Whether you are a fan of it or not, we undeniably now all live in a world dominated by social media. Be it looking for a new recipe, stalking celebrities or finding yourself a job, the likelihood of you going through social media to achieve that goal only increases with every year that passes. But on top of ruling your personal life, how is a social media strategy key for successful B2B marketing? Let’s take a look at why a solid social media presence and social media advertising might be just what your business needs.
One thing to keep note of when creating a social media presence is that not every social media platform will match your sector. In the case of B2B, you’ll find that LinkedIn is the most widely used in the community, followed by Facebook and Twitter. Others such as Instagram and TikTok aren’t as adaptable for B2B, and you’ll find few in your target audience on there looking for marketing advice. Make sure you pour your resources into the correct platform so you don’t waste your time and money. LinkedIn is specially designed to help you create meaningful, important business leads and connections, whilst Facebook is excellent for company pages and advertising and twitter is an easy way to find like minded people quickly and start conversations.
The next reason why social media is so effective to your marketing strategy is it presents the opportunity to explore a more informal, personal tone with your target audience. Whilst putting engaging, fun content on your website is also a must to generate interest, social media is where your personality can truly shine. Social media platforms are where people tend to spend their free minutes, scrolling through hundreds of posts and generally only skimming the majority of them. This means that your content has to stand out now more than ever, and that’s not going to happen if you simply put six paragraphs of dense information for users to read. Instead, use that space to let your individuality shine through. Highlighting employee achievements, running fun polls and keeping things short and sweet are how you grab attention. Once you do, you can then funnel each interested user to your website where denser information can be found. To sum up, keep it light and interesting to appear more personal and human. At the end of the day, people trust people, not robots spurting out constant floods of text.
Now we come to the invaluable paid advertising within social media. Don’t worry, organic strategies are still very important, but in an online world it is becoming more and more difficult to be heard above the noise. The benefits of paid advertising go far beyond (just) generating more attention to your brand. You can receive real time analytics to see not only how many people are clicking through on your ad, but how many are simply getting an impression (briefly stopping to look at it) too.
The other beauty of paid advertising comes when actually setting it up. I know spending a large amount of money on advertising may seem unappealing, but on sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook, you can set your own budget to play around with. You can easily spread this budget out on a selection of adverts like banners, videos (which are one of the most engaging content mediums), in-mails and more. What’s even better, all LinkedIn paid advertising can be cost-per-click, meaning you only have to pay the fee (again, you can choose how much to pay based on the size of the campaign) if somebody clicks through on the ad. This way, you don’t burn through your budget unnecessarily and only get the leads truly interested in knowing more about you.
Now another benefit of paid advertising on social media, and using social media as part of your marketing strategy in general, is targeting. A lot of social media platforms allow you to run advanced searches for people, companies and job titles that the people on there hold. You can even narrow it down by country or how long they’ve worked at their company for. Using these (free!) searches, you can start to build a web of people that your brand is specifically tailored towards, and you can start targeting your social media more towards them. There’s no point in using general content to cast a wide net and hope that a couple of fish are the ones that you actually want; form connections/followers with researched contacts and specify your content more. This way, you get the leads you truly need.
I’ve been blabbering on about how social media can be beneficial to your B2B marketing strategy, but let me give you a word of advice on how you should post on said social media. Regular posting is a must, but you can’t just flood people with content and hoping they like it. You need a schedule, a direction and clear goals as to what you want each post to achieve. Post a mixture of varied, engaging content such as videos, polls and articles and occasionally throw in offers and incentives to use your company. Make sure that whilst each post is fun and informative, they also somehow link back to your brand or imply that they should find out more on your website (remember, that’s where all the denser information can be found). A little NB is make sure each post is optimised for the platform you choose. I spoke about tone, but watch out for format too. Don’t be lazy and just copy and paste the same post across all of your social media’s – people will be able to tell, trust me, and that means they’re less likely to trust you and how much effort you put in to your business and clients.
So there you have it. A (good) social media strategy is now a crucial part of any B2B marketing business, so if you aren’t with the times yet, now might be a good time to start.
