Capture B2B Leads through Social Media and Brilliant Videos

Speak E.A.S.Y.

Bring together the devil in Reaper, a smarmy guy from The Usual Suspects and a large enterprise resource planning (ERP) company, and you have a business-to-business company that knows how to have fun while teaching. It’s part of the learn, laugh, share and connect philosophy that the supply chain management company Kinaxis applies to social media. 

Just For Kix Productions, the alias for Kinaxis, produces the show with the tagline of “the comedy series BigERP doesn’t want you to watch,” Suitemates, starring actors Ray Wise of Reaper and Twin Peaks and Kevin Pollack of The Usual Suspects and Shark. The show offers a creative and comedic way to raise awareness of customer frustrations with ERP vendors. 

Just for Kix Productions also produces Late Late Supply Chain Show, Uncle Jay Explains and Married to the Job. All of these touch on topics related to the industry. The videos make up one part of the company’s successful social media and online marketing modus operandi. 

Not only does Kinaxis go all in with its professionally produced videos, but it also brings in outside experts for guidance to ensure the company ventures beyond its blog and into the realm of social media with a full deck. 

The Kinaxis social media strategy 

The overall business objective for Kinaxis is to grow by increasing its market share and business momentum. Raising awareness in target markets, strengthening customer relationships and generating business leads are the social media gears, or goals, in the company’s social machine to reach its objective. 

The goals, in turn, led to the development of the social media strategy, which contains three parts: 

• Engage the broader supply chain community. This builds presence and credibility as employees provide valuable insights and join conversations. “It’s not about selling our product; thought leadership is first and foremost. Our blog is an example of that — you rarely see us mentioning, let alone plugging, our product,” says Kirsten Watson, director of Kinaxis corporate marketing. “We feel that talking about the industry challenges and solutions will, by default, prove out the Kinaxis value proposition.”
• Establish a corporate culture of engagement. Social media is not solely a marketing department endeavor. It’s a corporate-wide engagement that leverages many company experts. “Quite a few have embraced this as part of their daily routine, and that’s the goal. It’s an evolution that takes time. The company has established incentive programs to encourage contributions to the blog, discussion forums and other mediums,” Watson says. 
• Develop the company’s personality. Kinaxis has discovered that customers and prospects appreciate the company’s sense of humor. “It’s often the hook that gets people to visit our community/blog, etc. and learn more about us,” says Watson. The company produces videos using comedy while telling a story around a business problem such as the failure of ERP vendors in solving supply chain management problems.

“We believe that our social media engagement is the entire company’s responsibility,” Watson says. “With such a heavy emphasis on thought-leadership, we need to make sure our social media strategy is inclusive of our internal subject-matter experts. Most everyone can and should contribute. Of course, it’s a never-ending journey of adjustment and improvement.” 

The social media strategy focuses on building an online destination for supply chain management professionals, starting conversations around problems and solutions, boosting awareness with influencers and creating pull by having prospects who hear good things about the company come to Kinaxis. Together, these activities support the company’s effort to influence prospects. 

Building a business case for social media 

Kinaxis had to learn how social media can work for B2B since it’s not as intuitive as for business-to-consumer (B2C) companies. Rather than spending a lot of time trying to navigate the Web 2.0 waters with a blindfold, especially in a niche market, the company hired Forrester Research. 

Forrester studied Kinaxis’ target market to see where and what it did online. The audience consisted of supply chain practitioners and influencers, covering prospects, customers, academia, industry analysts, media and thought leaders. The result showed the target audience used social media for decision-making, support and references. “Knowing that supply chain management professionals are consuming — and participating in — social media for work purposes gave us justification to incorporate social media into our business,” Watson says. 

Working with Forrester, the company developed its social media strategy using Forrester’s POST model: people, objective, strategy and technology. Everything Kinaxis does today in social media comes from the plan including joining existing supply chain communities and creating its own community. 

Measuring success 

The company says that determining success has both hard and soft results. For the tangibles, Kinaxis looks at the following metrics: 

• Page views and unique page views.
• Referrals.
• Impressions.
• Online clicks.
• Email open, click-through and unsubscribe rates.
• Conversion rates.
• Community membership.
• Interaction and word-of-mouth mentions (blog comments, response to LinkedIn postings, tweets, retweets, etc.).
• Tracking the source of all new leads to a specific program or activity. 

Although these have value, they don’t tell the whole story. “The softer side of this is asking ourselves: Do we feel that people know us better?” Watson says. Employees look at whether prospects, industry colleagues, competitors and the press know or talk about the company.  

Advice to businesses 

“I don’t believe there is a choice of whether or not a company should consider social media — the choice is how it should participate. If your audience is online researching, talking, making choices, then that’s where you need to be, too. Some companies are scared to venture in uncharted (and largely uncontrolled) waters,” says Watson. She recommends following Forrester Research POST methodology, which contains the three steps: 

1. Identify where your audience is online. If you jump into Twitter and your audience isn’t there, that’s wasted time. Find them, and see what they’re doing.  
2. Define objectives. After knowing where your audience is and what it does, move forward with developing a strategy. 
3. Select the best tools. With a defined audience and strategy, you are in a better position to pick the tools that will benefit your company the most. 

“Social media is not a collection of new tools for you to blast out your marketing messages. They are tools for knowledge sharing and relationship building,” Watson says. “If you misuse them, people will call you out because the power is with the people, and they have a loud voice and a large audience.” 

Social media offers endless opportunities that can eat up resources. To be successful in social media means producing lots of content on a regular basis. Watson says, “Social media success relies on consistent and thoughtful engagement, and that takes time and effort. You need to figure out the ‘must-do’ vs. the ‘nice-to-do.’ We have implemented our social media efforts in stages. It’s better to tackle a few key things and get them right, than jump in and try to do it all from the start.” 

The company repurposes its content in a variety of ways. It may create a presentation that it blogs and tweets about, then create an interview from the content and start a conversation in the forums. Taking a phase approach also provides time to learn lessons and tweak them for future phases. B2Bs should consider taking a company-wide approach to share the workload while ensuring no one burns out and fails to deliver value. Watson says, “The bottom line is you get what you give. Have honest intentions and be true to them.” Then go after your goals. 

In fact, everything Kinaxis does revolves around SEO, one of the most important components in the company’s success. 

Although social media efforts take place throughout the company, marketing is a big player in the social media strategy. “Marketing takes the role of regularly feeding ideas and opportunities to the subject-matter experts. Long-term planning happens in the way of an internal editorial calendar that schedules out themes and deliverables by our group of experts,” Watson says. 

Results: In 2008, Kinaxis already had six figures of pageviews. One year later, the company more than doubled the pageviews. Kinaxis launched its community in the second half of 2009 and had an estimated 106,000 pageviews — and that’s after launching and using social media. Yet, it still managed to up the numbers by 20,000 in the first half of 2010. Finally, in 2008, it had over 13,000 leads. By 2009, that climbed to over 42,000 leads. Conclusion: Social media clearly works for Kinaxis. 

Meryl K. Evans is senior editor at InternetVIZ and the content maven behind Connected Digest, B2B Social Media Digest and Professional Services Journal. Follow her on Twitter @merylkevans, LinkedIn or on Facebook.