Last week there was an article in eMarketer titled B2B Marketers Up Social Spend. As the title indicates, it gives some very useful data and projections on B2B social media marketing spending from 3 research studies. For me, I want to read those numbers to see how B2B companies can decide on their marketing mix based on the past experiences of others. More specifically what emphasis should be given to social media in the mix based on the social media marketing spending and projections.
Here why this interests me, besides the fact that this is a common questions that many B2B business ask: as a technologist if I build solutions for business, what is the best channel to reach my customers – that is other businesses.
These numbers give some idea about the trends and potentially answer to the marketing mix question. Be warned that the social media marketing is relatively new, where a lot of experimentation happens, there is a risk of overreading these numbers.
To summarize, the article quotes numbers from 3 research studies:
- Outsell’s “Annual Advertising and Marketing Study 2010.”
- HubSpot survey on B2B companies in North America about lead generation through social channels
- Research study from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the American Marketing Association (AMA) on B2B marketing spending on social media
Here are the main observations relevant for this discussion an my read on them:
- The over all marketing and advertising spending by B2B companies increased from $127.98 billion to $129billion (less that 1% increase), There is no significant increase in overall marketing spending. Even though overall increase was small, there is an important shift in the marketing mix.
- Social media spending by B2B companies will grow from 9.9% to 18.4% (almost double) of their marketing budget. Since overall spending is likely to be same, this could be read as an increase in focus in social media compared to other forms of marketing. (Warning! This can be the result of increased optimism from early successes)
- B2B services companies spend bigger percentage of their marketing dollars on social media than B2B product companies. Can we read this as social media channels are more effective for B2B services than products, or is it that there are more B2B services than products?
Another useful piece of information presented in the article was graph ranking the social media sites based on their effectiveness (from Outsell study):
Effectiveness of social media sites for B2B marketers (from eMarketer)
It may be noted that HubSpot survey shows 44% thought LinkedIn more effective, while 33% thought Facebook in the same way.
