As BtoB marketing communications evolve and technologies have emerged to streamline and enhance market strategy, the biggest priority for any marketer is demand generation. Recent research supports the theory that BtoB marketers are focused on challenges early in the sales cycle.
The top three challenges identified by BtoB marketers in 2010 remain squarely focused on demand generation. According to the findings of the Q1 2010 B2B Marketing Budgets & Tactics Survey, conducted by Forrester Research and Marketing Profs, the challenges cited by marketers were:
Generating more leads (50%)
Reaching decision makers (46%)
Improving lead quality (44%)
However, Peter Burris, Principal Analyst and Research Director for Forrester’s Technology Marketing Research, cautions marketers that traditional marketing approaches may fail to reach today’s socially savvy buyers.
With Forrester research showing 88% of business technology professionals indicating they use social media for business decision-making, Burris stressed marketers must understand buyers’ social behavior. “Successful BtoB marketers must move from social media to community marketing,” Burris said.
Burris contrasted the old model of engagement where market interactions were based on products and extending offers and waiting for prospects to respond, to the new paradigm where interactions are “based on business outcomes” and matching solutions to the needs of the buyer to effectively engage. While demand generation is a top priority for any BtoB marketer, it should no longer stand alone. There’s a growing opportunity to make lead generation a social conversation.
As technology evolves, marketers are challenged to present content in engaging formats that outshine competitors and deliver information more interactively. Webcasts provide a highly scalable platform to deliver event content over the web. By connecting with prospects in an online environment, marketers can deliver content that
immerses users and re-engages them. While the impact of physical events can be challenging to measure, webcasting can be tracked with detailed reporting on attendee behavior and information. And webcasts present a more economical alternative to physical events, which require a hefty budget.
By leveraging the popularity of social networking, BtoB marketers can enrich the users’ experience to develop deeper relationships with prospects and customers. One of the greatest benefits of online engagement is the word of mouth impact from sharing insights and experiences. The sharing concept is the very foundation upon which social networking is built, and the notion that users are sharing their positive experiences online can offer the opportunity to extend reach to a peer network.
The business social sphere is also booming. LinkedIn has approximately 50 million users worldwide in 200 countries. The membership on LinkedIn is growing at roughly one new member per second. When LinkedIn launched in 2003, it took 477 days, almost a year and four months to reach the first million members. The last million took only 12 days. Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members.
The impact of social networking and technologies has changed, and continues to change the way marketers do business. Generating leads is largely reliant upon how marketers can get in front of prospects, and webcasting is an alternative to the same-old marketing song. It gives marketers the opportunity to engage users in a more socially-fueled environment that capitalizes on the success of social networking. DemandGen Report’s recent BtoB Buyer Transformation Survey showed social networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter are having a growing impact with business purchases. More than 20% of buyers connected directly with potential solution providers via social channels, and 37% posted questions on social networking sites looking for suggestions and feedback as part of their research process. The survey also showed the growing influence social media, blogs and other Web 2.0 tools are having on the BtoB buying process. A majority of respondents said Twitter and LinkedIn influenced their decisions during the “Solution Analysis” and “Problem Identification” phases. Nearly 90% indicated that blogs impacted their research during the “Solution
Analysis” phase and 3 in 4 respondents said social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Delicious were utilized during the early Analysis phases. The growing influence of social media on BtoB purchases was also validated by a report from marketing automation vendor LeadForce1. The company’s recently released B2B Social Media Report
Card found that nearly 15% of enterprise visitors to a web site are from social media sites. The report also found when researching a company, enterprise visitors
prefer content that’s balanced and neutral and presents facts to marketing jargon.
The Forrester/Marketing Profs Q1 2010 B2B Marketing Budgets & Tactics Survey, also showed marketers continuing to increase their investments in webcasts, with 62% indicating online events would be in their marketing mix for this year, versus 56% in 2009. Community Collaboration Social webcasting provides a platform for
high-level collaboration and engagement. Users can enhance communication with content sharing, peer-to-peer networking and even gaming aspects. Recent research from ON24 indicates that webcast attendees appreciate integrated community and sharing tools: 35% of respondents favored social networking features while 29% opened the Twitter feed within a particular webcast environment. The trend is moving upward, as 32% said social networking tools are actually an important element for sharing and commenting in the webcast environment.
Because a key purpose of online events is lead generation and lead qualification, social webcasting can nurture marketers’ need for leads by fostering the ability to gather, aggregate and analyze user activity and convert it into a lead ranking report with priorities. Given the fact that virtual events are offered today as a self-service model in addition to the traditional full-service model, it provides marketers with an even more cost-effective solution that increases the ROI. The community aspects of a webcast are endless: from high energy videos, presentations and whitepapers to games and sweepstakes that will stimulate interest, these tools are set up to nurture the shorter attention span of online users.
Another valuable DemandGen Reports’ Executive Briefing, sponsored by ON24