Most marketers agree that content marketing and social media have become mainstream B2B marketing strategies. Nine out of ten B2B marketers are now using content marketing to grow their businesses, according to the recent study released by MarketingProfs and Junta42|Content Marketing Institute.
This is a problem across the board for B2B marketers as reported by the same study – the largest challenge is “producing the kind of content that engages prospects and customers” (36% of respondents). One-fifth say that “producing enough content” (21%) and “budget to produce content” (19%) are their greatest challenge in content marketing.
It is very refreshing then to find an engineering company like Texas Instruments (TI) successfully use content and social marketing to reach and engage with over 10,000 design engineers and customers. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, TI is a global company that develops analog, digital signal processing, RF and DLP® semiconductor technologies used in consumer and industrial electronics products.
TI just didn’t set out to adopt a content marketing strategy and use social media marketing because everyone else is doing them or that they are the hottest (coolest?) B2B marketing tactics to use right now. No, they approached social marketing by first understanding how design engineers (their target audience) depend on the Web and its evolving social nature to help them do their everyday jobs better. TI then balanced that with their business and marketing objectives to formulate their content and social marketing strategy.
The focus definitely was on what their target audience needed and not just exploiting social media in an effort to generate more leads and sales.
Their first step was implementing the TI E2E™ Community (TI Engineer to Engineer Community) with a focus on creating value by connecting engineers to engineers (both customer and TI engineers) with the primary purpose of delivering design support.
Results: 10,000 registered members (as of March 2009) – over 80 percent of them are customers.
It’s not business all the time. TI produced a series of entertaining videos called Thank an Engineer. These fun videos help us appreciate engineering innovations like GPS, remote controls and wireless handsets while TI salutes engineers for their ingenuity and passion.
The results produced by these videos are no laughing matter. Amber Pizano, the Video Marketing Manager at TI, posted the company’s objectives and the results achieved on Social Media B2B blog.
Here’s the Thank an Engineer video for GPS. You can find more videos at TI’s Thank an Engineer site.
Do you have a content and/or social marketing success story to share?