Editorial Articles

Zina Manda, Director at Mardev-DM2 explains why she wants to take the fear out of social media for those working in the B2B sector

Universally marketers are saying they’re going to put more money into social media, but there are sceptics in the B2B world who aren’t sure it’s for them. The question is, does it work, how do you measure the effectiveness and what’s the return on investment?

I want to take the fear out of social media and I want people to understand that it’s appropriate for B2B. People feel they don’t have the same level of control in social as they do on their own website, but the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks if you have a good social media presence and you’re regularly talking and communing with you prospects.

Some people think that social media is first and foremost about brand awareness. But if that’s all it’s going to be – that in itself is a problem. I don’t know too many people in this climate who are keen to just go to market and build their brand. People are looking for much more concrete evidence of a return. Our proposition around social media is that yes, it’s a great place to measure your brand’s reputation. It’s a fantastic place to watch what people are saying about your competitors. It’s a great place to do customer service. But ultimately people should not be shy about using social media for demand generation purposes. A lot of traditional marketing methods have got ever declining response rates – it’s getting tougher and tougher to push people into doing stuff. If however, you have a comprehensive, useful, engaging presence on social you can pull people to you. And it’s making sure that when you do pull people towards you do engage, you do have calls to action and you do offer them educational material, events and chances to meet you.

The other thing is that it’s not just possible to measure the effectiveness of social media. It’s essential. How you attribute your revenue back to your social media presence is something I’d like people to have a better understanding of. We talk about ‘last touch’ attribution modeling. But last touch doesn’t tell what you need to know in a multi-touch world. Quite often social media is the first touch and you absolutely want to know what media put people on the path that resulted in a sale. We’re looking to score all touches and attribute revenue back to every channel engaged in the process. That’s very exciting and really allows you to properly examine the value of your marketing activity and where you should spend your money going forward.

Zina Manda was talking to Jon Fortgang