Vanson Bourne research into social media in B2B tech marketing and purchasing.

1. Research Insight:
Social Media: the key to
buyer engagement?
Intelligent Market Research

2. 2
Social media:
the key to buyer
engagement?
Faced with the 24/7 internet’s barrage of disruptive communications, technology buyers need
to filter a plethora of branded communications, product ratings, testimonials and user
sentiment before making their choice. But executives can find it difficult to extract genuine
insight that supports their decision making from that information flood.
For their part, technology vendors are trying to engage prospects individually, mixing
communications, content, and endorsements via corporate and social media networks, to
deliver valuable information to purchasers.
To understand new-style brand communications in the Facebook age, we examined 300 UK
purchasers’ opinions of the buying cycle while our companion business-to-business marketers
survey gauged 59 technology vendors’ views on their brand communications challenge.
Brand engagement is becoming
more complex and fluid as social
media rewrites marketers’
assumptions.
BRAND
And given how social networks blur the lines between data, research,
sentiment and insight, marketers accept the need to outsource some
of their research and analytics workload.
In the confusion of corporate noise and distinct from the easy-to-win ‘likes’, true referrals are a guiding
beacon for purchasers and marketers alike. Social media is disrupting marketing – but is it a trusted
information source alongside other branded communications? And what focus should vendors put on it?
Find out more:
Read our blog "Social media and technology marketers - friends or foes?"
Social media is on the rise
Purchasers once relied on exhibitions, forums and analyst briefings
to keep ahead. They now embrace the online world – attracted by
300
UK IT
purchasers
interviewed
59
Technology
Vendor
Marketers
interviewed
social networks’ immediacy and range - to interact better with key
contacts and save time spent at face-to-face events.
Online is transforming B2B marketers’ approach too; our survey
identified a social media “Big Three”: LinkedIn being the most
popular, just ahead of Twitter and YouTube with even the consumer-facing Facebook being used by
a majority.
Find out more:
Kevin Withnall and
Graham Opie,
Directors at Vanson
Bourne discuss the
headline findings of
the surveys.
Social media can help purchasers optimise their time. Buyers’ top tips to vendors on making their
information more accessible include: “make content easier to find”, “have more frequent online events”
and “make more content available via social media”.
Find out more:
For a headline view of the trends "The Rise of Social Media" Infographic
"Social Media: 3 Years On" Infographic looks at the figures in more detail

3. 3
Bosses ‘get’ social media
Brand & research anarchy?
Our research identifies changing information-gathering dynamics
Social media is complicating vendors’ engagement
amongst buying teams. But what role does social media play?
with buyers and its measurement.
Responses show three discrete purchasing unit roles: solution
Responding to how buyers mix different information
‘influencers’; ‘recommenders’/’short listers’ ; and the ‘decision-makers’.
sources, vendor marketers must now fund, implement
and evaluate an array of communication activities, led
Surprisingly, decision-makers find a range of offline and online
(purely in terms of share of budget) by event marketing
information sources - media, events, vendor information, analysts, blogs
followed by content marketing, PR, advertising, digital media,
and social media - more useful than the other two roles do.
e-mail, SEO, customer insight, social media/analytics, direct mail, online advertising and
mobile apps.
Decision-makers outstrip purchasing colleagues in connecting to bloggers, analysts, and media on social
platforms and share more information socially than those colleagues too.
Vendors need to engage purchasers through an ever-multiplying number of channels and
this complicates their research and customer insight tasks, not least managing the torrent of
information arising from them. Marketers acknowledge both a lack of analytical skills and, in
But how useful is socially-derived
information?
Purchasing decision-makers are probably better at filtering information
but colleagues doing the ‘legwork’ of validating suppliers may treat new
many cases, the budget successfully to outsource.
Directions in
Tech Marketing
information channels with no more enthusiasm than existing ones.
Find out more:
Download our recent Research
Report: Directions in Tech Marketing
And marketing professionals strike a more downbeat note, admitting that
they struggle to measure social networks’ value.
Intelligent Market Research
Despite bosses’ enthusiasm for “social matters”, how useful are these information sources? Are senior
purchasing decision-makers simply better filterers of information than colleagues focused on contracts
and compliance?
Next generation research and evaluation?
Find out more:
Watch our video discussion on
the importance of social media
to decision makers and the
challenges social media
presents to technology
vendors.
But is the technology market adequately assessing social media’s value? Buyers already
find blogs as useful as exhibitions and rate Twitter ahead of analyst events, hinting at their
ability to exploit multiple information sources. Vendors need to be at least as au fait.
The growing influence of social conversations is forcing technology marketers to rethink
their research and customer insight operations - but can they turn data from these sources
into genuine insights and personalised content?
Individual buyers’ ease in using social networks means that vendors need to keep
improving their understanding of how their targets engage in this way.

4. 4
Social media trusted information
To take the first step, download our latest White Paper 'Things to take into consideration when
choosing a Market Research company' for lots of tips and advice.
Technology purchasers are using multiple information
channels, increasingly including social networks, to build
their product, supplier and industry knowledge while
optimising the work time available to them.
And technology vendors need to personalise their delivery
of information to ensure closer customer engagement. They will
need to regularly review both their research and insight processes and how they
manage them.
white paper
Find out more:
Watch our video
discussion on the use
of social media in
market research.
Things to take into consideration when
choosing a Market Research company
Market Research;
What is it?
What’s it for?
What do you do with it and how do you do it?
Which agency should I use?
1-2
3
4-6
7-10
MR: What is it?
The clue is in the name. This is an
examination or questioning of a defined
market, which is usually carried out by asking
carefully-constructed and replicable
questions of a representative sub-set of that
market (rather than everyone because that
would be a census which would be very
expensive, take too long and is unnecessary)
which gives us a perspective on the current,
past or future behaviour of the whole market.
It tests the whole market by researching the
responses, attitudes, understanding, of this
‘sample’ group. That’s market research.
01 | Vanson Bourne - Things to take into consideration when choosing a Market Research company
ru
dis
This means that, in today’s internet of ideas
Download Now
n
source for buyers and as a channel for marketers.
tio
Social media has come of age as an information
p
Understanding disruption
(however grounded in fact those ideas are),
mindsets around marketing communications are
being overturned. As are the perceptions of what
constitutes market research, analytics and customer
insight. Next-stage questions will therefore include:
•
How to understand brand engagement needs in a ‘disrupted’ marketplace
•
How to improve your understanding of buyers
•
How to deliver optimal information
•
How to measure ever-evolving communication platforms’ effectiveness?
Intelligent Market Research