B2B social media marketing refers to using social channels to market products or services to prospective businesses. It is one of the easiest ways to build your brand and find your audience. According to Hootsuite research, 31.3% of global internet users use the internet for business-related networking and research. This is why every B2B business should start channeling the power of social media.
However, it is undeniable that B2B social media marketing is challenging, especially when you’re working with a product that can seem boring or technical. In this post, we’ll be sharing how B2B firms can develop social media strategies that align with the key objectives of their business. Whether you are new to social media or want to enhance your B2B marketing strategies, continue reading to learn more about the top social media marketing strategies for B2B businesses.
How to Build Social Media Strategies for B2B Firms
Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating an effective social media strategy from scratch:
1. Set Realistic Goals
Before creating a social media strategy for your B2B business, you should set some realistic goals. It will help you plan an effective strategy and determine the time and energy you need to dedicate to a campaign to meet your goals. Some of the popular social media marketing goals for B2B businesses of all shapes and sizes are –
- Brand Awareness: There are so many voices in the B2B space that you might get lost in the crowd.It is important to state who you are and what sets you apart from your competitors. You can use social media platforms to share valuable content emphasizing your personality and values.
- Educate the Target Audience: The social media strategy of a B2B firm should center around actionable and educational content. When B2B buyers visit a website or social media platform for research, they expect informative content. You can include blog posts, e-books, and how-to-videos in your social media strategy.
- Build Trust: Social media is the best platform to gather and promote social proof, which is important to build trust. You can share testimonials and positive reviews to demonstrate the worth of your business.
- Drive Traffic: If your goal is generating leads and traffic to your website, social media can help. You can share promotional posts and social ads to drive traffic.
Keep your social media marketing strategy simple and set achievable goals, as too many goals can complicate the process and distract you.
2. Research Your Target Audience
Marketers should avoid making assumptions when building a social media marketing strategy and rely on the data instead. It is important to know who you are trying to reach. You can use business tools to research the audience and collect data. Unfortunately, only 56% of marketers use personas to guide content creation. Marketers should keep the target audience front-and-center throughout social campaigns. It will make your brand more ”human” and ”personable,” which will boost engagement.
3. Establish Important Metrics and KPIs
Focusing on social media metrics and digging into the data that aligns with your goals is important if you want to build a data-driven social media strategy. Some of important metrics include –
- Reach: Number of unique users who saw your post and how much of the content reaches the users’
- Clicks: The number of clicks on your content or account helps you understand what drives curiosity and encourages people to buy.
- Engagement: The number of social interactions divided by the number of impressions.
- Hashtag Performance: Determine the most-used hashtags and hashtags associated with your brand.
- Organic and Paid Likes: Organic engagement is hard to gain, so brands turn to ads. You should know the difference between both these so that you can spend your money and time wisely.
- Sentiment: This is the measurement of how users react to your content, brand, or hashtag. Try to learn how people talk and feel about your brand.
4. Choose a Social Media Platform
The next important step is to know where your customers are. Go through the social media demographics and conduct audience research to choose the right social media platform to strengthen your B2B business plan.
- Twitter: It is one of the most simple, straightforward, and powerful social media platforms. Twitter requires minimal setup, and it’s easy to engage with your followers. It is also the go-to platform for customer service. You can use Twitter to master the social media basics like hashtags, tagging, brand voice, and social media etiquette .
- Facebook: Another social media platform that you can use to take your customer service and marketing campaigns to the next level is Facebook. Facebook ads help B2B businesses cut through the noise.
- Instagram: This platform is centered around visual content. You can use eye-popping photos and clever captions to show what you are selling.
- LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a goldmine for B2B marketers. Almost all B2B content marketers use LinkedIn and it is rated as the top-performing organic platform.
5. Create Engaging Social Media Content
Sharing technical information and new product specifications is important for B2B marketers, but it should not be the primary focus of your social media channel. If you want your followers to stick around, ensure that your content is not boring. The content you share on social media should delight the audience. You can share how-to information, industry news, trends, tips, strategies, and so on in social-friendly formats.
Partner with Company Expert to Boost the Social Media Presence of Your B2B Firm
B2B social media marketing is all about starting a conversation and building relationships that lead to sales in the long term. Many B2B marketers miss out on opportunities because they think social media is more of a B2C thing. If you also think social media is only for B2C businesses, forget this misconception and give social media a starring role in your B2B marketing strategy.
The highly specialized consulting team at Company Expert can help develop and execute comprehensive social media strategies. You can schedule a free consultation with a B2B consultant to learn more about incorporating social media into your B2B marketing strategies.