B2B social media marketing is often considered not only boring, but also unnecessary.
Consider the example of Adobe, B2B marketing helps the company land huge contracts, as evident from the fact that LinkedIn marketing successfully closed 42% of its sales in 2018.
So what are the best practices to leverage the power of B2B social media marketing?
Creating a B2B social media strategy
Regardless of your business size and scale, a B2B social media strategy is important.
Why you need to have a sound social media strategy for your business is a separate discussion in itself. Here is what you need to do add in your social media plan.
Align goals with business objectives
Just like we discuss any B2C social media plan, here are a couple of questions for its B2B counterpart.
- What are the company’s objectives?
- How will your social media efforts achieve them?
Follow the SMART framework to get answers as the groundwork for your plan development.
Locate opportunities
Your plan your outline the opportunities you can tap, start by conducting a thorough competitor audit.
Use the SWOT formula to pen down the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats within your industry. As a substitute, you can also create a competitive matrix.
Create buyer personas
As all marketers are expected to know the detailed profiles of the audience they’re trying to reach, the case with your B2B social media is no different.
Create detailed buyer personas fitting your particular industry with their custom profiles, needs, and preferences.
For example, a design and development firm like Tech4States has personas for commercial, public, and residential clients, and boards a team of specialists in that specific verticals and categories.
Emphasize the right platforms
B2B brands never work well with a pay and spray approach, in fact, you should be where your customers are rather than marketing on a rampage at every corner of all the social media platforms.
If you’re not sure, see top social media demographics for marketers to examine now and for the future.
According to Hootsuite’s polls on Twitter and LinkedIn, chronologically, the best platform to be on are LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
About 97% of B2B marketers use the platform for content marketing purposes, according to LinkedIn.
How will you calculate your performance?
Measuring the ROI is the real deal, even more so as B2B social media marketing efforts are considerably more crucial as compared to routine postings.
What are the metrics and KPIS you’ll use? The metrics could anything related to your campaigns like engagement metrics, impressions, response time, conversions, and sales.
On the basis of such KPIs, set your benchmarks and goals.
Moreover, don’t ignore qualitative indicators such as customer reviews, satisfaction ratings, and alike, also add other costs such as customer service and recruitment.
Be clear on what efforts you want to quantify and measure, this is because some metrics are difficult to put in numbers. Remember, just because you can calculate some specific metrics doesn’t mean you should and vice versa.
Speak to your audience
When it comes around B2B marketing, speaking to a general public isn’t applicable. Rather, use the terminologies that your industry and target audience is familiar with.
At the same time, avoid using too many technical jargons, a big turn off for people. Understand the fact that marketing is about clarity and relevance and not boasting.
Educate, educate, and educate
Keep one in mind: a visitor is not only coming to your website or landing page for the sake of browsing or inquiring the pricing.
Numerous B2B buyers will work hard to ensure that the companies they are shortlisting to work with are credible.
Perhaps, one of the best ways to educate your audience is by providing them informative resources in the form of blogs, eBooks, “how to” videos, and various downloadable resources centered around actionable educational content.
Stay ahead of trends
As a B2B marketer, most of workday will center around examining trendiest practices and executing accordingly.
In short, you need to stay close with what your competitors are doing and customers are talking about on social media. In doing so, you’ll stay in the industry conversations.
Yes, we aren’t asking you to stay and stalk on LinkedIn and Twitter all day long, but rather let social listening do the job for you.
