For B2C businesses, the benefits of digital marketing and social media marketing were quickly clear. In B2B, marketers have embraced certain aspects of digital marketing more quickly than others.
In 2014 and going forward, B2B businesses must craft an integrated digital approach to stay competitive. To reach new clients and maintain existing relationships, B2B marketers can learn from the digital successes of these three notable B2B brands:
Cisco’s social and digital marketing efforts have been making “best of” lists for several years, so the company’s 2014 digital marketing success is a continuation of an established pattern.
The most striking element of Cisco’s online presence is how integrated it is. A “Social@Cisco” page seamlessly brings together recent content across channels on Cisco’s own website. The company’s Youtube account has a fully-branded welcome page with a link to a downloadable study and streams of recent Twitter and blog posts. The page can be customized by region and language.
In addition to this coordinated presence across social channels, Cisco has launched their own information-packed pages and content. Working with Wired, the company presented “The Connective,” a digital magazine about the “Internet of Everything.”
Some of the young startups in B2B straddle the B2C/B2B divide with a product that both individuals and business clients can use. Canva, a graphic design platform, fits this description.
Canva encourages the audience of individual users to share their designs on social media. This builds an engaged following — and adds to the emotional draw of the page for business-affiliated visitors. This summer, Canva introduced the “Canva Button,” allowing other brands to easily direct users to Canva anytime they encourage user-generated design content. If successful, this move could dramatically increase the digital footprint of the young brand.
Earlier this year, AdAge wrote about Philips’ digital rebranding and the brand’s effort to become known for its B2B offerings as much as for its more popularly recognized consumer products.
The rebranding has largely taken the form of mini-documentaries, displaying the company’s innovations in a range of settings. Philips has reported viewer sharing above their expectations, and while individual videos have performed at varying levels, the campaign is clearly reaching a significant audience.
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