How to do B2B marketing on social media? B2B social media marketing strategies

Technology is moving at a faster pace, and social media is no exception. Social media statistics in 2019 show that there are almost 3.2 billion social media users around the world. Changes in social media are happening daily and affect the way marketers use social media to connect with the audiences and captivate their interests.

B2B does not seem to be the most exciting but overwhelmingly turn into an ideal playground for social content. Many B2B marketers and business doers are straining every nerve to think about how to make the most of social media that involves determining which platform to dominate. All of the things have to be done wrapped up in social media marketing. Let’s discuss more in this article!

Table of Contents

• What is social media marketing?
• The secret to social media success
  • Become a content marketer
  • Content marketing tools
• Critical steps to successful B2B social media marketing
  • Step 1: Identify your marketing objectives and goals
  • Step 2: Determine your target audience
  • Step 3: Choose the right channels
  • Step 4: Define what type of content to produce
  • Step 5: Have a posting plan
  • Step 6: Measure social media marketing success
• Successful B2B social media marketing strategies
  • Take advantage of employee advocacy
  • Share original content
  • Keep an eye on competitors
  • Create buyer personas
  • Go multimedia
• Conclusion

What is social media marketing?

Generally expressing, social media marketing is leveraging social media platforms to connect with your audience for the ultimate purposes, which may include building brand, increasing sales, and driving website traffic. This type of marketing focuses on creating compelling content that attracts the audiences and encourages them to share to make the content go viral. This also involves engaging with the audience, listening to their concerns, and solving their problems so far.

To understand more, let’s see Facebook - an outstanding social media marketing playground. A recent survey shows that there are over 50 million small businesses use Facebook to connect with their customers.

When it comes to social media marketing, its components should be clarified. Social media includes all sorts of content in text, video, image, or audio forms that you can publish quickly on any social network (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) Social media marketing, therefore, is the process of sharing social media on social networks or other websites for a specific purpose.

The secret to social media success

Become a content marketer

It is not overstating if saying this era is the era of content. Not anything else, but the content is the critical contribution of social media marketing success.

If you want to succeed in social media marketing, stop marketing your products and services only to sell them. Instead, try to provide value to customers through useful content first. Producing content that interests and build the audience. Before you think about increasing conversion rates and boosting sales, giving the audience the feeling of being attended and heard is a must. Now, it requires a content marketer mindset. You should consider content marketing as the cornerstone of your social media marketing strategy.

It involves creating valuable content to attract, engage the audience, and drive particular actions. You can deliver educational content about your products and services to satisfy the audience’s curiosity and free up their concerns.

Content marketing tools

If you want to leverage content marketing in social media, it is crucial to understand its tools and how to get the best out of them.

Discover which one of the following tools should be used in your content marketing strategy and, of course, leverage it into social media.

• Blogs
• Newsletters
• Information graphics
• Webinars
• Micropages
• Case studies
• White papers
• Videos
• Online articles
• Online presentations
• Sponsored articles
• E-books
• Gamification

Read more: 10 Best Free Social Media Management Tools for Business

Critical steps to successful B2B social media marketing

Step 1: Identify your marketing objectives and goals

The first question you should solve is, why does your business want to be on social media? In other words, you need to define your goals first. Take your time to identify what you want to achieve from social media marketing and consider it as important as your business goal. You may have the following objectives:

• Build brand awareness
• Generate leads and traffics
• Enhance social media customer service
• Increase customer engagement
• Increase signups, conversion rate and sales
• Create a community around your business

Setting the right goals is more than essential if you want your social marketing to be focused and successful. And, if you have many social media goals, it’s just fine. But if you do not have a team with the ability to help you achieve all your goals, focus on a handful of critical objectives that are good for your business’s current situation.

For example, in Buffer, the Advocacy team realizes that people want the business to respond to them on social media fast. Notably, Twitter and Facebook rank the first places where people usually go to for support. Hence, the team immediately catch the trend and build excellent customer service on social media.

Step 2: Determine your target audience

Once you have figured out your goal, let’s move to your target audience, answer the question - “Who are they?”

It is vital to know your audience because once you are wrong, the following questions - what, where, and when you are going to share - will never have the right answers.

So, how to identify the target audience correctly? A practical method is building marketing personas. 5Ws and 1H is a popular method you can try. Answer the following questions most precisely:

• Who are they? (e.g., job title, age, gender, salary, location, etc.)
• What can you provide that interest them? (e.g., entertainment, educational content, new products’ information, etc.)
• Which platforms do they usually use? (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.)
• When do they look for the content you provide? (e.g., during their free time, weekends, daily, particular time in a year, etc.)
• Why do they consume the content? (e.g., update with something new, get educated before using a product, gain knowledge, etc.)
• How do they consume the content? (e.g., read social media posts/article/online news, watch videos, listen to audio, etc.)

Read more:How to Get Verified on Instagram?

It is a general model of how to find your typical audience. If your company is already in the B2B industry for a long time, and know your customers well, you can apply some other models. But in the end, it is to think of your customers like a real person.

Step 3: Choose the right channels

The next step is selecting which social media platform your brand wants to be on. The social channels depend much on where your target audience goes online the most and which type of content you are going to share there. An important thing to remember is that your brand doesn’t have to be on every social media platform. Choose and focus on creating content on the channels where you can share content with customers and engage with them easily.

