Get Lost on the B2B Social Media Path?
Texas Instruments Paves Way; Learn from Their Approach
No matter your feelings about social media (SM), it’s big and proving it’s not a fad. Many B2B companies want to learn how to engage their clients and prospects. However, many businesses — including large organizations — can’t find their way, feeling wary about proceeding or taking shots in the dark.
Today, Texas Instruments (TI) continues its innovative ways by using SM in an organized manner with a bite-sized, zeroed-in strategy.
TI’s marketing approach
“Marketing, from our point of view, has always been about connecting to individuals and influencing them, even before the rise of social media,” says TI’s Director of Internet Marketing Devashish Saxena. “So we were lucky to have a wealth of understanding about design engineers and the decision process they use when they design products.”
The company knew what kind of information engineers were looking for, and had a good understanding of how they get that information and make decisions using the online channel in general.
As TI started going down the SM path, it first went back to that deep understanding to figure out how the engineers’ behavior would evolve or shift. More importantly, to identify how TI could take advantage of these new technologies, and help the engineers do what they are trying to do, in a way that helps TI from a business perspective. “We decided to zero in on the support area,” Saxena says.
Market research found that design engineers primarily use the Web to connect with manufacturers like TI to gather product information and technical specifications. However, after completing testing and prototyping phases, they rely on their colleagues as the number one source of support, often using informal personal connections.
Building a community
“We saw that as an opportunity and created the E2E Community as a place where engineers can connect with other engineers to engage in support dialogue,” says Saxena. Even more critical is that it’s a place where they can connect with TI engineers. TI’s customers value nothing more than access to its engineers.
“We’re not the first to develop an engineering-oriented forum, of course. But ours is the only one with direct access to TI design engineers, which is something that sets us apart,” says Saxena.
In addition to forum postings and conversation threads, the E2E Community also incorporates a lot of video content. Originally, the company printed how-to application notes, ranging from one or two pages to 50. Then it started looking closer at creating videos rather than documents. Now it puts an engineer in a lab or in front of a whiteboard and posts it on E2E.
Metrics measure success
TI defined and tracked traditional online metrics, such as traffic to the site and click-throughs, but the main metrics it used were the same ones it looks at across the online channel, and that is engagement.
“We track not only engagement of people in the community, but more importantly, whether engagement in the community drives the conversion from suspect to prospect to customer,” Saxena says. All marketing efforts had traditionally looked at certain behaviors as drivers: If they come to the site, download a product sheet, look at a video, request a sample, etc., they are progressing down the funnel in terms of engagement.
Similarly, TI tracks engagement levels in the E2E Community. Are they logging on frequently, participating in discussions or consuming content?
Go for a quick win
Saxena advises building something small, capturing the data and using an early success as a springboard. “You have to have a ‘success story’ or two before you can get the buy-in you need to go further,” he says.
When TI first traveled down the E2E Community path, instead of launching across all products, Saxena identified one or two specific areas, specifically the digital signal processing team and the low-power radio frequency team. “In both cases, we had ‘champions’ who felt good enough about the idea to want to jump in and participate in pilot programs,” says Saxena.
Advice to other marketers
“Social media is huge,” says Saxena. “If you don’t clearly define what you want to accomplish and whom you want to reach and what behavior you are trying to drive, it’s easy to get lost. And you can do a lot of shooting in the dark.” He sums it up:
- Define your goals. Know what you want to do, whom you are trying to connect with and what behavior you want to influence.
- Pick one thing. TI zoned in on support as a problem it wanted to solve for its engineer prospects. Don’t get distracted, or think that you need to use Facebook because everyone else is using it.
- Be ready for passionate internal debate. Prepare for that and be smart about finding one or two areas where you can build some small pilots and show success before broadening out. It’s difficult to get unanimous agreement in these spaces, unless you’re a very small organization.
- Develop comparative metrics so you can demonstrate success. Of course that will vary by industry and target market. “In our case, it was engineer engagement, which we had already been tracking for five or six years,” he says.
Even a large company has to enter the social media realm in bite-sizes. Big or small, TI shows that a company would have a better chance of buy-in and success if it begins with a single focus and tracking the before and after. TI shows no sign of aging as it continues unveiling new products.
Texas Instruments at a glance
Goal: TI’s target market in its B2B semiconductor business primarily consists of design engineers at companies like Cisco or Apple, who are developing products and making decisions about technical specifications and functionality that could include TI products. The goal with SM is to get more of them “engaged” with TI.
Engaged, as TI defines it, means progressing down the marketing funnel by visiting a site, logging in, downloading a product sheet, ordering a sample, buying a developer kit, etc. “We have models that show that if we can get engineers to request samples or buy our developer kits, we know what that means in terms of revenue down the road,” says Saxena.
Social media tools
TI relies on three main tools:
- Online Forum: TI’s E2E Community connects engineers to engineers (both customer and TI engineers) for delivering design support. TI has identified forums, video and blogs as the three legs of the chair that makes up the community. All three develop high-value tips and design help content. This community leads TI’s SM effort.
- Twitter: The TI Twitter feed, @TXInstruments, shares company activities and industry-related information with its followers, which include customers, electrical engineers, hardware and software developers, students, professors, employees, field sales, distributors, reporters and analysts. @TXInstruments also highlights relevant product developments, tradeshow activities, pertinent media coverage, industry news and trends.
- Conversation Agents: These agents contribute to online discussions and have a part in the company’s comprehensive approach to SM. TI finds appropriate SM conversations on the Web and deploys select employees to act as Conversation Agents and contribute to those discussions.
Results: After a year, TI compared metrics from its engagement of the traditional online customer to those who took part in its new E2E Community. “We found that twice as many E2E members were engaged with TI, and their engagement was broader, deeper and more recent,” says Saxena. “We found two to six times more engagement across each of the metrics we measure, compared to the average person who interacts with us in the online channel.”
Saxena adds, “We are doing further research, but we think that those who became E2E members were predisposed to do business with us.”
