Why B2B Companies Should Focus on Email Marketing More Than Social Media
Social media is still hot. It may be all the rage these days, but is it the most efficient way to reach, and grow, your audience online today?
When you’re a B2B company, the answer is no. The regular email is still far more effective at communicating with clients and potential clients.
B2B companies should focus on email marketing more than social media.
Here’s why:
1 – Lost in the noise on social
Your Facebook business page posts will organically reach less than 5% of the audience you build on that platform. You’ll be lucky to get 1% engagement. This is designed to get you to pay to reach your own audience.
It’s more efficient to spend your time growing your email list.
Well-written emails have great open rates and click through rates (CTR). You can see some industry benchmarks here.
You can follow-up with you audience any time because you have their contact information.
2 – Cost of reaching your audience
FB ads can be highly effective… for B2C companies.
It can be harder to find the decision maker using Facebook ads. Also, when people are on Facebook, they generally aren’t thinking about tools to improve their business. Facebook has reconfigured for a focus on friends and family above business posts.
You may be spending money trying to reach the wrong people and it’s hard to know as you won’t get them to comment on your ad letting you know who the decision maker is.
It doesn’t cost extra to reach your email list. You send them all an email and track the engagement rates to fine-tune your messaging.
3 – Following up with current and potential clients
You can use a service to automate follow-up emails to prospective clients. While you can set an ad to repeatedly show to someone, it’s not as effective as a drip email campaign.
You can see the last time you contacted a current client, make notes and adjust the messaging to them specifically via email.
Social media is like using a megaphone into a crowded area. Email can be an effective digital version of a handwritten letter.
4 – Control the Message
A key reason why B2B companies should focus on email marketing is that you control the messaging and presentation. You aren’t limited to a number of characters, links or style with email.
You capture and retain all the data as well, which is very important. With social media, the data is owned by the platform you use.
5 – Ownership of information
Your email list goes with you everywhere. Times change. Platforms may change. People leave Facebook. People don’t typically leave their email, unless they leave the company – in which case, emails would typically get forwarded to someone else in the company.
With Facebook, you own none of the information. You’re hoping Facebook’s algorithm allows you to reach the right people to get traffic and conversions. You can do better by sending people emails.
You’ll still need to write good emails to get your open rates above 10%.
6 – ROI
Growing your social media audience takes time and many quality posts. You’ll either need to do this yourself or hire someone to do it. Even then, you’ll have to pay more to reach the audience you’ve already built with those posts.
Hiring an in-house social media manager costs a salary of about $50,000, plus benefits and taxes. Then you have to hope that they can do it by themselves.
Outsourcing your social media to a digital marketing agency can save on the cost and you’ll get a team that can help grow your email marketing as well.
This way you get multiple jobs for the price of one and you can focus on the more important tasks of growing the business.
Conclusion
Focusing primarily on your email marketing strategy and campaigns is much more cost efficient than trying to grow your audience on social media.
I hope those 6 reasons why B2B companies should focus on email marketing more than social media helped you better understand how to grow you business.
Contact us if you’d like to see what we can do to help grow your email marketing efforts.
