Can B2B Find Enough Sex Appeal To Be Successful in Social Media?

Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube…do you really have to be a sexy consumer brand to make social media work for your business?

I would argue that you don’t. But you surely need to understand how you’re going to define “success” in social media before you craft a plan and embark upon it. You also need to have a very clear idea of who your customer is and what your brand persona is before you can even begin to craft a strategy that will do something more than completely miss the mark.

Find “brand persona” to be too vague? Focus instead on defining the need or desire that your brand fulfills for your customer. Then immerse yourself in their buying cycle and the specific pain points they experience at each stage. Lastly, dive in and get a good knowledge of their media consumption habits so that you don’t find yourself running the right message in the wrong place.

Once you’ve got all of that, define your brand’s value propositions in respect to how well the brand addresses and eliminates the pain points your customer experiences. Simplify the $hit out of that definition. Define a clever way of communicating that value proposition at the right time and in the right channels based on the media consumption habits of your customer.

Now, layer on your brands personality. Voila! Sex appeal for days.

If that all still seems confusing, remember this: even when it comes to B2B marketing (and even marketing some of the less sexy consumer brands out there), you’re still a company run by a group of people trying to reach and fulfill the needs and/or wants of another person or group of people. Buying on emotion and justifying with logic still applies in the B2B space—there are just a whole lot more stakeholders involved in the final decision. None the less, you can’t forget the people part or your B2B marketing campaigns—whether they’re set to run on a billboard or in Twitter—will fall flat. Every. Single. Time.

Ready for a killer example of a seemingly non-sexy brand getting social media right? How about a company that has come up with the ultimate commercial grade fan to really maximize the positive effects of heat destratification? Hot, right? (Evenly distributed warmth to be precise.)

Let me introduce you to Big Ass Fans.

That mention above about simplifying the $hit out of your value propositions…these guys nail that. Right down to their brand name.

Which of course, some people love and some people hate. A reputation nightmare? Not even close when you own it.

Take a look at their FanMail page on the website, for starters. No shame in their game, go right ahead and tell them if you love them or hate them, either way they’ll show it. Brilliant because it also shows what they’re like to work with by publicly displaying their responses to customer cheers and jeers.

Stop there? Not a chance!

Check out their brilliance on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest.

And wait, there’s more. Talk about knowing your business audience and the decision making process, here they have dedicated an entire microsite to the architects and engineers that that recommend and install their products. Understanding of where and when to communicate the message? Seems that those architects and engineers have been turning to Big Ass Fans to help educate their clients and themselves—you can schedule a lunch and learn right on their site. Smart, Big Ass! So very, very smart.

Does social media drive sales for them? I have no doubt it does, if nothing else by way of assist rather than direct conversion.

Sure, they have a consumer side of their business. But their roots are B2B and I would assume that overwhelmingly still, their sales are too. These Asses get it.

Dig a little deeper into how you can use social media to drive more qualified leads into your sales funnel by downloading Oneupweb’s latest white paper, “Business-to-Business: Bringing Sexy Back”.

Go ahead. Be gone with it.