Marketing for B2B is beyond formal pitches and boring marketing funnels. In fact, it is just the opposite! From a trendy medium for sharing personal experiences, social media has now transformed into a powerful business marketing tool. Today, we can see that B2B businesses can accelerate connections with leads, enhance brand awareness, and drive sales using social media. However, unlike the B2C branding approach, where catchy phrases and videos may suffice, B2B social media marketing demands a more strategic game plan. Ready to explore B2B social media marketing? This blog offers a blueprint to harness this powerful technique for lead generation and sales. Embrace social media and elevate your business and leadership!
What is B2B social media marketing?
Social media marketing for B2B involves using social networks like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc to establish and maintain relationships with both existing and potential clients. This process is usually defined by networking, engaging in active conversations on these platforms, and sharing industry-relevant content to establish your expertise in the industry.
As we know, unlike B2C, where customers buy products for their personal use, B2B involves purchasing products and services for business use and involves a number of people in the decision-making process. Additionally, with the cost of the product being usually high, the decision-making process is usually longer and may take weeks or even months before the final purchase is made.
As a B2B marketer, you must connect with these decision-makers by providing value with your content at each stage of the buyer’s journey, right from creating product awareness to nurturing leads. Such a strategy will enable your brand to reinforce itself as a trusted authority and influence the decisions and perceptions of the decision-makers.
How to create a solid B2B social media strategy?
Now that you have a grasp of the concept of B2B social media marketing, let us walk through the major milestones of a powerful strategy for B2B social media marketing that will help drive leads and sales. Whether you are starting a new game plan or refreshing an old approach, these steps are all you need to come up with a concrete roadmap for your social media campaign!
Define your goals
Social media is a pivotal part of your marketing strategy and you just cannot ignore its significance in capturing a major chunk of leads and driving sales. Therefore, you cannot treat it like a mere checkbox that you simply have to tick off. You can’t create office reels only because your boss thinks it’s trending. Just because something is trending doesn’t mean it will benefit your kind of audience. Before you come up with a social media marketing blueprint, define your audience and figure out the reason why you are doing it. You must set your goals straight before strategizing your campaign.
B2B companies benefit from social media marketing in the following areas:
- Creating brand awareness
- Increasing website traffic
- Producing referrals through gated whitepapers or reports
- Customer research through social listening
- Thought leadership
- Building customer loyalty through engagement
Your goals could be one or many from the above list. Once you have established your social media marketing goal, you can move ahead with the next step.
Identify your target audience
Before you start posting, learn about your targeted customer base. Analyze information like the industries your company intends to work with the age group of the decision-makers and buyers, and the strengths of your company that you want to highlight in your content. All this data can help you brainstorm ideas for social media content.
Also, take some inspiration from your competitors’ social media accounts. See what type of posts they put up and what the audience’s response is. It is never a good idea to copy their content, but you can take inspiration from their posts to produce original content with a new angle.
It takes time to learn about your audience, their behavior, and preferences. But the more you learn about them, the more you will be able to create more meaningful content that they find valuable. This leads to greater engagement. LinkedIn polls are a great way to learn about your audience as they help you identify their pain points, which you can address through your content.
Start a content calendar
Impactful and great content never happens by chance. Most viral posts are usually the result of days and sometimes weeks of brainstorming and planning. We suggest you prepare a 90-day calendar. No, this doesn’t mean putting up a post every day is imperative. However, this strategy provides a stable layout that enables consistency. Remember, consistency is the key to an effective B2B social media marketing strategy. It is never a great idea to practice sporadic posting as it is likely to work against the channel’s algorithm.
Another vital aspect of impactful social media marketing is that you must have a budget set for ad campaigns; otherwise, free posting will not help brand visibility. Paid ads are the best way to introduce your brand to its target audience, which helps boost your online followers. There are many ways to go about this. You can opt for email marketing along with paid ads or partner with a famous influencer in your industry to grow your account.
