Social Media B2B

Last Thanksgiving I wrote a post for another blog comparing a marketing campaign to Thanksgiving dinner. I have updated that post below looking at the similarities of a B2B social media campaign to preparing a Thanksgiving dinner.

The main functions of preparing dinner involve planning, shopping, cooking, serving, eating and cleaning up. Each one of these relates to the steps of a social media B2B campaign. The most important part of both a meal and a campaign is the planning. You need a goal and a strategy to reach that goal. For a meal, the goal is usually to serve your guests a tasty, well-balanced meal that they enjoy and rave about to their friends. Developing your strategy to reach that goal involves planning the steps you will take to get there. Your social media campaign goals in B2B might be to increase qualified leads, increase newsletter subscriptions, or to drive requests for information. The strategy you develop needs to drive those results. And these goals must ultimately be tied to increased sales or cost savings to measure ROI>

Who is coming to dinner? That’s your target audience. You would never make a turkey for a table full of vegetarians, so you need to make sure you know who you are serving. You also need to decide what dishes to serve. These are the social media tools that you will use in your campaign, things like starting a blog, using Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook to reach your customers and prospects. You would never serve just one dish to your guests, and you need to approach a social media campaign the same way. A mix of tools and techniques that reaches your audience at different touch points will be more successful that one that only reaches them one way. B2B marketers cannot live on turkey alone.

A traditional dinner may include family favorites that have been served for generations. The same is true for a traditional marketing campaign. It may be appropriate to use the same methods that have worked for years, but incorporating social media into your plans adds some variety to the menu. Make sure the additional of social media techniques are part of a goal-based strategy.

Shopping for your meal is just like checking your resources for your campaign, and making sure you have all the things you need to reach your audience and achieve your goals. Cooking your meal is just like putting all the pieces together to build your campaign. Writing copy, chopping onions, developing creative, basting the turkey, finalizing layouts, sprinkling the canned onions on the green bean casserole. They are all steps to the goal.

Serving the meal is like delivering your message in all its forms. Eating the food is when your audience interacts with your message. They read, click, open and digest. With a clear call to action, your target audience knows how to respond. Your dinner guests usually respond with yummy sounds. And your social media strategy needs to include listening tools so you can respond and engage with your happy diners and prospective customers.

And the final step of any plan is to clean up. With dinner, it means clearing the plates, but with in a social media campaign, it means determining what parts of the campaign worked and generated the best response. If you provide distinct calls to action for each element of your campaign, you can determine the success of each one, just like clearing plates that are left with various amounts of food. Sweet potatoes with marshmallows are never left, but nobody eats the random green vegetable. Incorporating this feedback and measurement against your goals will make your next Thanksgiving dinner and your next B2B social media campaign a success.

Related posts:

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2. 5 Assumptions That Kill A B2B Social Media Campaign The problem with social media and other forms of...
3. When Measuring Social Media’s ROI For B2B Don’t Chase The Wrong Goals You can measure anything as long as you have...

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