If you listen to the marketing experts, you hear lots of advice about getting on social media-Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn-and extending your brand. Through that, you drive traffic to your website where you convert those prospects into leads and, eventually, those leads into sales. Most of that advice seems to draw on the examples of business-to-consumer (BtoC) marketing. In other words, the value of the marketing is wrapped up almost completely in the number of leads.
Most people walking into McDonald’s can afford the meal, so the quality of the lead matters little. In business-to-business marketing, the story is different. Almost without exception, every seller in the building product supply chain is offering a product of considerable cost. And every buyer in the chain is a business, not a consumer. Leads are valuable, but they have to be the right kind of lead-a qualified lead. In recent years, with social and electronic media driving much of the leads, there has arisen one particular technique that can help move those leads to qualified leads. After all, few metal building companies or metal fabricators and installers are interested in a website visit from a 14-year-old boy interested in heavy metal music.
So how do you get a qualified lead? You establish your brand as a source of expertise. Experts are reliable, forward-thinking, trustworthy and provide answers to difficult problems. In the construction world, those attributes are highly prized. Even more importantly, they are attributes that buyers worry their seller may not have.
Social media provides a unique pathway for you or someone in your company to establish him or herself as an expert. Through blog posts, answering questions on aggregator websites, comments on LinkedIn groups and a whole variety of media, you can position yourself as an expert with deep knowledge of your craft. The reason this is so important is that all of those media outlets are searchable.
When someone searches in your area of expertise, your name begins to be associated with it.
What are the benefits? One benefit is that journalists are often the people using those searches, and when they find your name, you can become a source for them, giving you another platform. That can include print media, but also speaking at conferences and other venues.
More importantly, though, buyers who see sellers as experts trust them more. Trust brings further benefits. The cost of sale goes down because trust means you don’t have to spend as much time gaining it during the sales process. It can also translate into higher profit margins. Buyers-both consumers and business consumers-will pay more for a product or service they have confidence in. Doubt that? Ask yourself why Apple products cost more.
There are downsides to this. First, establishing yourself as an expert can take time from tasks-such as managing your company-that you may value more. The return on this investment is not as straightforward and it takes longer to see a payback.
Another concern is if the expert in your company is not you but an employee. In that case, the employee is implicitly tied to the value of your brand. Losing such an employee means not only losing their expertise, but it also means a hit to your brand, lowering your company’s value. Such a personnel situation needs careful management and open discussion.
Still, the benefits of establishing your company as the go-to source for information and expertise about your particular niche will increase your value, improve your profitability and help convert more leads into customers. Social media is a great tool for doing that.
