The B2B marketing space is confusing.

Agencies and employees promise that both social media marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO) will deliver great outcomes… but that promise does not always turn into dollars in the bank.

Does SEO or social deliver the best results in the B2B marketing space? Or do you need both? If so, what percentage of your budget should you spend on each?

In this article, we compare the return on investment from social media marketing and SEO  for B2B companies and offer some sound decision-making parameters.

User intent

Both social media marketing and SEO aim to do the same thing.

Put very simply, both methods aim to put your brand in front of people who might want to do business with you.

But the way the two options actually execute this is different.

In social media marketing, you aim to put interesting content in front of the right people as they scroll their feeds.

With SEO, on the other hand, you aim to come up in the free Google listings when someone types in a term that’s relevant to your business.

Immediately, you can see that user intent is very different between the two.

User A scrolling their LinkedIn feed might be looking for opportunities, new markets or industry news.

They are not necessarily looking for a business like yours, and they are probably not in the market for your services or products. But they might choose to stop scrolling if your content seems interesting.

While user B is actively searching Google for more information about a particular topic. User B is way more likely to be in research mode and way more likely to be actively looking to make a purchase.

They are likely to click a number of search results and compare the different websites they end up on.

So, in B2C (Business to Consumer) marketing, where emotional and impulse buying decisions are common, you can see how social media marketing can be very effective in showing people things they ‘never knew they needed’ and be a strong driver of sales.

However, in the B2B space, where buying decisions are often high-value and based on logic and avoiding risk, a user in active research mode on Google is the one you want on your website.

And I can confirm that over the past 15+ years of B2B marketing, SEO has consistently delivered far better quality enquiries for our clients than social media marketing.

Resources required

Whatever route you choose, you have to resource it.

And what you produce has to be high-quality.

The online competition in every industry ramps up every minute, and you need to be better than the competition to even get a sniff at the opportunity.

Resourcing social media.

Social media marketing is easier in many ways than SEO and it can often be at least partially resourced from within the business.

You don’t need website coding knowledge or detailed technical knowledge of how Google reads websites.

What you do need, is someone with a natural marketing ability to recognise potential content within the business and turn that content into something that will stop the thumb scroll of a potential customer.

If you have someone in the business with an eye for taking a great photo or video you are well on the way.

In many ways, this is more important than their technical ability to understand LinkedIn algorithms and reports because, without great content, the posts go nowhere, and the data is useless.

Consistency is key. It’s better to post quality content once a week than have a flurry of  5 posts in the first week and then crickets.

If you do give social media marketing to an internal person, you must give them enough time to do a good job. It can take a couple of hours to take good photos, write the content, have the post checked, and finally set it to live.

Outsourcing social media marketing often helps ensure consistency and professional content writing and reporting, but you will still need someone in-house to take photos and support the external team with news and content opportunities from inside the business.

You might also have sales personnel who use their LinkedIn profile to direct message potential opportunities. But be aware that if they leave the business, they take the contacts with them.

Resourcing SEO.

The cornerstone of SEO is adding regular content to your website in the form of product and service information pages, case studies and articles.

As you add more useful information, Google ranks you for more search terms, and the volume of traffic coming to your website grows.

SEO is more technically difficult than social media marketing and requires a number of skill sets. These include:

• Strategy – the know-how to come up with a content plan based on existing data, business priorities, Google know how and market opportunity
• Content creation – seasoned long-form content writing skill with a deep understanding of your business and search (AI content won’t cut it)
• Website coding – great coders keep your website functioning optimally and ensure it loads fast and works well

Most businesses don’t have all the skillsets in-house and outsource SEO to reach the quality required in today’s online world.

Where to invest?

Regular, informative posting on LinkedIn is great for building awareness and followers and definitely grows awareness and builds trust.

But does it generate business?

In our experience, regular social media posting is a supportive strategy only.

It rarely generates business unless you have active sales team working it… but that comes with a big risk as outlined above.

SEO, on the other hand, generates bucketloads of opportunities for our clients.

Of all the digital marketing activities, regularly posting quality content on an effective website grows your Google footprint, increases ideal traffic and delivers qualified opportunities every day of the week.

It delivers a much better ROI than social media marketing for all our clients.

And you retain ownership of the asset – your own website.

My advice for B2B companies is to put most of your digital marketing budget into a quality website and professional SEO and content marketing.

Save 10-20% for quality newsletters to a database of prospects and clients.

And allocate 5-10% to social media marketing.

Meet the author

I’m Deb Croucher, a former veterinary surgeon with a passion for B2B marketing.

In 2008, I permanently traded my stethoscope for SEO after successfully leveraging Google to power my vet business.

Diagnosis and treatment is still part of my day though!

In Brilliant Digital I identify issues, uncover opportunities and formulate strategies that lead to success and longevity.

You can read more B2B marketing articles here. I love to chat so feel free to, drop me a line!