B2B Internet Marketing – Social Media and SEO

SiblingsI think B2B businesses are often a bit jealous of their ‘cooler’ sibling B2C. They seem to get all the cool toys, all the praise and all the attention. I think much like a real sibling relationship, B2Bs may not realize that their cool hip relative is actually jealous of them too.

In real life, the young, cool brother travels around picking up seasonal jobs and gets to be so free and unconfined and the older brother owns his own home, is settled down and has a steady decent paycheck.  Yet to both the grass seems to be greener on the other side.

Social Media and B2B Marketing

Social Media has been cast aside by many B2Bs as something only hip B2C companies can pull off. In many cases that is not true.

We work with quite a few B2B businesses that are seeing more traffic to their websites and more sales leads that they channeled from Social Media. Websites like Social Media B2B do a great job taking social media news and bringing it to the B2B level. They also keep the site current with case studies and real life examples.

Our friend David Meerman Scott had a recent post poking at stuffy B2Bs. He reminds us in his post that marketing is still just trying to reach people and people like doing business with other people, not stuffy companies we know nothing about. David does a good job on his blog giving some B2B examples as well, I highly recommend checking out his blog. He is also really into video lately (as am I), so I like him even more now.

SEO for B2B companies

My world is deeply involved in social media but optimizing your website for search engines may be one of the most important things you can do for a B2B website. Decisions made for businesses are usually bigger buying decisions and a lot of research goes into making those decisions.

Most of that research starts right here:

Research starts right here

Making sure you know the right keywords to incorporate and how to do so is imperative to being found online when people are looking.

I feel that SEO and Social Media types should try to remain very close because their worlds get closer and closer as each day goes by. As search engines and social media sites mature, we will for sure see how the two work hand in hand. Keep your eye out next year for ‘Social Media Optimization’ – the thought that you should optimize every tweet, blog, status update etc. I appreciate the thought but please take warning that you should optimize your content for people #1 and search engines #2.

As people research more and more online, I think B2Bs especially need to take stock of what they have going on with their SEO and what social media sites may be valuable for them to spend time on. Please don’t hesitate on your B2B internet marketing just because you are a business to business site.

Just set up your goals and strategy and think logically on how you can use your online presence to get you to those goals. Don’t let B2Cs have all the fun!

See how Hall can help increase your demand.