Analyze your company’s distribution channels and see how you can repurpose it for social media. Emphasize content formats like blog posts, whitepapers, podcasts, and videos, as they are more potent in grabbing attention and engaging on social media.
There are many ways to create content with existing resources.
- You can repurpose the content on your website blog to create catchy social media posts.
- If your company has a newsroom, then you can adapt its press releases, media kits, or official announcements and share them on social media for brand awareness.
- If your brand has a PR team that creates media pitches and press releases, then it can be a great partner to help you develop and execute an impactful social media strategy.
- Your customer support team may interact with your customers to suggest insights for helpful content.
- Other internal stakeholders like your marketing, research and development, and product team can help provide resources and ideas for social media posts.
Create content that drives action
Each post should serve a purpose, whether it is to share product developments and updates, drive traffic, encourage resource downloads, solicit emails, etc. If you want to build quality content creation strategies, you must:
Identify customer challenges- Conduct market research and engage with your target audience to understand their pain points.
Address challenges – Create content that directly addresses the challenges faced by your target audience, highlighting how your product or service can contribute to overcoming their problems.
Offer value – Provide actionable tips, strategies, and advice that reinforce your expertise and offer measurable benefits to your audience.
Create informative and educational content – Provide practical knowledge resources in the form of tutorials, how-to guides, and case studies that assist in directly solving your audience’s problems while showcasing your value and expertise.
Use visuals effectively – Use compelling visuals like infographics, images, charts, and videos to enhance the appeal and engagement of your social media posts. Visuals can also be used to break up long text blocks for greater readability and engagement.
Tell stories – Leverage the power of storytelling with impactful visuals that help convey concepts and ideas more engagingly, driving message retention.
Use gated content and lead magnets
Craft compelling and impactful lead magnets like whitepapers, eBooks, industry reports, case studies, etc., that address the challenges faced by your target audience and offer actionable insights.
Implement a gated content approach that requires users to provide their contact details like phone numbers or email addresses, in exchange for getting access to premium content by your company. Use your social media handles to promote gated content and drive traffic to landing pages on your website where the audience can furnish their details to access resources.
Analyze and optimize social media performance
Monitor and evaluate your social media performance with Key Performance Indicators or KPIs such as Click-Through Rate (CTR), engagement rate, reach, and impressions to analyze the impact of your social media campaign. You can also use social media analytics tools to track these metrics and gain vital insights into audience behavior, campaign effectiveness, and content performance.
One of the best tools for social media marketing analysis is Google Analytics. You can optimize your website with a focus on data and conversion can aid in tracking organic methods used for lead collection. This will help you identify which campaigns have been most effective in capturing high-quality leads. Integrate your social media with CRM Audience engagement should never be limited to your social media handles. Your social strategy functions as the gateway that encourages your audience to move towards conversion pushing them through other channels. For this, you need a lead nurturing funnel, and this can be attained in the following ways:
Align your social media channels with CRM platforms – Integrate your social media handles with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. This allows the automatic capture and alignment of social media leads into the CRM. This will help the CRM to track activities and conversations of leads on social media and nurture them across the sales funnel. This allows your social media marketing for B2B to reach a wider audience while streamlining the crucial process of lead nurture ultimately leading to conversions.
Nurture leads through automated email chains and follow-ups – Implement marketing automation tools to generate and nurture premium-quality leads. Automate email sequences and follow-up workflows triggered by website visits, form submissions, and social media interactions. You can personalize these sequences with valuable insights and offers customized to suit individual preferences and engagement levels. This strategy works seamlessly in driving lead nurturing and social media conversions.
Bottomline
This B2B social media marketing framework will help build the most powerful strategy to drive leads and sales to your business. You now know that there’s a lot that goes behind a successful social media campaign. If you are looking for a tightly integrated social media strategy for your B2B business, then Kreativ Street can help you with the most successful and modern marketing plan to breed efficiency and results to meet your business goals. How do we do it? Contact our team at Kreativ Street to discuss the marketing strategy of your dreams!
