Some B2B companies believe that social media can serve a single goal for their business – that is to generate leads. However, a comprehensive social media marketing strategy when applied to a B2B business can do much more than generate leads for your company. A well-defined marketing strategy is built around certain goals such as lead generation, improving lead quality, developing brand awareness, building customer trust, re-engaging customers, and customer retention.
In this article, we go into detail about how to use social media to reach your marketing goals in a B2B setting.
Choose the Right Marketing Channels
The first step in realizing your marketing goals is to select the appropriate marketing channels. The go-to marketing channel is lead-generation campaigns for most B2B’s but there are other campaign types, when utilized successfully can give you great results. Your goal while selecting the marketing channels should be to support the customer journey at each step of the marketing funnel.
Marketing Channels for Brand Awareness
Building effective brand awareness can be done through paid awareness campaigns. Your company page plays a vital role in creating your brand image and defining your unique selling points. Organic reach options include sharing your company blog posts on social media and by creating short form content on social media that talks about your business. You get more engagement on your social media when you update content more frequently and you gain customer trust when you post valuable information.
Marketing Channels for Lead Generation and Lead Quality
Lead quality can be improved through designing lead generation campaigns based on targeting the right audience, creating a lead scoring system, and using the analytics data for improved re-targeting. Similarly, the number of leads can be increased by practicing audience segmentation, allocating proper budget to lead generation campaigns and monitoring your analytics data.
Reach your Marketing Goals through Social Media
Social media can be a key player in reaching your marketing goals whether it is brand awareness, building trust, engaging your audience, and re-targeting your audience. The sequence of brand awareness, customer trust, audience engagement and retargeting is exactly what a marketing funnel looks like. So, with a comprehensive social media marketing strategy you can target each step of the marketing funnel.
Brand Awareness and Building Trust
Building an online community of active users is important if you want to create brand awareness and build customer trust. Having a social media presence that showcases your logo, brand values and services is a great start when it comes to brand awareness. You further build on that by creating purpose led content that benefits both your audience as well as your brand. Furthermore, you can supplement organic reach with paid awareness campaigns as discussed earlier.
Engaging Your Audience
Social media provides an excellent opportunity to engage with your online community. The first step for audience engagement is to create content that gets them interested in your brand or promotes a healthy discussion online. Secondly, reply to comments and messages to let your audience know that you value their opinion. Social media can help you know more about your ideal customer and may even give you some new product ideas. Alternatively, you can invest in paid prospecting campaigns to gain more exposure such as likes, comments and followers.
Re-targeting Your Audience
Social media paid ad campaigns allow you to target a certain set of people on their platform. This can include your existing followers or individuals who have previously interacted with your company’s account. This way you can really narrow down your target audience to a select number of individuals who can become high quality leads. It is generally recommended to keep your audience broad while running paid ad campaigns, however, sometimes trying something new like retargeting can give good results. It’s all about efficient experimentation to support ad campaign optimization.
Best Social Media Channels for B2B
LinkedIn is the preferred social media channel for B2B marketing because of the large number of professionals and the availability of enhanced tools for business promotion like polls, newsletters, and articles. This social media platform has a unique presence of industry professionals and individuals seeking to do business with B2B companies. LinkedIn offers B2B specific marketing tools such as lead generation forms and landing pages. You also have a chance to directly interact with professionals who may be interested in your business or services.
Facebook is one of the largest social media network with more than a billion active users. This means that you can potentially target a wider audience as compared to any other platform. Similar to LinkedIn, Facebook offers landing pages and lead generation forms as part of its paid ad campaigns. Apart from paid ads, you can effectively showcase your brand on this platform and offer your users meaningful content.
Twitter offers an edge over LinkedIn and Facebook in the sense that it is easier to gauge public sentiment about your brand and overall thoughts on your business niche. Twitter users are generally more expressive as the platform’s focus is on short written messages called tweets. Hashtags are important on this platform and can generate a lot of positive PR and awareness for your brand if you’re trending in a positive light. Twitter allows you to create a unique brand personality and establish yourself as an authority in your niche.
YouTube
Video content has become popular in the past 2-3 years and YouTube offers good organic growth when you post consistently. B2B companies can benefit from YouTube by either showcasing their products or services or they can take a different marketing approach. For example you can start a (video) podcast series featuring industry experts to generate user interest and ultimately make your product or business more marketable. The good thing about YouTube is that if your video title, content, topics, and subtitles are optimized, they can rank better just like web pages rank in a search engine.
Next Steps: Link Your Social Media with Other Marketing Channels
Always remember that social media is a part of a larger marketing effort for any B2B company. This means that social media should be part of your marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy should include other channels such as email marketing, website marketing, SEO, blogs, and lead magnet. An example would be that your social media ads lead to your website or a lead generation form, in order to capture leads and contacts. You follow-up with the leads via email marketing or cold calling. All marketing efforts should be coordinated in such a way that your lead remains warm and is assisted across the marketing funnel, where they are finally ready to make a decision.
Learn how to design a tailored marketing strategy for your B2B business, read the detailed guide here.
Conclusion
Social media offers more than just lead generation. When used effectively, social media can create brand awareness, customer trust, ensure customer retention and establish your B2B company as an authority in your industry. However, social media should be used along with other marketing channels as part of a larger marketing strategy.
If you would like to design a tailored marketing strategy for your business, it is always good to talk to an expert. You can book a free session with us by following this link.
