How to create a successful B2B Social Media Strategy — Spark Eighteen |
For Business To Consumer (B2C) companies, social media is a natural channel to focus on. While B2C companies try hard to create effective social media strategies for their businesses, B2B companies try to overlook this whole social media sphere. This is unfortunate since numerous B2B social media strategy tips can be effectively implemented. After all, the businesses you’re trying to approach are still people. Businesses are as amenable to social media marketing techniques as an average consumer.
Here we’ll talk about how social media can be a key marketing source for B2B companies. Further, we’ll give you tips on what ideas you can implement your social media strategy. Hold on tight!
How Is Social Media An Essential Tool For B2B Companies?
It’s probably hard to argue how relevant social media marketing is for consumer-focused businesses. After all, social media tends to provide B2C companies with a high level of engagement and visibility. Although, the same has not been saying for B2B companies. Maybe because of how less focused they’re towards social media.
One thing all B2B companies need to know that they’re not approaching businesses but the key decision-makers within those businesses. These decision-makers are as likely to react to your social media marketing techniques as any other customer. Here we provide you with certain B2B social media strategy statistics to give you a clearer perspective:
- According to Hubspot, almost 75% of B2B buyers use social media for their purchase decisions.
- Almost 84% of B2B marketers trust paid distribution channels (like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.) for content marketing purposes. (Source: Content Marketing Institute)
- 65% of customers that B2B companies acquire are through LinkedIn paid ads. (Source: HubSpot)
- 33% of B2B businesses use Instagram. (Source: BlueCorona)
- Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are the three most used social media channels by B2B marketers. (Source: MarTechAdvisor)
B2B companies have a smaller audience to target as compared to any B2C company which means they have to work extra hard to locate buyers and get their attention. According to the above numbers, a B2B social media strategy might only prove beneficial to look at.
Practices To Consider For A Successful B2B Social Media Strategy
Here we’ll give you a list of some of the best B2B social media practices to get you a clearer understanding:
Feature more and more employee voices in your posts. It not only helps in humanizing your business but also increases employee’s value. It will also solve the issue regarding consistent posting that most of the B2B companies face on social media.
Source: wearecisco
Sharing messages through employees is also seen as a form of earned media — word of mouth or information from trusted sources. It is believed that more consumers trust earned media rather than what a brand has to say. Also, earned media makes your customers have a higher retention rate.
As a result, employee advocacy creates audience engagement and also completes the void of effective content posting.
This one is a key practice when devising a b2b social media strategy. Have a close look at what your competitors are doing on social media. Create a list of dos and don’ts of what tactics are working for them and what is not.
There are numerous tools you can use to monitor your competitor’s behavior on social media. GoogleAlerts, Social Mention, BuzzSumo, and SEMRush are just many of them!
The tools help in giving you relevant information that will help you track as well as determine topics you should work on your social media. The information will include:
- Which post has yielded the highest number of engagement?
- Relevant hashtags used, ideal post length, and sharing time.
- Influential users that have interacted the most.
This data will help you figure out what resonates with our audience and can also set your benchmarks.
Analyze the characteristics and social media profiles of business managers who’ve already purchased your product. These will be the group of customers that will help you understand your target markets.
Create a spreadsheet with names, contact information, and — if possible — profile URLs of companies who’ve engaged with you for their business purposes.
Once you’re done with this, you can add further information and categorize it in terms of age, gender, position, industry, and size, or scope.
It is important to understand where your social activity is reaching so you can know what affects your target market.
Creating more pictures and video-based most will likely earn you more engagement and website visits than posting just text-based content.
32% of marketers believe that visual content is the most important type of content for their business, with blogging in second. (Source: HubSpot) In conclusion, adding more multimedia content across channels will improve your performance through those networks as well.
You can join (or even create) certain groups or communities relevant to your business. It will help you boost engagement rates on networks.
Joining relevant groups and communities will help you get rid of those crowded timelines that constantly bury your posts. This will also help your business reach the industries that are actually interested in what you offer.
These business groups provide you opportunities to interact with people in other fields as well. Many of these organizations work in purpose to provide networking opportunities for businesses in a specific geographical area.
To Conclude…
We are sure it can be highly challenging for a B2B marketer to come up with effective social media strategies that can help connect with the target audience. Fortunately, there are ways you can indulge in social media activities without being too “salesy”. To do so, we recommend you to implement all the above-given practices.
Let us know if you have some B2B social media strategy tips in the comment section below. We’d love to know.
Originally published at https://www.sparkeighteen.com on June 15, 2020.
