So far, social media has been a jackpot for B2C companies, driving leads, consumers, sales, and revenue from the well-endowed internet community market. The booming social media market has been warm and welcoming for business to consumers (B2C) companies. For some reason, consumers rarely listen to IT companies crushing it on Instagram or dominating Twitter; a lot of B2B companies have struggled with grasping the nerve of social media marketing or just winked away from it.
Despite the prosperous success of the B2C companies with social media, B2B companies are still under the perception of grabbing the market with cold calling or attending lavish business networking breakfasts. Although traditional marketing tactics have built the market rapport, considerably, they cannot comprehend the immense success brands can achieve through B2B social media marketing tactics.
The B2B social media marketing strategy that’ll work for any industry
B2B companies implementing social media marketing strategies can not only benefit from the social media market but make it, the most effective marketing channel. The following pie chart entails the most used social media platforms and how profitable they can be for customer acquisition.
The following are the B2B strategies that need to be followed for achieving success in the B2B market.
Set quantifiable goals
In verse with other marketing strategies, your social media marketing strategy is based on two things: goals and ways to achieve them. You should be clear on the results you want to achieve through your social media marketing strategy. Is it about lead generation, more traffic, more followers, or just brand awareness?
Your goals should possess characteristics like measurability, attainability, relevance, time-bound, and specificity. Pre-decide what metrics do you want to track through your marketing strategy, depending on the business needs. Once you know what metrics do you want your marketing strategy to focus on, you can let the social media analytics platform do the rest of the task.
See what your competitors are up to
As far as social media is concerned, knowing about the engagement tactics of your competitors is of profound importance. If the target audience of the competitor is similar to yours, then you can also take inspiration from their content.
Being involved in the same business will sometimes lead to crossovers of content ideas and interests between you and your competitors. Analyze what your competitors are missing out on, and take over to those opportunities. This will differentiate your social media marketing tactics from your competitors.
Related: The Best Way to Use Social Media in B2B Sales Lead Generation
Quality content is the key
For B2B companies, scripting quality content and effectively marketing it, is what casts a positive impact on the consumers. As for your audience, they can distinguish between original content and that curated from other sources. So, make sure you post novel content only. More importantly, as a B2B company, your goal is not to sell your products but let the social media users know the difference you have created in the market. It has to be a story of how your services are transforming the dynamics of the market.
In case you find it difficult to create content every day, you can scale up to those platforms where the target audience is already developed and try to garner customer engagement.
Use Employee Advocacy
Featuring your employees in your social media posts serves two purposes: consistent supply of new content and personalization of your brand. Putting faces to your company results in employee branding, in turn, casting a positive image about their place of work. Sharing the quotes from your employees will increase your reach and engagement and establish you as a trustworthy and admirable brand. Humanizing your company will fill in the content voids in your social media marketing strategy while effectively engaging your target customers. Moreover, it will also improve your company’s retention rate.
Have nurturing conversations with your connections
The underlying motto of social media was to help people make connections with other people. Even though some brands have established their persona on social media for quite a while now, knowing what your customers think about you is still of pivotal importance. Not connecting with your customers, can have disastrous effects on your social feed, making it monotonous and unappealing. The key is to retain your connections on social media and the solution is to indulge in engaging conversations with your target audience even if it doesn’t deal with your products and services. Not every post has to have an advertising and promotional value.
Related: Best Lead Nurturing Outcomes: Insights from Parenthood
Think beyond LinkedIn
LinkedIn has established a reputation for being the best B2B social media platform for such companies. Furthermore, according to the Content Marketing Institute, 63% of marketers believe LinkedIn to be the most effective B2B social media platform. But, not every B2B marketing strategy has to revolve around LinkedIn. Unless your idea is to use B2B social media for lead generation, you don’t always have to consider LinkedIn. The first goal for any brand, new to the social media arenas is branding, not generating leads.
Most of the crowd on social media seek entertainment, and your social media content should be for a similar demeanor. Create content that tells stories and sparks appealing conversations.
The following graph entails the effectiveness ratings for various B2B social media platforms. (Ref. Sprouts Social)
Comment on breaking news
Sharing your insights about any relevant news can draw attention to your company while demonstrating subject expertise. For this, you will have to set up your Google page and social media for industry keywords. You can also use ‘breaking’ keyword in your news posting, to make it look more emphasizing. If effectively executed, it can serve more benefits than press releases.
Set up a support account
Social media has transformed into a medium, for people to raise issues and ask service questions, B2B companies should run support accounts for resolving such customer queries. Many customers do not hesitate to share their experiences on the online mediums. So, it is better to talk about your product on such support accounts, to centralize the customer relationship management (CRM) activity.
Analyze your audience
Studying your audience demographics such as interests and locations can help you to improve your social media performance. Until you analyze your audience, you will not discover important facts like the age, gender, and profile of your connections. This will help you create content specific to such profiles so that consumers who view such type of posts, can also connect with you. Audience analysis uncovers effective methods of reaching and engaging target markets.
The truth about B2B social media marketing
Companies like IBM, Google, HCL, and HubSpot are the B2B companies that are thriving on a humongous social media presence. If your B2B company still believes that social media is bootless and nugatory for their marketing and customer pool generation, then you are losing a lot of amazing opportunities.
B2B businesses hold the potential of transforming a niche industry into an amazing platform for the sharing of social content. As a B2B company, you need to find the middle ground between engaging users, not through advertising of products and services, and instead let the audiences have an amiable experience on the platform.
The social media marketing strategy for B2B companies differs from the B2C ones, in not only being about product and service endorsements but about the community that thrives within the organization.
With billions of users worldwide, social media is not just reserved for clothing and beauty companies, or people who are interested in such services. B2B companies have to script their stories in the form of motivational quotes, videos, or informational content tailored for the type of audience that they want to attract.
Final Words
These strategies can serve as a starting point to guide your social management and marketing. They will improve your core metrics and help you to explore newer audiences for effective brand management.
