Research Report October 2016

State of B2B Social Media

Marketing 2016www.regalix.com

Profile of respondents

CXOs - 11%

VPs - 6%

Managers - 44%

Others - 23%

Directors - 16%

Profile of companies

Service – 63%

Product – 37%

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Geographical distribution of respondents

Revenue break-up of companies surveyed

46% - North America

54% - EMEA, APAC & rest of the world

$10mn to $100mn 59%15%26%

$100mn to $500mn

$1bn and above

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Industry break-up

Information Technology & Services 33%

19%

12%6%6%6%6%

3%3%

2%2%

1%1%

Marketing & Advertising

Software

Business Services

Others

Media & Entertainment

Manufacturing

Internet

Telecommunications

Computers & Electronics

Education

Financial Services

Healthcare

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“ It would be like flying blind into a storm if we don’t use social media to engage in conversation with our audience.”-survey respondent

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Does your organization invest in social media marketing?

No 14%

Yes 86%

Primary reasons cited for not

investing were lack of clear

ROI & inability to generate

actionable insights from

social data.

A third of them, however,

felt their organizations would

invest in the next 12 months.

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In your opinion, how important is social media in your organization’s marketing efforts?

Somewhat important48%

Very important52%

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What do you hope to achieve the most through your social media marketing efforts?

Increase brandawareness

Post-sale engagement with customers

for cross-selling & building referrals are

missed opportunities that require more

attention from B2B marketers.

Gathering meaningful

insights from social media is

a challenge that agencies

need to help marketers

with to increase adoption.

Any takers?

Providing customer support is an area that will increasingly gain attention in the coming years; we know companies that are providing technical as well as sales support to their customers effectively through their social channels.

Increasecustomeracquisition / leadgeneration

Build customeradvocacy /loyalty

Increasecustomerengagement

Provide customersupport

Promoteproducts &services

Gather insightinto consumer

87%

50%52%59%

17%

57%

26%

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Which of the following social media platforms proved most effective in meeting your marketing objectives?

LinkedIn Twitter Facebook YouTube Google+ Slideshare Instagram Pinterest Tumblr

LinkedIn continues to dominate the social space,

like it did in our last year’s survey, as the most

effective social channel for B2B marketers.

“Facebook is increasingly becoming like a complaint register

for us.... But that’s good! “- Survey respondent Sites like Instagram are

showing much higher levels of engagement than legacy sites

like LinkedIn, and marketers may need to consider this at the planning stage.

89% 78%

46%37%

19% 15% 11%6% 4%

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Which of the following content types, in your opinion, worked well across different social media platforms?

Facebook Twitter LinkedIn

84%

70%

86%

49%

51%

47%

21%

73%

71%

69%

21%

84%

83%

53%

49%

57%

49%

53%

Videos

Interactive content

Gaming

Blog posts

Infographics

Lists

Blogs & Videos continued to find favor with

marketers. Given their contextual relevance, it

isn’t surprising to note that videos seemed to have

worked better on FB and blogs on LinkedIn.

10

Facebook Twitter LinkedIn

52%

28%

50%

47%

33%

56%

65%

51%

78%

91%

91%

78%

57%

26%

95%

GIFs

Research reports

How-to posts

Articles

Whitepapers & case studies

LinkedIn was the B2B

marketers’ medium

of choice for serious

business messaging

(read whitepapers,

case studies,

research reports and

the like) across almost

all product categories.

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Does your organization invest in social media advertising?

No 33%Yes 67%

Given the content overload, it might become

necessary for brands to invest in advertising on social

to be heard over the din.

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If yes, then which of the following social media platforms would you say delivered efficiently on your advertising dollars?

Facebook

While LinkedIn & Twitter scored high on effectiveness, they seemed

to have underperformed when it came to delivering efficiently on

advertising dollars. Facebook, on the other hand, seemed to have

over-performed here.

58% 58%

39%

14%

6%3% 3%

LinkedIn Twitter YouTube Google+ Pinterest Slideshare

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Do you share coverage of your brand by other online sites to drive referral traffic to your website?

No 35%

Yes 65%

Missed opportunity: A surprisingly large number of companies seemed to have missed out on what could be a very cost effective way of building traffic to their sites.

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Is your social media marketing integrated with your overall marketing program currently?

Yes 81%

No 19%

Has increased this year from a lower figure of

12% last year as per our earlier survey; probably

a reflection of the fact that more companies are

investing in social media this year (86%) than they

did a year ago (82%).

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Which of the following metrics does your organization use to measure the success of social media marketing?

Website traffic from social

Leads generated / conversions

Click rates

Followers / Likes

User engagement

Re-tweets / Shares

Reach

Virality of content

Share of voice

ROI

Customer engagement has

continued to play a secondary

role to revenue metrics; we hope

to see some reversal in that

trend in the near future.

This is even more misplaced in

social media, a platform that

allows you to engage with your

customers like never before.

83%

63%63%

60%52%

50%

31%

13%13%13%

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Does your organization collect or track any of the following social media metrics:

89%

77% 49%

58%

66%

45%Retweets / Likes / Shares / Comments

Own brand mentions

Competitive brand mentions

Level of employee participation

Social trends

Sentiment analysis

Vanity metrics still dominate. Marketers are now

beginning to realize the limitations of such metrics.

56%Demographic information of consumers (location,

age, gender)

39%Social graph data of consumers (friends,

contacts etc.)

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What percentage of your website traffic comes from social media campaigns?

What percentage of your digital marketing budget is currently allocated toward social media marketing?

Below 10%

Below 10%

48%

68%

36%

23%

5%

7%

11%

2%

11 to 25%

11 to 25%

26 to 50%

26 to 50%

Over 51%

Over 51%

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How do you see your social media marketing budget change over the next 12 months?

