Make Social Media Work for B2B Marketing
“We think customers buy based on price, features and functions. In reality it is emotions, cognitive biases, and engagement experience. We need to use the latter first.”
Bridget Kendrick, CMO, ICIS
What is B2B Social Media Marketing?
Somewhere along the line in the growth of marketing, we began to make broad distinctions in B2B and B2C strategies. We decided the ideal customer acted one way when purchasing products or services as a private consumer, but would somehow change entirely when acting in a business capacity.
In reality, the truth is more nuanced. Although the types of purchasing decisions may be different in a business environment, a similar process is used in arriving at those choices. And in the digital environment of today, that means making liberal use of social media as part of your communication strategy.
Most people recognise that social media revolutionised the way we communicate and that means marketing as well.
It is now possible to build extremely effective organic and paid social media campaigns to promote a company or brand to both a consumer and a business audience.
According to Techopedia, social media marketing refers to “techniques that target social networks and applications to spread brand awareness or promote particular products.” Social media marketing campaigns usually centre on:
Establishing a social media presence.
Creating shareable content.
Cultivating customer feedback.
Building engagement.
Supporting the entire customer experience journey from start to finish.
The importance of social media marketing in the business environment is that it can be highly targetted, and therefore very effective in helping to create brand awareness among the people you want to reach.
Why You Need Social Media Marketing
“Digital, mobile, and social media have become an indispensable part of everyday life for people all over the world.More than 4.5 billion people now use the internet, while social media users have passed the 3.8 billion mark. Nearly 60 percent of the world’s population is already online, and the latest trends suggest that more than half of the world’s total population will use social media by the middle of this year.”
Whether they are consumers or business decision-makers, people all over the world now rely on social media as a major source of information and news. Equally as important as the sheer numbers on social media is the fact that Millennials have surpassed Baby Boomers as the dominant demographic group. They have brought their social media habits to the office with them:
As they move up the corporate ladder, Millennials are influenced by social media when purchasing. Social media is an essential part of the research process in uncovering new B2B opportunities.
According to the Merit B2B Report on Millennials, 73% in the US are involved in product or service purchase decision-making at their companies. And roughly one-third of the Millennials are the sole decision-maker for their department.
Cold outreach and trade advertisements no longer work as effectively in a culture so dominated by social media. From the C-suite to the purchasing department, buyers are turning to social media for their buying insights.
Strategic use of Social media marketing has to be part of a B2B digital marketing strategy.
Benefits of a Social Media Marketing Strategy for B2B
Beyond the sheer scale of audience numbers and competitive advantage of implementing a social media strategy, there are many advantages to be gained for B2B marketers:
Personalisation: As unsolicited approaches lose their effectiveness, buyers are looking for a more personalised approach. They may be interested in peer-to-peer connections or recommendations, or targetted messages that speak to their specific requirements. A buyer’s journey that treats them as an individual instead of a job title is more effective.
Reach: Prospects and customers are already on social media platforms, so the best way for B2B companies to reach them is to be where they are.
Customer Support: Because business moves at the speed of light, business people like to know they can get answers and support whenever it is needed, with no thought to time zones or holidays. Social media allows for faster access to customer support channels. Signpost where they can find a video for a product demonstration, an insightful blog article, or a social network where they can ask a question and get responses from their peers or the company in question.
Collaboration: Social media channels make it significantly easier to share information, coordinate activities, and build professional communication networks.
Brand Promotion: Seeing a brand in a variety of ways helps to reinforce the prospect’s view of a company as a thought leader. It also increases the know-like-trust factor.
Website Traffic Generation: A strong social media marketing strategy serves to provide sufficient information so prospects are motivated to visit a website to gather more information about available products and services. They make even be at the point where they are willing to share personal contact information or request an in-person follow-up. Somebody asking to be contacted is always more efficient for sales purposes than any cold-calling or general advertising strategy.
How to Create a B2B Social Media Marketing Strategy
To create a B2B social media marketing strategy, ask yourself a series of questions:
1.Why does your business want to be on social?
Decide what your overall goals are, and what business objectives social media will meet. Outline your SMART goals, and have a clear definition of what will be considered a success. Ask what you are you going to measure, so you can track progress and make adjustments as your strategy unfolds.
