By Steve Fodor
Business-to-business companies are dedicating more and more marketing funds to online marketing, SEO strategies and social mediums like Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. Some in the industrial marketing sector have even coined the term “SMO” (social media optimization) which refers to the integration of social media and search engine optimization.
But even though the media landscape has changed dramatically in just a few short years, should B2B industrial companies put all or even most of their marketing efforts into just SEO or SMO strategies? There’s no doubt that investments in SEO, SMO and content development strategies will help more customers and prospects find your Web site, but consider these media usage statistics before you put all of your eggs in the online basket.
More than 50 percent of companies today are blocking access to social media in the workplace. Why? It has to do with productivity. A recent study showed that up to two hours per day per employee are lost due to social media, and 87 percent of employees said they had “no clear business reason” for using social media in the workplace.
A 2010 study from Palo Alto Networks, a network security firm, revealed that at least 88 percent of traffic on social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn comes from users simply reading their own personal pages. That’s a lot of checking to see if anyone has “liked” my latest status update.
Please don’t get me wrong here. I am all for B2B industrial marketers utilizing online video and social media marketing to develop thought leadership positioning and for raising search engine rankings. But, I also believe that the usage habits and true role of social media marketing is still being defined for B2B marketers. I still have yet to see a bona fide case study with a measureable ROI for social media marketing in the B2B space.
Social media, online marketing and content development strategies most definitely have their place in the marketing mix for B2B industrial companies. But it’s estimated that 75 to 80 percent of people find Web sites through “other” marketing mediums like print, direct mail, and personal contact (i.e. – trade shows). No matter how much things change, an integrated marketing communications strategy is still vital.
Flickr Photo Credit: ivanpw
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