New Social Media Marketing Report Highlights Challenges; Most Effective Tactics

A new report reveals insights into the social media strategies of nearly 700 B2B and B2C companies around the world. Conducted in February 2013 by consulting company Ascend2 , the 36-page report attempts to distinguish companies with a superior strategy for accomplishing marketing objectives from those having an inferior strategy.

Interestingly, the business challenges for social media marketing are similar for B2B and B2C companies. The following conclusions for B2B companies are drawn from Ascend’s Social Media Marketing Strategy Report:

• Improving customer engagement is the most important objective of social media marketing
• Dealing with staff limitations and the inability to measure ROI are the most challenging obstacles
• Creating content for articles and blogs is the most effective social marketing tactic, however creating all three types of content are the top most difficult social marketing tactics to execute
• Measuring website traffic is ubiquitous because increasing it is a top priority and it’s easy to do
• Social marketing objectives worth achieving should be, but aren’t always, worth measuring
• You get what you pay for; most effective tactics are often most difficult and costly tactics to use

Companies the survey deemed had a superior strategy for social marketing are clearly focused on engaging customers and realize this will require increasing their efforts to reach more customers with timely and relevant content. Companies with an effective strategy are also more likely to target lead quality as a means to increasing sales revenue. Business marketers are more concerned with leads than their consumer counterparts

Selling Products and Services

The report also compares companies selling business versus consumer products and services. While companies that cater to the consumer have established their presence in social marketing channels, those who sell their products and services to businesses are rapidly gaining social marketing traction.

The most effective tactics are listed below. Of note, creating article and blog content is almost two times as important to B2B companies than to B2C.

Obstacles to achieving objectives are equally challenging for both company types regardless of what you sell.

Creating content of every type is more difficult for marketers of business products and services.

When it comes to ROI, the results indicate  most companies still use the tried and true measurement of website traffic and search engine rankings to measure effectiveness of their activities. What best practices would you say keep your social media marketing strategy on its game?