2. Who is your target audience?
Know precisely who your ideal customer is, so you can better understand their interests, needs and social media consumption habits. Different buyer personas respond to different social media channels and tactics.
3. What type of content are you going to share on social?
Think about the type of content you want to share with your target audience. Is it educational, informational, humorous, or hard-hitting? Content can be created for so-called “boring” industries just as easily as “creative” industries. You want to define your voice, create a personality that will appeal to your target audience, and remember that B2B marketing still involves creating a human experience.
There are many different types of social media marketing content ideas you can use, including links to your website, conversational content, and product or service information. You can also invite engagement by asking questions or starting debates on topical industry issues. It does not have to be all static, written content.
Mix in some multimedia content including video, audio files or podcasts, live streaming, photographs or images, and helpful infographics. Don’t stop at using your own content. Invite user content where appropriate, share industry content that you find interesting, and engage on other people's content as well with a like, share, or retweet.
4. When are you going to share?
Create a content calendar so there will be consistency in social media marketing outreach across all channels. You may want to share part of each information stream on each channel so you build a story as targets interact with the various platforms. Or you may want to experiment with posting times to find what works best with your particular audience.
5. How will you document your social media marketing strategy?
Keep close tabs on your social marketing plan so you will know exactly when and where each piece of content was used and can attribute results to your efforts.
6. Which Channels Works Best for B2B Social Media Marketing?
Although Statista reports that LinkedIn is the number one B2B social media channel, try not to have too narrow a definition of what will work for your company. Be very clear about which social media platforms suit your brand personality and create the best fit with your unique audience. Don't stretch yourself too thin trying to be everywhere. Be where you need to be based on where your audience is and the type of content that works for you.
Although previously considered as just a powerful business networking site, LinkedIn should now be a core component of your B2B lead generation and content marketing strategies. It is the one social platform catering to the business professional.
"There are 2 million publishers posting fresh content on LinkedIn, along with peer posts in the feed, long-form content, LinkedIn Groups and 7 million brand-managed company pages."
While LinkedIn is perfect as part of a strong organic marketing strategy, there is more you can do beyond building a LinkedIn network and creating great content. A paid LinkedIn advertising and retargeting strategy can help increase buyer interest and close sales faster.
📌Learn More: Create a powerful LinkedIn marketing strategy
Known for its short-message style and rapidly moving feeds, this social media platform can help companies provide quick, snackable morsels of information. B2B companies can use Twitter to announce product enhancements, share information and news, link to website content, or engage conversationally with their target audience. Twitter can also be an integral component of the customer service experience.
📌Learn More: Twitter for B2B Marketing
Facebook:
Facebook is not just for connecting with family and friends. It can also be used to help businesses communicate with prospects and build community. Depending on the business model, the company can provide Facebook profiles, share testimonials, use Facebook Ads, set up Facebook Pages for various brands, or start Facebook Groups for specialised product purposes. It is also a great platform for repurposing the content marketing stories your team took so much time to create for other platforms.
YouTube
YouTube is the most popular video hosting platform in the world. Content marketing on YouTube can use the sight, sound and emotion of video to strengthen the brand by creating awareness, expanding current audiences, and boost search rankings.
📌Learn More: B2B Video Content Marketing on YouTube
Sometimes overlooked by B2B marketers, Instagram offers these companies a solid opportunity to present their products and services creatively without spending a large amount of money. Instagram for Business promotes B2B engagement through commenting, and also provides the ability to host photos, text, and videos directly on the platform.
Pinterest can be the perfect option for a company which can present its products most effectively through visual means. Business users can curate their business interests by “pinning” images, videos and links on their digital boards. Major B2B companies such as IBM, Salesforce, HP, Oracle, GE, Intel, Microsoft, and Cisco actively use Business Pinterest to build bonds with their business audience.
Executing Your B2B Social Media Strategy
“We, as an industry, are the worst completer finishers in the world. Until you deliver a campaign, a programme or event, you might as well not have got out of bed to start it. Work that is only 99% complete adds no value to your company.”
Chas Moloney, Marketing Director, Ricoh
The first step in creating an effective B2B social media marketing strategy is to create buy-in throughout the company to commit to the process. Social media cannot be effective if everyone is not 100% on board with the concept, and commits the time and resources necessary to create and sustain a process. This starts by getting executive buy-in from the very top levels of the organisation. Gather your documentation to convince them of the cost-effectiveness of social media marketing.
