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How Customers Find Vendors Via Social Media
November 3, 2014 |Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Eighty-nine percent of customers begin their buying process with a search engine according to a study by Fleishman-Hillard. Seventy-five percent of customers say they use social media as part of the buying process according to a study by IBM.
Customers are using search engines and social media to figure out who they want to speak with as possible vendors. You are being judged without even knowing it. Many companies are being discarded or not making the final cut because they aren't seen as offering the prospect anything of value.
Let’s have a look at this further, because this represents an opportunity for manufacturers to stand out and be chosen as a company that prospects want to consider.
Demand Gen published a report where they asked: What types of content have you used in the past 12 months to research B2B purchasing decisions? Here are the results:
- White papers, 78%
- Case studies, 73%
- Webinars, 67%
- Ebooks, 58%
- Videos, 58%
- Blog posts, 56%
- Infographics, 52%
- Interactive presentations, 28%
- ROI Calculations, 25%
- Podcasts, 9%
Leaving the relative merits of different formats aside, what leaps out here is that there's a hunger for information. Prospects have questions--by definition, a prospect looking for a new vendor has problems with his current one--and he or she is looking for someone that can solve those problems. Instead of accommodating a steady stream of sales reps, prospects are now doing investigations themselves, preselecting the companies that might have the answers to their questions.
The questions that arise from this data include: Are you a company active with social media and a continually updated website offering answers to these prospect’s questions? Or are you hunkered down and invisible? Given this data, is invisibility a good marketing approach? Given this data, would you rather be the company offering white papers and blog posts or the one that doesn’t?
The problem with many manufacturers is that they see this as a problem. It’s more work: “We don’t have time to write white papers,” and it’s foreign to them: “I don’t know the first thing about webinars.” But 20 years ago we were all saying the same things about e-mail: “It’s just more work. Who would ever use it?”
And what most manufacturers don’t get is that these different types of content are surprisingly easy to put together. As a manufacturer, you already have the answers to a prospective customers questions right there in your head. You are an expert at what you do. Your prospective customers are not and they have questions and want answers. All these types of content--white papers, blog posts, webinars, and infographics--are just different ways for you to express that knowledge that you have and that your prospects want.
Social media isn’t a problem, it’s an opportunity. Ninety percent of manufacturers are either uninvolved or just plain inept at using social media to help themselves. The 10% who do are laughing all the way to the bank, as they are the ones with the webinars and white papers who are being invited to talk with prospects. Bruce Johnston is a sales consultant specializing in social media and especially LinkedIn. He has over 25 years experience in high-tech sales and management. He can be reached at brucej@practicalsmm.com or through his profile on LinkedIn.