Kiran Veigas, Associate Director and Head – Corporate Strategy & Marketing at Happiest Minds, shares his views on how social media marketing can benefit B2B organizations. Happiest Minds, the digital transformation, infrastructure, security and product engineering services company, uses social media effectively to reach out to not just potential clients but also employees, to keep them connected with the company’s strategy.Veigas tells us how B2B companies can look at professional networking channels like LinkedIn to promote the brand and develop business campaigns.
Interviewed by Priyanka Bhattacharya
/ / How relevant is social media for B2B organizations?
B2B brands derive maximum mileage out of social media by powering up its brand quotient and creating an identifiable persona of the organization that connects with customers and prospective talent.
It helps in social selling and nurturing relationships by showcasing thought leadership and company culture. Social media has become an essential cog in the integrated marketing wheel of content marketing, event marketing, media relations and influencer marketing.
/ / Which social media channel would you say worked best for you in lead generation?
For lead generation, we have derived maximum results from LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google.
The main reason is that marketing spends in these channels can be more focused towards our target audience. We have found that paid campaigns can be tightly controlled using the various analytics and dashboards provided by these channels. We also have the option of tweaking the campaigns if desired results are not met.
/ / What are the things you focus on when investing in social media advertising?
The first thing we ensure is that the messaging is crisp and focused. We are very conscious about picking the appropriate channel for the audience that we want to reach out to. We use more than one channel where applicable. When it is a paid social campaign, we are meticulous about selecting the target audience to maximize on the spend.
/ / How often does Happiest Minds use social media channels to reach out to its customers?
At Happiest Minds, we use social media almost on a daily basis to share various updates like company news, press releases, recent thought leadership content (whitepapers, blogs, case studies and POV articles), upcoming event information and service offerings information.
For instance, when Ashok Soota, Founder and Executive Chairman at Happiest Minds, was conferred IT Lifetime Achievement Award by Financial Express in Dec 2016, we used social media in a big way. We shared the event photos on social media and we were able to extend that feeling of happiness and pride across all Happiest Minds people and office locations.
/ / What would be the measure of success of a social campaign? What would you say is a good ROI?
We would measure the success of a social campaign by its social shares and comments. The ROI would be based on the quantum of web traffic and leads generated.
/ / How critical is social media marketing in the overall marketing plan?
Social media marketing is a very cost-effective option for a brand. Irrespective of whether the brand is big or small, digital media provides a level playing field in most ways and a great campaign will achieve virality irrespective of the media spend.
/ / Your suggestions to organizations looking at social media for a B2B connect?
To understand the market you must invest across multiple channels. Only then can you figure out which channels work for specific objectives. Then you create campaigns to fit the channel you have chosen. Run a mix of paid and non-paid campaigns to get the most out of your social media marketing efforts.
When developing the content for your campaigns, do use a mix of images, infographics, videos and text to capture maximum eyeballs. Finally, to understand the success or failure of your campaign, you will need to use various analytics and dashboards to evaluate sentiment analysis, web traffic and prospect engagement.
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