Once there is agreement from the C-suite about why your company should invest in social media marketing, you can start to bring in the marketing and sales departments, customer service, and any other helpful participants. You will need to determine who is going to be responsible for creating a social media strategy and developing your B2B content. You can hire an outside social media management company, organise an internal team of shareholders, or partner with specific contractors to handle individual tasks.
As tactics and strategies for paid advertising and retargeting are decided, you can start spreading the news to build up employee advocacy for the new approach. Engage in social selling to promote buy-in and social listening to learn what your prospects, and even your competitors, think.
Finally, involve customer service. Make sure there is plenty of support available as your prospects learn to navigate and respond to your social media outreach program.
The Role of Marketing Automation in B2B Social Media Marketing
The amount of work involved in creating an effective B2B social media strategy might seem daunting. It can be made substantially simpler with the support of social media marketing software tools. SharpSpring Social helps to:
Manage Social Content in Context: Get a comprehensive look at planned content such as social activity, scheduled emails, and blog posts with an efficient Content Calendar. This provides the ability to see what is in the funnel, so you can make needed changes on the fly. You can also prepare for seasonal campaigns and understand your content needs well in advance.
Post Instantly or Schedule Ahead: SharpSpring’s social media management platform enables you to publish across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. You can share fresh content immediately or plan in advance by scheduling posts for future dates. This provides you with the flexibility to time your posts for optimal engagement, or to target specific demographics and user locations.
Unlimited Profiles, Unlimited Users: This platform gives you the ability to efficiently juggle multiple Twitter feeds, Facebook profiles, LinkedIn pages, and manage many other social media problems. This can be handled by one person or various members of your team within a single platform.
Post Once Across Unlimited Accounts: Posts that were intended to be “one and done” can sometimes turn out to be surprisingly efficient. This allows the capability to instantly transform those opportunities into multi-channel success stories by easily sharing content across relevant social platforms and audiences simultaneously.
Monitor Conversations That Matter: Listen to what your targets are saying on social media. You can find and filter social conversations on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter by #hashtag, keyword and more. Learn what people are saying about your industry, brand, and competitors. Quickly spot customer queries or support issues so your support team can respond instantly.
Identify Hot Leads and Brand Advocates: Likes, retweets, and shares can often be the beginning of a sale, so you want to be able to spot them quickly. You can automatically adjust lead scores and capture interactions to identify prospects that are ready to buy, as well as current customers who may be willing to become advocates in helping you close the next deal.
Trigger Automations Based on Social Activity: You can even utilise the SharpSpring social media management platform to identify hot leads and integrate information with your CRM. For example, you can send out a series of emails with related content, or to notify the sales team when a lead is ready to engage.
Show End-to-End Social ROI: Better social media management requires improved analytics. The SharpSpring platform allows you to create professional, customized reports that will enable you to show management and team members the value of your social media marketing. Evaluate social media effectiveness beyond basic engagement and track leads’ progress down to the individual level with our powerful social media management platform.
Most importantly, you want to measure, review and reiterate what is going well.
In addition to Sharpspring, 1827 Marketing's Amplify service uses artificial intelligence to make more of your content on social networks. Our suite of AI-driven tools read your content when it is published to your blog, generates social media posts and automatically schedules them for publishing.
This isn't just a one and done process. Social media campaigns can be scheduled out over the course of a whole year, ensuring you hit the consistent posting schedule loved by both audiences and algorithms alike. We also have syndication networks in place to ensure that your message is amplified by bloggers and influencers.
Our tools can even automatically generate video summaries from your blog content to enhance the visual impact and shareability of your social media content across all major platforms.
A B2B lead generation and nurturing strategy that is based on the effectiveness and efficiency of social media can help propel your business to new heights. Plan carefully, create buy-in, deliver consistent content, measure and repeat what is going well. If something does not appear to be working to your satisfaction, take the time to discuss it with your team and strategise a new approach.
Enhance your social media marketing with 1827 Marketing's Automation and Amplify platforms. We bring it all together with strategic planning, content creation, marketing automation and social amplification. Get in touch for more information.
Practical strategies for aligning content with customer intent, ensuring your marketing efforts translate directly into increased B2B conversions