5 Must-Haves for B2B Social Media Marketing
By: Julia Angelen Joy
August 29, 2019
B2B companies have a huge opportunity right now to deploy social media strategies that will move the needle – but with everyone doing it, how do you stand out in such a noisy marketplace? It all comes down to not being boring and telling a story that connects with your target audience.
Easy enough right? But most B2B marketers are not storytellers, so the content too often comes across as a sales pitch, which makes it all too easy for your customers to tune you out.
“By 2019, content marketing is expected to be a $300 billion industry and within the next 10 years, content marketing will become so infused in every marketing tactic that it will lose its meaning altogether — both overtaking and becoming marketing.” ~ Kirsten Newbold-Knipp, Gartner
To be successful and relevant, you should start your B2B social media marketing strategy with a focus on content, using a combination of websites, blogs, videos, and premium deliverables (case studies or white papers, for example). Once your tactics are defined, focus on providing a fresh approach and a new look for your product or service.
Ideally, your marketing team has an established sales funnel that works like a well-oiled machine, continuously capturing new leads and moving them further down the funnel. To increase your impact, social media marketing can help to fill your sales funnel by providing content that creates interest, awareness, engagement, and a sense of community.
Ready for a deeper dive into B2B social marketing? Order a recording of our webinar, “Success on Social for B2B Brands,” when social media experts working at healthcare, software and design firms shared their top tactics for growing engagement and driving business outcomes.
Understanding your audience is key, because great social media applied in the wrong place will have zero impact. LinkedIn has the capacity to ensure that you meet all of the B2B social media marketing goals, but Twitter, Facebook, and even Instagram may be part of your B2B social media marketing mix. Once the right tools and platforms are in place, you need a solid B2B strategy that will help you reach your intended goals.
Ultimately, every company’s main goals are to drive revenue, and while social media is simply a stepping stone along the path to success, it is not the final destination. Just posting is simply not enough in this market. By delving into your target audiences, segmenting your topics, and creating buyer personas, you can use tailored approaches on each platform that drive interest and activity around your products and services.
Today, with the use of each platforms’ built-in analytical tools, gathering and understanding user data, engagement, and action is easy. Hence, there is no reason why you cannot be totally on point for personalization, targeting, and measuring your efforts.
B2B social media marketing in 5 easy steps:
1. Understand your audience. What platforms, publications, and channels are most relevant to them?
2. Understand your team. What resources, stories, and digital tools can you use in-house to build your B2B social media marketing plan? What activities or competencies need to be outsourced?
3. Set a well-researched strategy and use an editorial calendar to keep your content and social media frequency and freshness moving forward.
4. Review the data and use it. Understand what posts, stories, white papers, toolkits, etc. resonate with potential customers and lead to sales. Once you know what is working, you can do more of it.
5. Refresh and follow-up, making sure that your content and stories are always connecting to the brand.
And whatever you do, don’t be boring!
