Alan Gayle is a sales and marketing consultant specialising in the construction industry. In this column he offers advice on how to make an impact in the market. This time he continues his discussion of digital marketing.

Following last month’s overview of digital marketing, I am staying with the online theme this month and looking at social media marketing.

This is about using social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to engage with your customers and enhance your online presence. It has become a very hot topic in the marketing world.

I believe we should embrace new technology and, wherever possible, use it to improve our marketing. I’m also a big fan of seeing what works for big businesses and applying it to smaller companies in the construction industry – although only if I think it can produce a worthwhile return on investment (RoI).

While I’m a big advocate of digital marketing – I use websites, search engine optimisation (SEO), email marketing and a whole host of other opportunities offered by computers for my clients and my own business – I’m not a fan of using social media for business to business marketing.

For high-profile, consumer companies like Nike or Apple or even Marks & Spencer, who are primarily selling their products to consumers, an effective social media policy can be of great value.

Through social media these companies can launch new products, gauge consumer response and engage directly with their customers.

But the key to their success is that they are already well established brands and, more importantly, they are primarily B2C (business to consumer) not B2B (business to business) companies.

If you type ‘how to generate leads using social media’ into Google, you’ll get loads of results and loads of suggestions. Unfortunately, 99% of the advice – at least, of that I have seen – is aimed at B2C companies and in my experience doesn’t work very well in the B2B marketing world.

Now, I’m sure there are several marketing experts who will disagree with me and even within the construction industry social media marketing has got a lot of supporters. I’ve even noticed a few companies in the stone industry that have got Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. It’s not that I don’t like social media networks. I use my LinkedIn account most weeks, I have an active personal Facebook account and I’ve even got a Twitter account, although I must confess that in two years I’ve only ever sent out one ‘tweet’.

Over that last three years I’ve been to workshops, training sessions and conferences, most notably the Chartered Institute of Marketing Construction Industry Group (CIMCIG), where marketing experts have extolled the virtues of social media marketing.

But I always come away with the same question: For small B2B companies in the construction industry (ie my clients and most of the readers of this column), where is the RoI?

There is a fallacy that Facebook and Twitter are free! Of course they’re not free. Every time someone from a business spends time on these activities it costs the company money.

Some people might be interested in Steven Fry’s every utterance but are your customers really interested in your employee’s long service record or that you made a donation to a local charity? No matter how many people ‘like’ your Facebook page the question remains: What is it achieving to promote the business?

LinkedIn might possibly be different because it is business focused.

I shall continue this theme in this column next month.

Alan Gayle is a sales and marketing consultant specialising in the construction industry. He spent 19 years with some of the UK’s leading building product manufacturers and has worked in the stone sector for the past eight years.

Alan now runs Gayle Associates, which provides a range of sales and marketing services for small and medium sized contractors and suppliers. His clients are seeking growth but the management are too busy to do it themselves and they don’t want the commitment of a full-time employee.