The Use Social Media Marketing Towards External Business Customers : Goals and Measurements

Abstract: The marketplace has recently faced a large transformation and has become more digital. As a part of the digital transformation the social media has taken an increasing part in companies’ marketing strategy. The use of social media within the B2C context is already very common, while it is still in an early phase in the B2B context. To use of social media as a marketing tool could bring lot of advantages to the B2B companies, though there are still several challenges which is a reason to why companies hesitate to apply it to their strategies. An essential step when applying social media in the marketing strategy is to develop clear goals and metrics. Though, this has been identified to be one of the major challenges for using social media. Therefore, the propose of this study has been to describe the main goals and objectives of using social media marketing towards external business customers and to create an understanding of how its effectiveness can be measured by describe the necessary financial and non-financial social media metrics. To fulfill the purpose following research questions were developed: RQ1: How can the goals and objectives of social media marketing towards external business customers be described?         RQ2: How can the use of financial metrics, when measuring effects of social media marketing towards external business customer, be described?  RQ3: How can the use of non-financial metrics, when measuring the effects of social media marketing towards externa business customers, be described?  In order to answer the research question, thus the purpose, a case study was performed. Qualitative data were collected through observations and interviews whit respondents from B2B companies, a B2C company and experts within the field of digital marketing. There reason of the selected sample was to enable an understanding for the social media use in B2B companies, and examine which knowledge could be retrieved from B2C companies. The study emphasizes to make the goal setting and measurement simple. The result connects essential goals and measurements in a framework, which gives an holistic view of the social media goals, financial and non-financial metrics. This framework aims to deepen the understanding of what can be achieved by applying social media in the marketing strategy towards external business customers.