B2B & Use Social Media To Sell? Start with Internal Marketing

Yeah I totally mean it! And the very good case-study is my own company – IDM Vietnam.

I never thought of this matter until one of my friends in Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) asked me about the guideline of using social media when you are top people at a company – regardless of the size – to be whether personal or professional. What is your answer? I mean both, and later I will explain to you why?

Additionally, during many consultancy sessions with customers who are B2B and seeking for effective way of communicating themselves to potential partners, here are main problems they usually encounter:

1. Their target are always high on the corporate ranking: CEO, MD, GM or Marketing Director, Purchasing Director or at least CEO Assistant
2. Limited marketing budget. I served FMCG brands before and compared to those, marketing budget of B2C companies is just like a fraction of it
3. Personnel of marketing department are not many. 2 or 3 including even Marketing Manager or in some cases Managing Director does all the marketing work
4. Marketing experts within the companies are rather obsolete. Unlike marketing people in FMCG big brands which are very difficult to consult or work with, I find my clients in B2B very friendly and a good listeners because they know they need it.

Sound familiar? Then you should read through (otherwise, you can leave here)

So the common scenario of their B2B marketing here is that:

1. Know the trends but usually are not sure know to get started
2. Beside other classic marketing tools such as Google adwords, they set up several social media accounts. The order usually is Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and the list goes on …
3. Link their own accounts to industrial similar channels. In my case as marketing, I can choose to link my company’s account to Ad Age, CIM, AMA or similar organizations
4. Start copy and share others’ content on their pages
5. Occasionally put up some content of their own, mostly promotional content
6. Get all the engagement from their employees and THAT’IT!

My confession is I did exactly the same 6-step and well … you know the rest of the story …

Late time of last year, IDM Vietnam decided to aim for a new proposition which is performance-based marketing agency and we need a way to communicate it out, so I started to throw in some brainstorming sessions of how to do it. The ideas came out were quite good and we picked the best to execute. Here are some key points:

• New proposition: performance-based marketing agency
• Concept: #IDMPerformers
• Idea: Everyone is a performer of their own lives, and we gather here to put up the best performance ever which is IDM Vietnam
• Execution: collect employees’ thoughts about their dreams, reasons why they chose marketing as their careers

I have to say it was the best success so far for my company INTERNALLY and EXTERNALLY, because:

1. Employees are happy to have a chance to express themselves; have their messages heard publicly, thanked for by company’s management team
2. Management team is happy to get close to everyone, understand them and make necessary adjustments to make them happy to stay
3. Employee’s social friends (a big part of them are also marketing professionals working for clients or other agencies) heard our message; some of them even call back asking to be our next client
4. Potential candidates heard the message too, judging our company as a good one to work for and send us their CVs.

At the campaign debriefing, two most prominent factors of success were raised:

1. Employee-related content. Unlike company-related content only, employees do not want to share and then being judged by friends to be business-all-the-time and boring to talk with. Employee-related content is nice to share since it has a balanced between branded content of the company and personal content of the employees.
2. A spice of creativity. Yeah if it was just normal, no one would want to see or hear. In fact, we took photos of employees and turn them all into cartoon characters. It was a series of activities for a month ended by a big Year-End Event.

For sure, we have a plan to carry on the #IDMPerformers for the rest of the year and beyond as part of our own IDM Branding Plan. Still, the best part of this is that THIS IDEA SELLS much better compared to what it costs.

If want to know more, you can check out part of it by following the links below.

• https://www.facebook.com/IDM.VN
• #IDMPerformers

Or give me a call to talk more about it over coffee. After all, sharing is growing – personally and professionally!