Are You Serving the Wrong Customer?
A hot topic on the web is whether social media can work for companies who work B2B. Of course it can. Social media tools are simply tools for connection. Like email and the telephone they don’t discriminate about connecting people who at businesses to people who run businesses from connecting people at businesses to people who are considered to be end users of the products we build.
A good part of my career I spent building products for a B2B2B kind of market. The textbooks we made were mandated by politicians, sold to schools, used by teachers and students. It was a complicated sales and marketing process filled with “adoption” scenarios, standards documents, and presentations.
In the early years, I did a lot of looking in the wrong direction. Are you doing that too?
The Biggest B2B Marketing Mistake
The biggest marketing mistake B2B businesses make is considering the business they sell to as their customer. It works in these ways:
- I build something for Larry’s Business to sell to Larry’s customers. I listen to Larry and make Larry my customer.
- Everything I build is for Larry’s approval.
- Larry is the only one looking out for Larry’s customer. He’s left to do all of the thinking.
That worked for me until I got to be Larry. Then I realized I should have been looking at Larry’s customers. I would have been so much more valuable to him if I had been participating in evaluating what I was doing from the point of view of the people he served.
and What It Means to Social Media
So what does that mean to social media? How can social media work in a B2B world?
If we understand that our role in working with businesses who sell to other businesses is to help them grow their businesses, then we can use the tools that the Internet gives us to
- uncover and discover information that better defines what those customers value — what irritates them, what is essential to them, and what they consider more important than lower prices.
- connect our business clients build networks with people in other industries who want to solve similar problems
- offer information, research, and case studies via webinars and seminar about the latest tools and processes for serving their customers
- show them how to use the social web to see and serve the customers of the businesses they serve.
Social media tools and models work the same for B2B as they do for B2C if we realize that that B2B businesses want networks and information.
Network Solutions and Radian6 do B2B well.
What other great examples of B2B social media come to mind immediately?
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!
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