Social media has proven time and time again to be a successful platform for almost any type of advertising. To advertise where the people are is wise, and social media brings all consumers to a choice few networks. In the cases of business-to-business marketing and business-to-consumer marketing, social media has been a very successful platform. I found out just how well social media has worked for B2B and B2C today while browsing eMarketer. An article of theirs reports information from a study performed by WebMarketing123, a marketing firm that specializes in digital advertisement. Their study shows information regarding the performance of social media marketing campaigns for both B2B and B2C marketers.
Here’s the gist of their ad spend findings from eMarketer;
In its “State of Digital Marketing 2012 Report,” Webmarketing123 found that 52% of US B2C marketers and 41% of US B2B marketers planned to increase their social marketing budgets in 2013, while an additional 46% of B2C and 56% of B2B marketers will keep them the same.
As you could expect, the most popular social network for B2C spending was Facebook, with 65% of B2C marketers saying that they had spent money on Facebook advertising. B2B marketers did not show as much interest in Facebook, with only 40% of marketers saying they spent money on the network. However, another finding that was of no surprise was that more B2B marketers spent money on LinkedIn than did B2C marketers. 39% of B2B marketers spent money on LinkedIn while only 23% of B2C marketers did. Google+ and Pinterest saw the lowest percentages. For Google+, only 17% of B2C and 14% of B2B marketers showed spending interest and for Pinterest, only 14% of B2C and 6% of B2B marketers showed any spending interest at all. Google+ doesn’t seem to be turning out to be the marketing wonderland that Google thought it would be.
Anyway, everyone knows that the true key to any sort of internet marketing campaign is lead generation. Luckily, WebMarketing123’s study covered this aspect of B2B and B2C social media marketing campaigns as well. It covered just which social media networks were bringing in the highest amount of leads for both B2C and B2B marketing categories.
The results showed that Facebook produced the highest percentage of respondents receiving leads for B2C at 67%, while it only brought 39% of B2B respondents’ leads. LinkedIn is where B2B marketers saw most of their leads, with 44% of respondent leads being generated on the network. Twitter was reasonably successful for both types, with 30% of B2B respondents generating leads there, and 43% of respondents in B2C marketing finding leads on the network. Once again, the networks that were most successful for each were those that are expected with social network stereotypes. Google+ and Pinterest were also the least successful of the networks in this category as well.
eMarketer and WebMarketing 123 have provided some valuable information for both B2B and B2C marketers, especially considering how important social media is in marketing today. To sum it up, it seems that Facebook works best for B2C and that LinkedIn is the best choice for B2B.
