Social marketing

laura
Uncategorized
July 28, 2017

The following showed up in my mailbox a few moments ago
I commented to Steve that social marketing was about connecting with people, and businesses aren’t people. That’s why social marketing for B2B is hard: there are no people involved. Or, as he pointed out, B2B in the social space is bot to bot marketing.

Of course, there aren’t literal bots behind most brands. In the B2C space, brands have cultivated a social media presence that personifies the business in a way that appeals to their consumers. But that’s the brand projecting onto people and responding to people. When a business tries to connect to a business, it’s just two puppets talking.
Sure, there are small businesses where there isn’t the case. But generally businesses aren’t on social media to consume marketing. They’re on social media to generate marketing. They aren’t targets because you can’t market to a puppet.

But…

Of course, consumers aren’t on social media to absorb marketing, either, but there’s a bigger pool there. Even more importantly, most people on social media are there to relax and be entertained. They’re not thinking necessarily about what they need, they’re just out to be, well, social. In this context, they’re open to marketing and the right brand personification.
Business folks are either on social media as brands and have goals and work to do so they’re focused on their goals. Or they’re on social media to interact with colleagues or keep up with industry news. In this situation they may be open to marketing. But, the pool of potential customers is smaller. Brands don’t have to just find the right company, they also have to find the right person inside that company.

Still…

This isn’t to say businesses can’t successfully market to other businesses in the social space. They do. But they’re still marketing to people. Social media is about a social environment. Treating it solely as an advertising space misses the point of social media and risks alienating potential markets.

Email?

This does apply to email as well. Even when you’re marketing in the B2B space, you’re still contacting people. And the rules of permission still apply – no matter how hard B2B marketers try and tell us B2B is different. B2B isn’t different. If anything permission is much more important. Consumer mail providers are constrained in their filtering because they have a diverse user base. Businesses are less constrained because the user base is more uniform and there is no expectation that the business is going to let employees do anything they want with email.
While there are hundreds, if not thousands, of companies selling business addresses, it’s not OK. You’re still entering someone’s space, you need to respect that. Many B2B marketers don’t. And those of us who are your targets owe you nothing when you annoy us.

Reaching targets, the wrong way

I’ve been increasingly annoyed by these drip automation campaigns. You know the ones I mean. Senders use some software to find some flimsy pretext to send a mail. Then there emails drop every few days. Sometimes this cycle goes on for months. Most of these messages violate CAN SPAM. It’s annoying. It’s illegal. It is spam.
I can even opt out of most of these messages, they don’t offer that ability.

If I can't tell, it's spam

Judging by the amount of B2B spams I’ve gotten this past week, a number of businesses got bright, shiny new email programs for Christmas. “Like to set up a call with you…” “Just need 10 minutes of your time to explore…” “Love to jump on a call and tell you about our product…”
That’s just the mail that comes into my personal address. There’s also a raft of mail coming into our contact address. The majority of those are trying to sell me FB or Twitter followers, although Instagram is rising in the ranks. Some of those messages are kinda funny, though. They try so hard to pretend there’s a real person who really did look at our website and who really has a comment.
Most of the time it’s pretty obvious that it’s not from a human. But every once in a while a message comes in that might be from a real person. I’ve finally decided that if I have any question if a message was written by a human or a bot, it will be treated as written by a bot.
Unfair? Maybe. But I’m a small business owner and a consultant; I don’t have tons of spare time to sit around letting folks pitch me on their business. I don’t think I’m actually that unusual when it comes to entrepreneurs. We’re busy, we don’t like distractions and we go out and search for the things we actually do need.

Harvesting Addresses from LinkedIn

There seems to have been an uptick in the number of folks harvesting addresses from their LinkedIn contacts and adding them to mailing lists. I’ve been seeing this in my own mailbox. I’m getting added to different lists and because I used a tagged address I know these folks are harvesting from LinkedIn.
This behavior is really rude. Just because someone accepted your contact request on LinkedIn, doesn’t mean they want to be added to any mailing lists you may have. Let’s be honest, some people have hundreds or thousands of LinkedIn contacts. They’re not going to want to get mail from all of them.
This behavior risks your ESP account. I know of ESPs who have disconnected customers for importing all their LinkedIn contacts.
Of course, there are ways to effectively use your LinkedIn contacts. The short version is think about what you’re doing and how your mail will be received. Don’t grab all your contacts, be selective about who you choose. Have too many contacts to go through manually? That’s not an excuse, in fact, it’s an even bigger argument for not becoming a spammer.

I’ve previously written things you must consider when sending bulk mail to people who have connected with you on social networks.