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Social Media Has VAST Untapped New Business Potential For B2Bs
Are you trying to generate more sales leads but still can't quite grasp the value of social media for B2B marketing? If so, you could be one of the leading B2B brands missing out on a total of more than 70,000 sales opportunities which are up for grabs on social media every couple of months. No that's not a typo: that's 70,000!
The latest B2B Social Media Report by Brandwatch - which surveyed 200 B2B companies in the UK and the US - found that customers with an 'intent to purchase' on social media were simply not being engaged with by marketers. (An 'intent to purchase' is defined as a customer expressing an interest in using a brand's product or service.)
Rather than jumping on the opportunity to engage with their audience, Brandwatch found that less than 1% of the 72,756 brand mentions of the 200 B2B businesses that it analysed over a two month period were then acted upon by companies. Frankly, that's a shockingly low amount and, according to the researchers, equates to nearly $36 billion in lost revenue. All for the sake of responding to a comment and starting a conversation!
Daily brand mentions ran into the thousands, too. Collectively, these top 200 B2B brands received an average of 5,055 daily mentions on news websites, 2,935 on chat forums and 2,623 on blogs. Every day!
And where exactly were most of these brand mentions happening?
In a word: 'Twitter'. As you can see from the chart below, almost 75% of all B2B brand mentions occurred on this platform alone - a stunning endorsement of Twitter's lead generation credentials.
To quote directly from Brandwatch's report: 'The proportion of brands with no account or no activity is incredibly high at 42%. While competitors are benefitting from using Twitter for customer service, lead generation, recruitment and much more, reluctant B2B brands are falling behind the curve.'
So why aren't B2Bs engaging with this vast audience?
Natalie Meehan, a marketing insights analyst at Brandwatch, notes that social media gives B2B brands "a wealth of potential sales opportunities." But in order to get the most from these opportunities, they needed to be "better educated in the areas they need to be active on and uncovering these conversations before they die out, or worse, end up in the hands of a competitor who is doing a better job of monitoring than them."
Meehan is spot on. If you don't a) start listening in to what's being said about your brand then b) start engaging with your social media mentions, it won't be long before somebody else steps in and takes those sales leads right from under your nose.
One more stat to conclude: on average, Brandwatch calculates, top B2B brands receive 363 potential sales opportunities from social media each year...uncannily close to one new business lead, per brand, EVERY SINGLE DAY, including high days and holidays.
Still think your B2B can get away with not having a well-structured, properly-resourced social media marketing strategy?
You can download Brandwatch's excellent B2B Social Media Report report, in full, here