As we discussed in How to Future Proof Your B2B Marketing Strategy, B2B marketers need to shift from purely transactional to more relational models. Rather than viewing marketing in terms of sales funnels and broadcasting, they should frame it as creating ongoing value and collaboration.

With value creation as the goal, we need to rethink how we use social networks throughout the B2B customer journey–from creating brand awareness to providing customer service. Doing so will help us design effective, scalable B2B digital marketing strategies and systems for cultivating the collaborative partnerships that B2B clients want.

Important Shifts in Social Media Marketing

An important part of rethinking how we use social is understanding how the field is changing. Here are five important social media trends to keep abreast of moving into the next year. Doing so ensures you have the right tools, strategy, and skills to make the most of social marketing efforts.

1 - Type of Social Media: Users Are Becoming More Discerning

There are growing concerns about mental health and data privacy because of social media use. As highlighted in The Social Dilemma, social media has also played a role in political interference, spreading misinformation, and hate speech. While overall use of social media has continued to climb, there has been some backlash, particularly against platforms like Facebook and Twitter:

• In its 3rd quarter report for 2020, Facebook notes its active user base in Europe has remained flat for three consecutive quarters. Its U.S. and Canadian user base has dropped by over two million from the previous quarter.

• The Verge Annual Tech Survey 2020 reports that 46 percent of American respondents listed privacy concerns as their primary motivation for leaving Facebook.

• Twitter also reported a slowdown in user growth in 2020. Daily active users only increased to 187 million users instead of the 195 million analysts had predicted them to reach in the third quarter.

• Over 1,200 advertisers – including large brands like InterContinental Hotels Group and Aviva – publicly joined the #StopHateForProfit Facebook and Instagram boycott in July 2020.

Some social media platforms are becoming more responsive to consumer/advertiser pressure to self-regulate. Governmental bodies are increasingly starting to explore policy solutions, such as the GNDP.

As part of the growing demand for ethical social media, users are becoming more selective in how they use platforms. In particular, there has been a rise in ‘cloistered interaction’ i.e. closed groups and private messages on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and WhatsApp. However, that doesn’t mean that the public social will go extinct. Research from GlobalWebIndex found that brand discovery and product research continue to thrive on public feeds.

Brands will need to create social media marketing plans that balance public and private engagement. This entails creating more opportunities for one-to-one interactions on private social media channels aimed at deepening relationships. For example, integrating AI-powered chatbots and customer service reps on social to immediately provide relevant answers to customer questions.

2 - Cost Effectiveness: Tightening Budgets Mean Businesses Need to Be More Discerning Too

B2B marketers need to adopt more agile methodologies to operate in today’s rapidly changing world. An important part of this is doing more with less. Using marketing automation technologies in B2B will only continue to rise.

For example, 1827 Marketing’s Amplify service uses artificial intelligence to automate social campaign scheduling and content creation. Our AI tools repurpose blog post content to generate social posts and videos which are then scheduled as year long campaigns. This dramatically reduces the amount of effort necessary to maintain a brand’s presence on YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc while increasing the ROI on each piece of content produced.

In face of an economic slowdown, marketers also need to justify how they’re allocating resources on social. This means understanding how each social channel contributes to their overall digital marketing strategy. Does it contribute to brand building? Generate referrals, leads or sales?

Using a marketing platform like SharpSpring (1827 Marketing is a Gold SharpSpring Partner), which provides integrated performance data across all channels, will be key for tracking true social media ROI.

Measuring ROI ties into another important development – namely, what metrics are being used to test what is and isn’t working on social. Some platforms, like Instagram and YouTube, have been shifting away from popularity metrics (i.e. public ‘Likes’ and subscriber counts) for measuring content performance. Even if they don’t completely disappear, moving away from these superficial vanity metrics will be a smart move for B2B organisations.

Instead, B2B marketers should focus on the deeper insights that come from looking beyond surface-level data. Long-term engagement is more valuable than a temporary uplift in ‘Likes’ on social media posts.

What motivates your customers? What sort of content is driving engagement? What topics create meaningful conversation? What sort of promotions nurture a relationship? Gleaning this kind of information requires better social listening and using perception and sentiment analyses to help redefine campaigns.

3 - Personalisation and Targeting: Using Social Media to Create Customised Experiences

Content personalisation remains an important trend in the social media landscape. When sharing content on social, you want to offer relevant experiences to your target markets. This is particularly the case for social media ads, where you only want to promote your product and services to receptive audiences.

