Course: Marketing Management The Marketplace Live simulation involves business-t
ID: 420783 • Letter: C
Question
Course: Marketing ManagementThe Marketplace Live simulation involves business-to-business (BTB) marketing of computer products. Social media is often considered for business-to-consumer (BTC) marketing. Does social media marketing work in the BTB marketplace? Why, or why not? How might you use social media marketing in the Marketplace Live simulation to build relationships with business buyers? Provide at least two specific examples and defend your choices.
Course: Marketing Management
The Marketplace Live simulation involves business-to-business (BTB) marketing of computer products. Social media is often considered for business-to-consumer (BTC) marketing. Does social media marketing work in the BTB marketplace? Why, or why not? How might you use social media marketing in the Marketplace Live simulation to build relationships with business buyers? Provide at least two specific examples and defend your choices.
Course: Marketing Management
The Marketplace Live simulation involves business-to-business (BTB) marketing of computer products. Social media is often considered for business-to-consumer (BTC) marketing. Does social media marketing work in the BTB marketplace? Why, or why not? How might you use social media marketing in the Marketplace Live simulation to build relationships with business buyers? Provide at least two specific examples and defend your choices.
Explanation / Answer
The effectiveness of social media for BTB marketing completely depends on the objective of the marketing campaign. Marketing campaigns usually have several stages. The basic stages can be broken down into
While social media is primarily used by BTC companies, they can easily be used to create awareness and generate interest among target groups. The other two stages, desire and acquisition of customers on the other hand may not be very easy on social media for a BTB company.
For a BTB company, there are several stakeholders that the company may need to reach out to. For example, an organization that uses a software product such as Adobe Illustrator can have multiple stakeholder. If we look closely, Illustrator is usually used by designers and collateral creators. On the other hand, the designers are not the ones who make the purchase of the product. The purchasing power often lies with their managers. Hence the consumers and customers are often distinct for a BTB product/service.
What social media can do is create awareness among the customers and the consumers of the product/services. In addition to this, the social media campaigns can be targeted towards the consumers to create interest. This could result in the consumer recommending the customer to purchase the product/service for the organization.
Let’s consider a second example of an analytics platform. Social media allows the analytics platform companies to easily target their campaigns to people with a specific designation (data scientists, market analysts, CDO, etc.) and can reach to them with their message. However, when an organization purchases an analytics platform, it also considers reputed journals such as Gartner, IDC, etc and their recommendations. For example, consider google analytics. It is a B2B product that is widely used. While google analytics does not necessarily sell their product on social media, it continuously shares various coverage that it receives from other publications. If we check Google Analytics’ Facebook page, we can see that one of their recent coverage has been in HBR. Such shares help create a brand image for the product on social media.
Overall, social media for BTB business is more focused towards a part of the marketing process that creates awareness and generates interest. On the other hand, the customer acquisition process takes much more effort than just the use of social media for these businesses.