March 05, 2015 Anand Srinivasan
According to a survey report published by digital marketing company Regalix in January this year, close to 92% of B2B companies now shared content over social media. But is this getting them the necessary dividends? The survey of top level executives from B2B firms show that only 41% of the respondents have actually seen an effective return from their investment in social media. In comparison, 54% saw returns from SEO while a whopping 71% of respondents found email marketing to be effective.
It has always been argued that SEO helps businesses reach out to prospects at the most opportune moment while they are looking for them. In contrast, social media is just about visibility. However, this argument cannot be much farther from truth. The right comparison to make is between social media and email marketing – in both cases, businesses tend to engage with their prospective audience hoping to convert them into customers over the long term.
So why is it that email marketing has proved to be so effective to B2B marketers while social has not? One reason is that marketers have been able to quickly transition from regular newsletters to email marketing and thus adapted the learnings from the former to the newer communication medium. On the other hand, social media is a new beast that is still being mastered.
One way to get better at social media marketing is to deploy the learnings from email marketing to this medium. The most popular email marketing strategy is what is called the drip campaign. In a drip marketing campaign, businesses send a set of marketing messages at a pre-determined frequency to prospects. The messages are aimed at warming up the prospect steadily over a period of time to drive them towards taking the desired action.
A lot of businesses today continue to shoot in the dark when it comes to social media strategy. The sequence of messages are not relevant in a number of cases. Instead, B2B marketers need to adopt a drip marketing strategy to post useful actionable information at a predetermined frequency. This strategy drives users towards taking action and can make your social media engagement more effective.
There are however challenges in social media unlike email marketing. In the latter, it is mostly a case of set-and-forget. Autoresponders make it possible to engage with every new subscriber the same way that you did with the older ones. However, since social media needs real-time communication, you may need to come up with a new set of drip messages every time.
One way to do it is to package your drip marketing communication through blog posts that you can share with your social network. AllStream, a provider of business internet services offers case studies and survey reports in a blog format that is shared to their LinkedIn followers in a periodic format.
The great thing about social drip marketing is that you do not have to only target people who are already following you. If you have an advertising budget, you may use social drip marketing to retarget website visitors who did not convert. This is an effective strategy that combines retargeting with drip marketing to vastly improve your conversion rates.
Have you tried social drip marketing for your B2B company? What has your experience been? Share it with us in the comments below.