Most social platforms depend on digital advertising, so they aim to provide robust targeting and customisation features for digital marketers. This includes more advanced options for reaching increasingly niche markets.

LinkedIn specifically targets professional audiences and recently expanded their retargeting options so you can market to a select audience based on where they may be in their purchase process. Or those who submitted a lead gen form, but did not convert the first time around. 

Besides advances in demographic targeting, many social platforms now offer local targeting options, such as geotagging. Being able to reach people in specific geographic locations can be extremely useful in the B2B context. For example, promoting content or tweets for conference attendees, or advertising only to a relevant, local audience for an in-office event.

Another part of the personalisation trend is for B2B to catch up with B2C in using social as a customer service channel. Because it is so convenient, most people expect brands to respond to a question or complaint on social media on the same day. Developments like shoppable posts are creating a streamlined way for people to make purchases without having to switch platforms. Business buyers are increasingly expecting B2B brands to provide this same level of convenient, tailored customer experience.

4 - Type of Content: Giving Your Target Audience What They’re Looking For

Ephemeral content will continue gaining popularity. These are photos and videos that are only available for a short duration and disappear afterwards. Facebook and Instagram Stories are perfect examples of this content.

Recognising the value of short-lived content to drive engagement, LinkedIn has also recently launched a Stories feature aimed at the professional crowd. B2B brands can create short, engaging, and snackable content that can also include interactive elements – such as polls or Q&A submissions. This makes them perfect for reaching busy professionals.

Alongside Stories, if you’re not already creating video content, it’s time to embrace it as a key part of your content strategy. According to a study by Cisco, video will account for 82% of all internet traffic by 2022. Unsurprising when you consider the vast range of video media options, ranging from short ads to long-form content. This makes video an extremely versatile tool for winning and keeping your audience across all major social platforms.

A major development in 2020 for video was the sudden rise of TikTok. At the end of April 2020, the video-sharing platform had over 2 billion downloads. While it’s rapidly being adopted by B2C brands, many remain sceptical about using TikTok as a B2B marketing channel. These concerns are due to TikTok’s younger user demographic and lack of advertising options.

However, in China, where TikTok is known by the name of Douyin, the platform has become an important channel for selling industrial goods. For example, in 2020, it was the driving force behind a multi-month industry trade show featuring integrated online sales. According to marconomy.de, approximately 46 million euros worth of goods were sold in the first three days alone.

Still, several concerns surround TikTok that B2B brands should carefully consider before adopting the platform. For instance, past issues with data-harvesting and censorship.

5 - User Generated Content: Invite Users to Be Part of Your Brand Story

Integrating social user-generated content (UGC) into your content marketing is another important trend and a great way to incorporate platform thinking in your strategy. By shifting from one-way content to conversational marketing, your brand becomes a community where valued relationships can thrive.

Instead of a thinking of your marketing as a sales funnel, it becomes a customer engagement engine. By promoting UGC, you bring audience members to the forefront. You create a more personal connection by recognising and sharing their contributions. And by deepening existing relationships, you build in loyalty and increase customer retention.

Encouraging UGC is also a brilliant move for generating social proof of the quality of your products or services. Similar to influencer marketing, prospects find content posted by their peers more interesting and trustworthy than content produced by brands.

Overall, it is a customer-centric approach to social media. As users share their content about your brand, they help you increase brand reach and act as advocates. It also has the benefit of creating a network between people in your brand community. Building networks creates opportunities for shared learning and understanding that adds value for both users and the brand.

A useful side effect in times of straitened circumstances, leveraging UGC also allows your brand to do more with less while creating that value. By repurposing UGC on social channels, you can cut down on the amount of branded content you need to produce. You can then focus those resources on other more value driven areas, such as engagement. While this is the least of the benefits you’ll accrue by concentrating on UGC, it can be useful for businesses with limited marketing budgets.

Your Partner for the Future

1827 Marketing offers B2B brands the tools they need to future-proof their social marketing. With our Automation and Amplify services, marketers can produce and deliver conversational, collaborative content that deepens audience relationships at scale.

Our integrated solutions bring content marketing, PPC and remarketing, social media, CMS, campaign tracking and analytics into alignment, creating a 360 degree, single customer view. Coupled with creative, data-driven content creation and campaign management, we can deliver true efficiency to your marketing strategies. Contact us to learn more.