Social media is no longer the exclusive preserve of B2C marketers. B2B marketing campaigns are now thriving on social media, with certain marketers saying it’s fast becoming the most effective marketing channel for their B2B lead gen efforts.
What Is B2B Social Media Marketing?
Before you try to do any B2B marketing on social media channels, you need to understand what social media marketing is and how it can help you to achieve your business objectives.
B2B social media marketing is the use of social networking websites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin, as a tool for driving traffic, generating leads and boosting brand awareness. Social media marketing helps you build relationships and create connections with your target audience to increase marketing performance on specific social media channels.
Why You Need to Invest in B2B Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing can help you connect with more corporate clients and build new business relationships. A survey of B2B marketing specialists conducted by Omobono revealed that 79% chose social media marketing as the most effective marketing channel for deepening customer relationships, improving brand awareness and enhancing thought leadership.
A well-executed social media campaign can help you do the following:
- Strengthen Thought Leadership: Social media gives you the privilege to speak out and let your audience receive your messages regularly. You can communicate and engage with different audiences on social media. Thus, you’ll build a strong presence while promoting your personal or professional brand.
- Better Understand Your Audience: With access to analytics and data on engagement, social media gives you more insight into your target audience. A good understanding of your audience can help you deliver engaging content, provide answers to your prospects questions and offer information that can help your prospects move quickly through the buying cycle.
- Increase Search Visibility: Social media is the second-most crucial determinant of organic search success, right after well-designed web pages. It’s an efficient way to acquire links and more social elements, which are now being displayed in Google Search results.
- Get More Website Traffic: Sharing content on social media must be a part of your content marketing strategy because it will drive traffic to your website. Users can read your content on social media, then visit your website to learn more. Also, your engagement with your audience on social media can give you good referral traffic.
- Provide Better Customer Service: Social media enhances customer service. It’s becoming more critical for businesses to relate to their prospects and corporate clients very well on social media. Those who’ve had a good experience with a brand are more likely to recommend it to others.
- Achieve Greater Brand Exposure: By creating and posting content your target market loves, you can reach a broader audience. Those who see your content will share it with their followers, and your brand exposure can increase rapidly.
How to Turn Social Media into a Profitable Marketing Channel
Here are a few tips to follow to make sure you’re getting the most out of your social media accounts:
- Choose the Right Social Media Network: The two most popular networks used for B2B marketing are LinkedIn and Twitter. So, be sure to establish a strong presence on these two platforms. As you master the art of B2B marketing, you can invest more time on Facebook and Instagram. Before you choose the networks to spend your time and resources on, you need to study your audience.
- Examine Your Competitor’s Social Media Accounts: Make sure you take time to look at your competitors’ social media pages. What works for them could work for you, too, since you’re operating in the same industry. If you notice your competitors have a large following on Twitter or YouTube, you should undoubtedly build an audience on these platforms, too.
- Build a Professional Profile: Let your company’s profile reflect your brand and be easy to recognize. Use a consistent logo on all your platforms. Let your descriptions be professional, but write them so they enhance your connection with people.
- Provide Engaging Content: Your company will be more successful on social media when you prioritize engaging content overpitches, links to services and calls-to-action. Share more content that will help your audience solve their problems. Providing content your audience loves to read, watch and share will allow you to build your brand quickly. Then, you can take advantage of your brand authority and provide links to your website for higher conversions.
- Keep It Short: Your content should help other businesses cut costs, reduce overhead, improve productivity and make their office a great place for their employees to work. To ensure readability and engagement, it’s better to share short-form content on social media. You can also post links to long-form articles on your website that’ll provide more answers to your readers’ questions.
Monitoring Your Results
On most social media platforms, the business account offers various tracking options that help you track your success. You can:
- Use the analytics provided to monitor user engagement
- Check out the number of clicks and followers you’re getting from each post
- Check your management dashboard and use the resources provided to track your performance
- Use Google Analytics to track the sources of your website traffic and learn how much is coming in from social media
Hiring a Dedicated Social Media Manager
Effective B2B social media marketing requires insight, commitment, fresh content and continuous research. You must have someone who’s dedicated to posting new content and responding to comments. When you can’t afford to do this by yourself, you need to hire a social media manager or assign a staff member to handle your accounts.
Developing a Consistent Posting Schedule
It’s crucial to post your content at the time your target audience is active online. To achieve this, you can use automation tools that make it easy to create content in batches and have it posted at the most suitable time. Many automation tools like Buffer and Sprout Social allow you to adhere to a consistent posting schedule. Ideally, you should post content on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis.
By following the tips in this guide, you can easily start developing a B2B social media strategy that will lead to higher conversions and better ROI. At PixelFish, we provide top-notch marketing video content for businesses of every size. Our videos will help you engage your social media audience and build strong brand awareness. Give us a call at 888-308-2009, or reach out to us online for a free consultation about useful marketing videos for B2B social media marketing.