some reversal in that
trend in the near future.
This is even more misplaced in
social media, a platform that
allows you to engage with your
customers like never before.
83%
63%63%
60%52%
50%
31%
13%13%13%
16
Does your organization collect or track any of the following social media metrics:
89%
77% 49%
58%
66%
45%Retweets / Likes / Shares / Comments
Own brand mentions
Competitive brand mentions
Level of employee participation
Social trends
Sentiment analysis
Vanity metrics still dominate. Marketers are now
beginning to realize the limitations of such metrics.
56%Demographic information of consumers (location,
age, gender)
39%Social graph data of consumers (friends,
contacts etc.)
17
What percentage of your website traffic comes from social media campaigns?
What percentage of your digital marketing budget is currently allocated toward social media marketing?
Below 10%
Below 10%
48%
68%
36%
23%
5%
7%
11%
2%
11 to 25%
11 to 25%
26 to 50%
26 to 50%
Over 51%
Over 51%
18
How do you see your social media marketing budget change over the next 12 months?
Remain the same
Increase36%
64%
19
In your opinion, what are the key challenges faced by your organization in social media marketing?
71%
50%43%
39%30% 30%
Assessing theeffectiveness ofsocial mediamarketing activities
Generatingactionable insightsfrom social data
Aligning social mediastrategy acrossvarious departments
Lack of expertise inrunning social mediacampaigns
Creating customerfocused content
No clear ROI
Generating actionable insights will require
digging deeper into understanding the
consumer’s social behavior.
Marketers will do well by also building in
engagement metrics, in addition to the revenue-
driven metrics that they currently have, in gaging
the effectiveness of their social plan.
20
Which key obstacles are keeping your organization from investing in social media marketing?
56%
33% 33%
22% 22% 22%
No clear ROI
Generatingactionable insightsfrom social data
Lack of expertise inrunning social mediacampaigns
Assessing theeffectiveness of social mediamarketing activities
Aligning social mediastrategy acrossvarious departments
Creating customerfocused content
21
Do you see your organization investing in social media marketing in the next 12 months?
Yes 33%
No 67%
22
Final thoughtsAccording to a recent The CMO Survey (https://cmosurvey.org), social media spending is expected to touch 20.9% share of marketing budgets in the next five years, up from 5.6 percent in 2009. What is troubling, however, is that only 3.4 percent of marketers surveyed felt that social media contributed very highly to firm performance, while 40% thought it was below average. It isn’t surprising, then, that a good 15% of organizations that we spoke with still don’t invest in social media.
Here are a few best practices that we could infer from this study.
Measure business outcomes. The biggest challenge that marketers face is in assessing the effectiveness of their social media activities and in generating actionable insights from social data. Getting marketers to embrace and benefit from social media would require more persuasive data on ROI and help by way of gathering meaningful insights from social interactions. For this, marketers and their agencies need to go beyond pursuing vanity metrics like ‘number of followers’ and ‘likes’, and look at the business outcomes of their social media efforts.
Following the social graph of consumers, analysing brand sentiment and benchmarking competition are some of the things that marketers need to do to get the most out of their social media investment.
Tap into the true potential of the medium. When asked what they hoped to achieve the most through their social media marketing efforts, marketers predominantly settled for ‘increasing brand awareness’ as their key objective. Fortunately, social media has more than that to offer.
Increasing engagement and building long-term relationships with customers for cross-selling & building referrals; gathering insights to provide more personalized services; and using social channels to provide support are some of the things that visionary marketers are doing through their social engagements.
Understand the nuances of the medium. LinkedIn continues to dominate but with a caveat; only about 25% of its members visit the site at least once a month (https://press.linkedin.com/). A recent study by TrackMaven (www.trackmaven.com)
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shows engagement levels at LinkedIn significantly lower when compared to newer social sites like Instagram & Pinterest. And while Facebook performed well in terms of delivering efficiently on the client’s advertising dollars when compared to Twitter in our research, it was rated significantly lower as a platform that effectively met the client’s marketing objective.
The point we want to make here is this: Social is no more a monolithic entity; the social media landscape is evolving every day and marketers need to understand the nuances of what each channel represents and what it delivers when they work on their social plan. Going forward, marketers need to consider having different strategies for different social channels.
Get emotive with your messaging. The world is going visual and images and videos dominate the social space. B2B companies seem to have grasped the significance of this and have added videos as an important element to their marketing firepower. Currently product & how-to videos dominate, but we speculate more emotive content to creep in soon. In fact, according to a study done by Corporate Executive Board (CEB) partnered with Google (www.cebglobal.com), B2B brands that connect with their buyers on an emotional level earn twice the impact over marketers who are still trying to sell business or functional value. Early movers on this will stand to gain.
Investments in social media are predicted to grow. But for these investments to fructify, marketers need to script more sharply focused social strategies with a better understanding of the medium and perhaps, a deeper insight into the consumers’ social behavior.
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About the Analysts
Nimish, Senior Vice President, works with CMOs and senior marketing professionals. His research focuses on customer experience management, predictive analytics, mobile enablement and other emerging trends that help customers leverage technology as an enabler of marketing and business outcomes.
Arunh started his career with consumer product marketing, moved to brand management, and been involved in new product launches. In his various roles, he has had deep involvement with consumer and product research. Arunh is currently involved in studying emerging trends and understanding consumer behavior in the digital space.
Nimish VohraSVP, Principal Analyst
https://twitter.com/VohraNimish
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nimishvohra
Arunh KrishnanSr. Analyst
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About Regalix ResearchHeadquartered in Silicon Valley, we help the CMO organization leverage emerging digital practices for creating marketing leverage as they bring new products and innovation to market. Regalix Research helps marketers through research-based insights, consulting and peer-to-peer programs that guide marketing strategy development and execution. Our focus is helping Technology companies leverage innovation and best practices to create real differentiation. Our analysts are practitioners with a successful track record of delivering real marketing results for both leading Fortune 500 companies as well as venture backed firms.
Regalix is an award-winning Global Innovation company that leverages technology and marketing to help companies grow. We create successful ventures with our clients through co-innovation and idea-driven frameworks that inspire companies to think different. We bring ideas to life by envisioning new companies, developing brands, engineering products, and designing technology platforms. Founded in 1998, Regalix is based in Palo Alto. Our Silicon Valley setting has enabled us to stay ahead of emerging trends in digital technology and marketing.
For over a decade, we have provided complete marketing services – Social, Mobile, Content, Multi-channel Campaigns, Technology Development, and Analytics – to companies such as CA Technologies, Citi, Apple, eBay, Cisco, VMware, NetApp, Cypress, LSI, Keynote, and MetricStream.
For more informationTo find out how Regalix can help you,
please contact our office, or visit us at
www.regalix.com
1121 San Antonio Road,Suite #B200 Palo Alto,CA 94303
(US): 1-888-683-4875(India): +91 80-49445010Email: research@regalix-inc.com
Regalix Research
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