Following on from the part 1 article in January 2013 on Socialnomics, link here. I finally got around to finishing the book. There is an interesting chapter on Business-to-Business (B2B) social media. It starts by saying many companies are struggling with what their social media strategy should be, in fact up until a year ago Kavia Moulded Products did not have one or a presence on the social media channels. Today you can find us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIN.
We are interested on how our customers and partners are using social media so sent a survey, report to follow.
From Socialnomics
In a referenced survey over 56% of B2B marketers acquired new business partnerships from social media channels. This is true at Kavia and our use of LinkedIN to develop new contacts.
Nearly 60% have improved their search ranking from social media. Kavia has gone from virtually no ranking to top 5 pages in Google because of our news blogs, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIN activity.
We are more able to gather market and industry insight from social media. In fact these features are embedded into our Salesforce CRM software and simple one-click connection from the customer account or individual.
Here are 15 tips to B2B social success and comments how Kavia is currently approaching each tip.
- Face-to-face interaction cannot replaced or replicated but you can use digital tools to augment your personal meetings. Kavia’s first priority to meet with customers and has Iain Hill, their Business Development and Sales Manager available nationally and our factory located in West Yorkshire. We are our sales system to book meetings and minute meetings afterwards. Actions from the meetings are tracked in our sales system to make sure they are not lost in the minutes document with an agreed deadline.
- If your client is willing, promote case studies. You will find a dedicated page on our website to case studies here. We also recently worked with our material supplier and they released to industry press.
- Digitally listen for your customers and industry online conversations. Kavia does this through LinkedIN and Twitter principally. We also use TweetDeck to listen for keywords, customer and partner groups.
- Create customer specific content. Kavia has been doing a lot of work recently on our website content. There is a lot more information on the homepage. Also for presentations we are always prepared to present something bespoke.
- Share industry article and blog posts. We principally do this with retweets or twitter posts which can get by following us or the last 3 tweets can be found on our website. We source articles from trade journals, trade associations, material suppliers and the BBC.
- When you make a mistake, this is your chance to be ‘flawsome’. This is about owning up to mistakes and then correcting them. Mistake when they occasionally happen is an opportunity to exceed customer’s expectations. Kavia reviews every issue (there not many) at director level.
- Share lots of relevant photos. Kavia mostly adds photos to case studies on the website and on our Facebook page as it is quick and easy to add photos their live as it happen sometimes, there are 150 images on there at the moment.
- Don’t forget about the mobile as customers consume content on the go. The Kavia Facebook, LinkedIN and Twitter feeds are setup for mobile browsing.
- If not confidential, share behind the scenes content. A lot of the Facebook page photos are from behind the scenes so like us to se the content.
- Be responsive to fans. We don’t have many online fans for our Facebook page, or the LinkedIN page, hence sending out a survey to see how our customer and partners are using social media. Our Twitter feed has quite a good following of 170 but many of those are auto follow back from our follows. If you do follow us it means you will get news delivered straight into your feed keeping you informed and saving time.
- Don’t hesitate to take some things offline. Fortunately we don’t have much cause as we have very few issues.
- Hold industry and offline meetings and events. Kavia uses Twitter and Skype when we visit trade events or when clients want to reduce travel costs we setup a Skype meeting. For our own products we are selling internationally Skype is a great solution to meet and discuss the products.
- Develop partnerships with customers, organisation, partners, and even the competition. Relationships are key business retention and growth and we endeavor to strengthen them all the time.
- Use industry keywords in your Twitter bio. Already done, also Twitter is about to enhance the bio with ‘cards’ so you add products and services.
- Make sure you know how to align and track success. All our sales activity is tracked in Salesforce product, it notes the sources of qualified leads and new business. The data is live and changes are published in an internal feed automatically. Additionally, notes are made on every opportunity and communication within the system for sales transparency.
The social media channels for Kavia Moulded Products are;
https://www.facebook.com/kaviamouldedproducts
https://twitter.com/kaviamp
https://www.linkedin.com/company/kavia-moulded-products
http://kavia.wpengine.com/plastic-injection-moulding-news/
Please like or follow us. See you on the net.
