Knowing who your audience is, is pretty easy. All businesses know who their products or services are aimed at. They key question for any company’s marketing team is, Why would they want to talk to us? This is especially important when trying to get your customers to engage with you through social media. You need to find the common denominator for your customers – what are their common interests that they might form around online?
For B2C social media, this is tough as there is very little that “people who like corn flakes” or “people who use anti dandruff shampoo” have in common other than using the product. For B2B social media marketers, it’s sometimes easier to find the common ground, as the context is already defined and it’s easier to segment the target audience. If you sell photo copiers, then you know you are looking at the office managers or if you sell CRM software, you are looking at the CTO or systems admin. However, that is only the first part of the battle. The next challenge is to find out what unites them on a personal level, because for the most part, it won’t be the love of photo copiers or CRM solutions!
Last week I was out an event where Matt Rhodes of Fresh Networks, gave a talk on this subject and had a case study which highlights this very well. They have a client who sells paper to offices. Who buys the paper in an office? The office manager or office administrator. So, creating an online community where office managers/admins can discuss procurement of office supplies seemed like the obvious solution, right? Apparently not…as surprise, surprise, buying paper and office supplies wasn’t of massive interest to these people and they didn’t want to spend time in a community about it!
So, back to the drawing board to find out what was important to them. What were they interested in? What would get them engaging in an online community? Organizing office parties. Now, that’s far more fun and while slightly off topic in terms of the long term play of flogging more paper, getting these people hooked in with something that actually interests them means there is the opportunity to build relationships, capture rich data and insights…and ultimately make sales.
If you are going to build an online community as part of your B2B marketing, build it around the most interesting or fun part of your audience’s professional life. Make it about them. Give them a reason to want to be there, not just because it vaguely relates to one aspect of their job (that they probably don’t like that much anyway!)
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