I’ve had multiple social media-oriented conversations with potential clients recently about how social media in general, and Facebook specifically, supports business-to-business (B2B) relationship marketing. In the midst of these conversations, a real-life B2B relationship marketing case study played out recently courtesy of a Facebook friend who is in B2B sales. Her business-to-business Facebook example demonstrated the strategic perspective we advocate with clients: you can create dynamic experiential marketing opportunities by integrating guerrilla marketing, event marketing, and social media in a B2B setting.
One note: I asked my friend who was behind this experiential marketing case study about using photos and actual Facebook screen shots to better illustrate the content marketing side of her strategy. Because of privacy concerns, however, I can’t. As a result, this overview is generalized - to protect those who had the fun.
My friend is a senior business development leader for a marketing services company. She's an incredible networker who will tell you everybody she does business with is a friend. Looking through her nearly thousand Facebook friends, you see a mix of marketers on both the client and provider side. Ultimately, she’s looking to her network and relationship marketing to grow her company’s revenues through helping more clients in more ways. That’s a pretty classic business-to-business objective.
My friend created a couples-oriented, weekend experience for several decision makers and influencers at a current client. The weekend involved a few meals - one at a steakhouse Esquire magazine recognized as a top US restaurant and another at a restaurant with a striking view of a natural landmark.
The big event for the weekend was attending one of the “dinosaurs of rock” concerts rumbling across the countryside this summer. Not coincidentally, my friend’s husband knows a musician in one of the well-known bands. This afforded her client group seats close to the stage plus the opportunity to go backstage and meet and greet with performers from several bands.
Combining personal interest, emotional intensity, with clarity about how a brand fits into that and made the experience happen is a proven formula for creating a memorable business-to-business experience.
If my friend had done nothing more than creating this memorable event experience, she’d have further solidified relationships and likely identified new business opportunities with three key clients. And that’s a lot. But she also turned the experience into a content marketing bonanza (again, just as we advocate). At each venue, she checked in on Facebook, plus had photos taken of:
Importantly, she made the effort to tag herself, her clients, and even the performers they met in more than thirty photos she shared (with “public” status) on Facebook. Of course, her clients were able to like and re-share these photos with their Facebook friends too.
By turning the experiential marketing event into a content marketing opportunity, the weekend experience supported her relationship marketing objectives five ways,
In talking with my friend a week afterward, she told me she importantly secured an okay from each client invitee to share content on Facebook – a smart content marketing move since people can have very different privacy and comfort levels with social media sharing.
If you’re still on the fence about how social media supports the business-to-business sales / business development process, this example should ideally start to push you off the fence. It’s not an example that will work for every business-to-business situation, but it does demonstrate how you can use fundamental event marketing and social media principles to design customer experiences which grow, solidify, and drive results from business-to-business relationships. – Mike Brown
The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your customer service in a smart way without seeming as if you’re micro-managing the customer experience.
