ICT SMB social media efforts impact final purchase decisions, according to AMI research
NEW YORK – Social media have become an influential resource in the U.S. small and medium business (SMB) purchase decision-making process. Among U.S. SMB users, 30% cite that social media has a high influence in driving awareness of new brands, products and/or services, according to AMI-Partners. In addition, 19% of U.S. SMBs cite social media as being highly influential in the final purchase selection. This is no accident. Savvy ICT marketers targeting U.S. SMBs understand that social media initiatives should have a measurable impact on the bottom line.
“The primary outcome of investments in social media by ICT firms must be to increase revenue and/or reduce cost,” says Donald Best, with AMI’s Marketing Advisory and Social Media Practice. “Incremental revenue can come in many forms, with some scenarios leading to direct sales, and others resulting in leads or qualified opportunities which then go through the sales cycle and eventually become a sale. This is true ROI,” Best continues.
As straightforward as this advice sounds, getting there requires clear objectives and discipline. Social media initiatives targeted to SMB decision makers should have clearly defined goals related to the marketing funnel; that is, these efforts should drive awareness, consideration, and/or purchase. Softer goals, including community development and engagement, should serve to drive revenue. For example, getting an SMB decision maker to like a brand on Facebook must lead to a more meaningful, measurable outcome in order to have value. By the same token, no SMB decision maker gets up in the morning deciding to have a relationship with an ICT provider; SMB buyers need and expect relevant information to help them solve problems.
Social Media in the Purchasing Process – Awareness, Consideration and Purchase
Optimizing social media to capture SMB ICT sales requires an understanding of the behaviors of decision makers throughout the sales funnel.
1. Awareness: SMBs are becoming aware of brands and solutions primarily through self-discovery and word-of-mouth through their peer/associate networks on social media. SMBs tend to explore messaging or ads/promos they find noninvasive and relevant.
2. Consideration: The consideration phase is highly dependent upon SMB decision makers being able to gather enough information to become familiar with the brand/solution and determine if they are further interested. During consideration, decision makers may even reach out to the IT or telecom manufacturer or seek out opinions on forums or community sites.
3. Purchase: The actual purchase decision is mainly driven on conclusions made during the consideration phase. At this point, other user experiences and even recommendations for alternative solutions impact the final decision. User evaluation becomes more critical in this phase, as decision makers establish trust through others’ experiences.
AMI recommends that marketers start with revenue goals and then work backwards to try and determine how they could impact the purchase process of SMBs through their social media efforts. The same tactics are often involved, e.g. increasing the number of positive postings, registrations, participation; but by starting with revenue as the goal, marketers are forced to frame their initiatives and their investments in terms of how it will impact that one concrete goal: driving revenue.
Clearly, there are numerous ways to drive revenues from social media, including customer retention, acquisition, channel sales assistance, nurturing customers into advocate roles, etc. Starting with revenue simply puts every activity, investment and idea under an umbrella that can be more easily “sold” internally, and will force marketers to cut anything that doesn’t deliver value to the SMB customer and result in revenue in one form or another.
Related Studies
AMI’s Social Media and SMBs Study is an in-depth, survey-based analysis on how social media impacts the SMB ICT decision making process, and includes data on how social media drives behavior through the marketing funnel. AMI can provide ICT partners with SMB-focused segmentations and strategies for their social media endeavors.
AMI’s Social Media Marketing Best Practices Report is an examination of how leading ICT vendors use social media to drive revenue in the SMB market, and is based upon extensive interviews with social media marketers in several firms.
For more information about these studies, AMI-Partners, or our global SMB research, call 212-944-5100, e-mail ask_ami@ami-partners.com or visit www.ami-partners.com.
About Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc.
AMI-Partners specializes in IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence — with a strong focus on global small and medium businesses (SMBs), and extending into large enterprises and home-based businesses. The AMI-Partners mission is to empower clients for success with the highest quality data, business strategy perspectives and “go-to-market” solutions. Led by Andy Bose, the firm has built a world-class management team with deep experience cutting across IT, telecommunications and business services sectors in established and emerging markets.
AMI-Partners has helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services companies. The firm is well known for its IT and Internet adoption-based segmentation of the SMB markets; its annual retainership services based on global SMB tracking surveys in more than 25 countries; and its proprietary database of SMBs and SMB channel partners in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The firm invests significantly in collecting survey-based information from several thousand SMBs annually, and is considered the premier source for global SMB trends and analysis.
