I am always on the hunt for B2B examples of successful social media marketing tactics. IndustrialInterface.com provides sales referrals and matching between engineers and suppliers. The new company is using social media marketing to grow their small business. 
If you’re marketing and selling to a technical customer, you’ll be interested in how startup company IndustrialInterface.com is creating and sharing valuable content. The interview below with T. Brian Jones, President & Founder
of Industrial Interface, offers key insights. Read on to find out how they are building their brand online using blogging, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Brian: It’s not always about marketing. Internet users can smell marketing speak a mile away. Why? Because it’s usually meaningless drivel that conveys no real benefit to anyone. Social media marketing is all about people sharing with other people.
1. Describe IndustrialInterface.com and what you do.
Industrial Interface is the quickest, easiest, and most efficient way for engineers to find industrial products and services. An engineer posts a project to our website, we notify relevant suppliers of the sales opportunity, and sometimes within minutes, the engineer is collaborating with a supplier who has a solution. Suppliers can review all the technical details of the leads we share with them, but the posting engineer remains anonymous. When suppliers find sales opportunities that are a good fit for their business, they pay us for the engineer’s contact information.
2. Who are your customers and prospects, and what problems do you solve for them?
Our customer base is two sided–Engineers and Suppliers.
The engineering side includes anyone who sources industrial products and services. This group includes degreed engineers, technicians, purchasing agents, project managers, manufacturing supervisors, maintenance personnel, among others. They currently rely heavily on past experience with suppliers or dated online industrial directories to find products and services for their projects. It literally takes weeks or months for an engineer to find an appropriate supplier for a particular need.
The supplier side includes anyone who sells industrial products and services. This group includes sales reps and sales engineers at manufacturers and rep groups. These salespeople currently must sift through endless cold leads to find a single sales opportunity. This is because current industrial marketing avenues cost a lot of money upfront and don’t guarantee any value over time.
An email vs. dozens of calls…
Industrial Interface makes sharing a design problem with dozens of relevant suppliers as easy as sending a single email. Engineers don’t need to call dozens of suppliers to track down the few that can fulfill their need, because our system does the work for them. We anonymously share their project with relevant suppliers and they either contact the engineer directly or share that lead with a colleague that is a better fit. We’ve leveraged the knowledgeable and well-networked supplier base to help us find engineering solutions.
Sample project posting from IndustrialInterface.com:
Our system also makes it incredibly simple for suppliers to qualify sales opportunities, collaborate with engineers, and share opportunities with colleagues, something our users do millions of times a day in the real world and are already doing on our website.
Leads = Sales Opportunities
By using Industrial Interface, engineers can shave weeks off their development time. We also allow them to find the best solutions during the concept and design phase of their projects, ensuring great savings over the lifetime of the design. Suppliers save time sorting through leads because every email they get from us is a sales opportunity. If they call an engineer from our site, it’s guaranteed that the engineer is ready to buy.
3. How are you using social media to build awareness, generate leads and win customers?
We are using a number of online tactics in unison. Our overall goal is to present our brand as a professional yet comfortable environment for engineers and suppliers to collaborate. Our social media efforts reflect this as they are generally tied not only to the Industrial Interface name, but also to Chris’ and my name and face. This allows us to leverage our expertise in the manufacturing industry to enhance the image of our brand, something that can be hard to do as a startup.
Blog = Quick Reads, Useful & Fun
Our blog is a major outlet for us to communicate with the online engineering community. We write mostly thought provoking articles that are interesting and quick to read. This way the blog is professional, useful, and fun. We don’t want to just be more technical white papers, as we need to appeal to a broader audience and only have limited time to produce content.
Twitter has been a great distribution model for our blog and other great content that we come across via my account @help4engineers. Chris has also grown @techsalesleads that we use to distribute leads that come into our site.
LinkedIn is a way to share information and interact directly with our customers. Along with various other engineering based social networks, LinkedIn allows us to spread our content and news about our company through groups and via direct emails to users.
We have also created an engineering resources toolbar via a website called conduit.com. We share the most relevant online resources for engineers and have created a toolbar of great value to our users. This way our brand is in front of them every time they use their browser, and our site is listed as one of the many useful resources at their disposal.
4. What led you to use Twitter as a lead generation/customer acquisition tool?
Twitter seemed like another great way to interact directly with our customers. It was also an early and quick way to get a “blog” up and running, as Twitter is often referred to as microblogging. What better way to share interesting information with your audience, present yourself as an expert on a subject, engage directly with your target users, and promote your brand all at once, with only a few minutes a day?
5. What kinds of results are you seeing?
With the combination of all these efforts, we had over twenty thousand visits to our site in October.
- Messages and content we share on our blog, twitter, LinkedIn, EngineeringExchange, and Globalspec’s CR4 often see dozens of comments combined and always result in meaningful and direct contact with our target customers.
Since our product requires a lot of trust for a user to try the first time, continued and positive exposure is key to our marketing efforts, as is speaking with them directly.
6. How much time and budget (approximately) does it take to grow your business using social media?
To distribute all of the content we create and to maintain an active presence on the sites we’ve discussed take roughly 20-30 hours per week. Since all of these services are free, the cost consists entirely of our time. To keep this effort reasonable, however, it’s important to know what process to follow every time a new blog post goes up or we have a product announcement. If it’s not clearly outlined, we can waste a lot of time.
So much of social media promotion is monotonous and tedious, but it can pay off over time, and every so often you get lucky. We have a recent blog post that has been viewed over 12,000 times via Stumbleupon, and it’s continuing to be viewed a few hundred times a day. This makes sense though, because I think it’s one of the best posts we’ve done.
There is a lot more to all this than simply distributing content, however. Our sites need to constantly be optimized to work with our marketing efforts and to more successfully convert visitors to customers. This is a never-ending effort, and one that we’re just starting to work on.
Recommendations
In our next post, Brian shares recommendations for small/startup B2B companies that want to begin to use social media to stimulate leads and find prospects—but aren’t sure where to start.
Learn more about or follow IndustrialInterface.com here:
Related post: 5 Social Media Marketing Tactics from IndustrialInterface.com
We build social networks and we have found that they are a great, cost effective, target specific method of promoting a business. Btw, its amazing the effectiveness of leads Twitter can generate.
Social Networking Software
@Gus M, Finding successful Twitter results for small businesses selling B2B is challenging. Do share a link to successes you’ve had with building social networks for small biz.
– Cynthia