Seems like I’m suddenly finding reports everywhere about the rise in B2B marketer’s spending on social media marketing. Posted on this topic earlier this week, and now just downloaded a March 2010 report from Forrester Research’s Michael Green titled “B2B Interactive Spend Will Double by 2014.”
The report predicts that by 2014, B2B marketers will be spending $54 million on social media (they spent $11 million in 2009). An 80% increase, yet still an extremely small piece of the overall predicted $4.8 billion pie for B2B interactive spend in 2014. However, given the cost-effectiveness of social channels, only a fraction of the budget is needed to make a significant impact. I’m spending the majority of my budget on creative development and graphic designs for social channels — I wonder if many companies count these costs as part of the social media budget, or as part of another budget.
As I’ve mentioned several times on this blog, I often hear rumblings at conferences, within the walls of my own company, and among my peers that there aren’t too many good B2B social media case studies out in the public domain right now. I think this is changing rapidly, and I know that many B2B marketers are experimenting with various social media programs
According to Forrester:
“Traditionally conservative B2B marketers are beginning to see the benefits of investing in social marketing…As B2B marketers move away from mere experimentation they must invest in more than just Web site building or search marketing fundamentals or risk falling behind the competition.”
In order to move from the experimentation phase to full-blown acceptance, marketers are going to have to wrestle that ugly ROI beast to the ground…
[...] now broken into the Business-to-Business (B2B) world, too—and in a big way. According to Forrester, B2B companies will spend $54 million on their social media marketing campaign in 2014, up from $11 [...]
[...] as a priority that attracts the same kind of budget as their B2C counterparts. Nonetheless, both B2B and B2C spending on social media has increased and is projected to continue to go up for the [...]