A tip for you is to have a complete profile on the big four at least: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. They are the most used social media platforms by B2B, which likely show up in high places when people search for your brand. Besides, you can consider other channels or website which may best fit your business’s purposes.

Step 4: Define what type of content to produce

“What are you going to share?” - When asking yourself this question, the first answer in your mind may be what types of content you should create. There might be something like videos, blogs, images, infographics, or audio. It’s one thing that needs your attention and consideration.

Nevertheless, it’s merely a form or tool of the message you want to convey to the audience. The theme is exactly what you should define here. It’s fine to have more than one main theme as it gives you space to share a wide range of content with the audience while not making them bored.

At this step, if you feel confused and overwhelmed with multiple themes to choose, hold on, and come back to the key - understanding your target audience. It’s time to find answers for questions - What does your audience want to see on your homepage? What goals or challenges do they have? How can you help them?

For example, suppose you have a clothing brand. The holiday shopping season is around the corner; teenagers are seeking new items whenever they surf Instagram feed to stay up-to-date. In this case, you can share your new products regularly and open the reply as well as the direct box to attend the audience’s inquiries timely. In some cases, you can actively send updates on your products to customers. Those who have no much time being online may prefer this way.

Remember to share valuable content with your B2B audience. Understanding what content B2B users usually find on social media is crucial. Do not focus too much on brand promotion. Recent surveys indicate that 46% of social media users will unfollow a brand if they post too many promotional messages.

Step 5: Have a posting plan

Scheduling your content is necessary. You might be tempted to search for the best times to share on the internet. But before referring to someone’s advice, consider the behaviors of your target audience. In particular, answer the question: “When do they usually use social media (or platforms you use) to find the content you’ll share?”

Each group of the audience has a different time to search for their interests. For example, a travel lover will be more likely to be on social media during weekends. And, a Millenial may have other different online time.

Step 6: Measure social media marketing success

If you want to succeed in social media, don’t just sit down after starting a strategy and wait for the good results to come. If you succeed for the first time, congratulate! But if you fall into pitfalls, it’s better to pause and learn from the errors. Tracking the process or your social media marketing, analyzing the data, and tweaking to optimize the results sound basic but essential to social media success.

Data does not tell lie. It will give you an in-depth insight into your social media marketing so that you can know how your social media marketing is going on. Data will guide you to figure out which channel works best four your brand, and which mistakes you’ve made. Performing thoughtful analytics from the received data, and you will define the solutions to streamline your social media marketing.

Successful B2B social media marketing strategies

Take advantage of employee advocacy

Many B2B businesses are making the best of spotlighting their employees, which brings several benefits for them. Featuring your employees on the company’s social accounts will humanize your business. No matter what products your company is selling, people should always be the heart of your business. This method keeps your business open to the audience and personalizes your business with others.

Besides, using the employee’s voice and is also a form of earned media. Once your employees feel satisfied with what and who they are working for, they will be most likely to tell good about your business. Word-of-mouth promotion will be a powerful weapon that helps you strengthen your brand identity as well as gain more trust from your audience.

Share original content

Although content curation has a lot of benefits for B2B marketers, the original content is vital to develop your website with personalization and profession.

Instead of just curating content from other sources, you should create your own content that is original and creative, which is also good for your content marketing. The truth is, your audience will be soon fed up with your repeatedly curated content that is updated constantly just to say that you are still active on the platform. They are interested in something more creative and unique.

If producing original content daily gives you a lot of hassle, it’s ok to scale back your operation. Creating original content shouldn’t be a rushed process. You don’t have to force yourself to post original content every day while you’ve been racking your brain all day but nothing original comes up. It’s better to focus on the channels where your audience is the most developed.

Keep an eye on competitors

One of the best practices is learning from your competitors. Tracking their activities on social platforms, monitoring what they are doing with their content can tell which tactics work and which doesn’t. This notion is useful for your social media marketing strategies.

There are many social media monitoring tools that enable you to keep track of your rivals’ movements on social media. They can reveal precisely valuable information such as the number of post reach, posts that yield the highest engagements, ideal post length, hashtags, and sharing time. All this data help you measure the performance of your competitors, evaluate topics, and posts that most likely resonate with your audience.

Create buyer personas

You can build your buyer personas by analyzing the characteristics and social profiles of those who bought your products on behalf of their companies. It helps you understand your target audience and the market.

You should add important information in a spreadsheet to track easily. The first must-have information can be the names, contact information, or even the social profiles of people who purchased your goods or services. Then, you can include additional details such as their age, gender, career, industry, or business size and scope of the firms behind.

Through this practice, you can define precisely who will be your potential customers and then, target your messages and campaigns towards them properly.

Go multimedia

Creating multiple media posts will help you earn more engagements and visits than only text updates. Along with text, it’s better to craft various types of media to improve your social media performance as well as meet the ever-growing visual taste of your audience.

Images and videos have been dominating social media and driving more traffic for websites, increase conversion rate, and ultimately boost sales. According to the Hubspot study, Facebook posts with images generate 53% more likes, 84% more clicks, and 104% more comments than those without images.

Conclusion

Developing a social media marketing strategy is properly challenging but worth your efforts. You have to step back and look at the big pictures, instead of just scheduling your posts daily without pointing to an ultimate purpose.

Use this article to guide your social marketing management and strategies. Let me know if you get things done successfully.

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