We’ve seen (and reported on here) numerous studies of marketers’ increasing adoption of social media. What’s been largely missing is analogous research on the demand or buy-side of the equation.
Until recently, that is, with two such studies appearing in close succession. Most recent is a UK-based study conducted and analyzed by McCallum Layton for Base One and B2B Marketing Magazine. It’s especially significant for limiting participation to buyers involved in the decision-making process for the purchase of a business product or service of value over £20,000 during the previous 12 months …in other words, a population very similar to the customers of many of our readers.
Posting on The Customer Collective, Ardath Albee has briefly summarized the study and points out a key finding…
“There is a notable decrease in the influence of supplier websites after the early stages of the buying process. At the need identification stage 58% described websites as influential or very influential, a figure that dropped to 43% by the final supplier selection stage.”
On the other hand, social media remains influential from start to finish, for the subset who have embraced its use in their buying process.
This study also includes an interesting breakout of results by age; respondents 30 and under tended to use social networks more often, and to view them as more influential and less difficult to use than their elder colleagues. The moral goes without saying, considering which group represents the future.
The earlier study, titled “Social Technographics: Business Technology Buyers”, was conducted by Forrester in late 2009; it’s a fairly large-scale survey, of over 1,000 global business technology buyers. You can order it here (you’ll need to bring a $500 bill), or you can check out Kate Maddox’s brief summary over at B2B.
Two of Kate’s points really stand out:
- 46% of business technology decision-makers have joined a social network for business purposes; that’s a surprisingly high share, and it’s also a jump of over 50% from the previous year’s study.
- 33% of business technology buyers actually create social media content for business purposes (publishing a blog, uploading an online video, etc.), indicating a level of involvement with the medium that goes well beyond casual.
These results lead to a couple of key takeaways for B2Bs:
- Examine your website to be certain it is content-rich for those early stages of the buying cycle, and that that content employs the keyphrases which those early-stage buyers are using.
- If you aren’t employing a blog and a presence on the primary social networks, you could be missing in action in those critical stages where buyers move toward vendor selection.
Clearly, social media has long since passed the stage where it might be said that marketers are forcing their use of it just to keep up with a bleeding-edge competitor, or because some opinion-maker said they should. Now their prospective customers are leading the way.
