The Role of Social Media Marketing in Enhancing B2B Customer Relationships

Abstract

This master’s thesis researched how B2B companies employ social media marketing to develop customer relationships in the pre-purchase stage of the customer journey. The study takes place in the context of three main areas: brand awareness, trust and engagement, and lead generation, and adopts a qualitative and exploratory research design. The study involves six semi-structured expert interviews with marketing professionals from B2B companies operating in Austria and Germany. The purposes of this thesis are to investigate how theoretical expectations reflect real-world practices, uncover potential barriers, and possible opportunities for using social media as a relationship-building tool. The research confirms that social media, especially LinkedIn, is widely adopted by B2B companies to improve brand visibility and reach professional target audiences. Content strategy and authenticity emerged as core concepts in the interviews with strong emphasis on testimonials, employee-driven content, and real success stories. These approaches facilitate building trust and emotional engagement, while also supporting a shift from traditional promotional messaging to more relationship-oriented and transparent communication. For lead generation, B2B companies use gated content, paid ads, and call-to-actions. Despite this, challenges such as high costs of ads, limited targeting, and poor returns from manual outreach were identified as persistent barriers to effective conversion. The results of this research largely support the existing theoretical literature, however, some operational misalignments were identified in areas such as resource constraints, conversion barriers, and strategy fragmentation. Overall, this thesis brings insights into how B2B companies are interacting in the constantly evolving landscape of digital relationship marketing. It provides practical insights for marketers and organizational leaders wanting to optimize social media activity towards trust-based engagement and long-term customer development in complex B2B environments.

Date of Award	2025
Original language	English
Supervisor	Thomas Holzmann (Supervisor)