Remain the same

Increase36%

64%

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In your opinion, what are the key challenges faced by your organization in social media marketing?

71%

50%43%

39%30% 30%

Assessing theeffectiveness ofsocial mediamarketing activities

Generatingactionable insightsfrom social data

Aligning social mediastrategy acrossvarious departments

Lack of expertise inrunning social mediacampaigns

Creating customerfocused content

No clear ROI

Generating actionable insights will require

digging deeper into understanding the

consumer’s social behavior.

Marketers will do well by also building in

engagement metrics, in addition to the revenue-

driven metrics that they currently have, in gaging

the effectiveness of their social plan.

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Which key obstacles are keeping your organization from investing in social media marketing?

56%

33% 33%

22% 22% 22%

No clear ROI

Generatingactionable insightsfrom social data

Lack of expertise inrunning social mediacampaigns

Assessing theeffectiveness of social mediamarketing activities

Aligning social mediastrategy acrossvarious departments

Creating customerfocused content

21

Do you see your organization investing in social media marketing in the next 12 months?

Yes 33%

No 67%

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Final thoughtsAccording to a recent The CMO Survey (https://cmosurvey.org), social media spending is expected to touch 20.9% share of marketing budgets in the next five years, up from 5.6 percent in 2009. What is troubling, however, is that only 3.4 percent of marketers surveyed felt that social media contributed very highly to firm performance, while 40% thought it was below average. It isn’t surprising, then, that a good 15% of organizations that we spoke with still don’t invest in social media.

Here are a few best practices that we could infer from this study.

Measure business outcomes. The biggest challenge that marketers face is in assessing the effectiveness of their social media activities and in generating actionable insights from social data. Getting marketers to embrace and benefit from social media would require more persuasive data on ROI and help by way of gathering meaningful insights from social interactions. For this, marketers and their agencies need to go beyond pursuing vanity metrics like ‘number of followers’ and ‘likes’, and look at the business outcomes of their social media efforts.

Following the social graph of consumers, analysing brand sentiment and benchmarking competition are some of the things that marketers need to do to get the most out of their social media investment.

Tap into the true potential of the medium. When asked what they hoped to achieve the most through their social media marketing efforts, marketers predominantly settled for ‘increasing brand awareness’ as their key objective. Fortunately, social media has more than that to offer.

Increasing engagement and building long-term relationships with customers for cross-selling & building referrals; gathering insights to provide more personalized services; and using social channels to provide support are some of the things that visionary marketers are doing through their social engagements.

Understand the nuances of the medium. LinkedIn continues to dominate but with a caveat; only about 25% of its members visit the site at least once a month (https://press.linkedin.com/). A recent study by TrackMaven (www.trackmaven.com)

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shows engagement levels at LinkedIn significantly lower when compared to newer social sites like Instagram & Pinterest. And while Facebook performed well in terms of delivering efficiently on the client’s advertising dollars when compared to Twitter in our research, it was rated significantly lower as a platform that effectively met the client’s marketing objective.

The point we want to make here is this: Social is no more a monolithic entity; the social media landscape is evolving every day and marketers need to understand the nuances of what each channel represents and what it delivers when they work on their social plan. Going forward, marketers need to consider having different strategies for different social channels.

Get emotive with your messaging. The world is going visual and images and videos dominate the social space. B2B companies seem to have grasped the significance of this and have added videos as an important element to their marketing firepower. Currently product & how-to videos dominate, but we speculate more emotive content to creep in soon. In fact, according to a study done by Corporate Executive Board (CEB) partnered with Google (www.cebglobal.com), B2B brands that connect with their buyers on an emotional level earn twice the impact over marketers who are still trying to sell business or functional value. Early movers on this will stand to gain.

Investments in social media are predicted to grow. But for these investments to fructify, marketers need to script more sharply focused social strategies with a better understanding of the medium and perhaps, a deeper insight into the consumers’ social behavior.

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About the Analysts

Nimish, Senior Vice President, works with CMOs and senior marketing professionals. His research focuses on customer experience management, predictive analytics, mobile enablement and other emerging trends that help customers leverage technology as an enabler of marketing and business outcomes.

Arunh started his career with consumer product marketing, moved to brand management, and been involved in new product launches. In his various roles, he has had deep involvement with consumer and product research. Arunh is currently involved in studying emerging trends and understanding consumer behavior in the digital space.

Nimish VohraSVP, Principal Analyst

https://twitter.com/VohraNimish

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nimishvohra

Arunh KrishnanSr. Analyst

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About Regalix ResearchHeadquartered in Silicon Valley, we help the CMO organization leverage emerging digital practices for creating marketing leverage as they bring new products and innovation to market. Regalix Research helps marketers through research-based insights, consulting and peer-to-peer programs that guide marketing strategy development and execution. Our focus is helping Technology companies leverage innovation and best practices to create real differentiation. Our analysts are practitioners with a successful track record of delivering real marketing results for both leading Fortune 500 companies as well as venture backed firms.

Regalix is an award-winning Global Innovation company that leverages technology and marketing to help companies grow. We create successful ventures with our clients through co-innovation and idea-driven frameworks that inspire companies to think different. We bring ideas to life by envisioning new companies, developing brands, engineering products, and designing technology platforms. Founded in 1998, Regalix is based in Palo Alto. Our Silicon Valley setting has enabled us to stay ahead of emerging trends in digital technology and marketing.

For over a decade, we have provided complete marketing services – Social, Mobile, Content, Multi-channel Campaigns, Technology Development, and Analytics – to companies such as CA Technologies, Citi, Apple, eBay, Cisco, VMware, NetApp, Cypress, LSI, Keynote, and MetricStream.

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