Page 70 - DCOM507_STOCK_MARKET_OPERATIONS

Unit 3: Primary Market and Secondary Market

Notes

Case Study Using Primary Market Research to Evaluate B2B
Social Media Strategies

ecent research on social media has found that engaged consumers are more likely
to buy and recommend a brand. Chadwick Martin Bailey, Inc. describes this research
Rand their recent work with a leading processor company in re-evaluating their
social media effectiveness.
We recently conducted research on social media to look at why people become fans and
followers of certain brands. We wanted to get a high level view of why people become a
fan/follower. Our gut (and some of our own personal experience) told us that many
people that become a fan or follower do so because they are already customers of that
brand. For the most part our instinct was right. Our research found 49% of people who
become Facebook fans do so because they are already a customer.
The really interesting part is we found over half of those people who are engaged stated
that they are more likely to buy and recommend that brand since becoming a fan/follower.
It’s clear that using social media as an engagement strategy helps cut through the online
clutter and keeps brands “top of mind”.
This makes a lot of sense for consumer companies, but is a social media engagement
strategy right for harder to reach B2B audiences? The short answer is yes, but not without
digging deeper to learn more about whom you are trying to reach and where they “live”
online. There are so many social media outlets available today and they are not all created
equal and they’re not a “one size fits all” answer.
Truly using social media as an engagement strategy may not take a lot of money, but it
does take a lot of time. So the best place to start is prioritizing who you want to engage
with and then look for the best places to find them and figure out how they want to be
engaged in the various social media outlets available.
Recently we worked with AMD, a leading processor company to re-evaluate their social
media effectiveness and develop a more optimized and targeted strategy to reach their
widely disparate target audiences. It was important to start by looking at each of those
targets and then systematically evaluate the true extent and impact of social media usage
on each of those audiences.

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