92% of B2B businesses deliver their marketing campaigns via social media channels. B2B marketing is hard to do, B2B social media is even more difficult for marketers to be successful. Do you know why?
It is quite obvious to see that B2B is a boring business since they do not interact directly person by person. But rather than that, a b2b company does marketing to attract and affect another company, which means a lot of people. That’s why marketers in b2b often get trouble in their social media planning and performance.
As a long-life business in the B2B area, we want to provide readers who are running their own businesses the best B2B social media strategies to help them create an energetic and beneficial social environment. By this, you can draw much traffic and attention from your potential customers.
1. Straightforward & Attainable Target
Everything you do needs a target to achieve. Similarly, B2B businesses have to answer the question: “What do we want from doing social media marketing?” before properly jumping into it.
In order to set up a clear and attainable target, B2B companies should use measurable KPIs for their success in any projects and campaigns.
KPIs can be varied based on your company’s goals of doing social media marketing. You need to define if you want to raise brand awareness or create a bigger customer community, or even to make more sales on the potential social channels. What is your utmost goal?
Then the target must follow that goal. Let’s take an example to understand how goals, targets, and KPIs go together.
- Goal: Draw customer awareness of a B2B brand name
- Social media channel: Youtube
- Content: Viral Youtube video. Hire a hot Youtube blogger to do produce a content related brand
- KPIs: 500,000 likes and 100,000 followers on that video and our company channel
– Traffic to our B2B website from that Youtube channel increase 10%
– Time-bound: in 1 month
Besides the KPIs, it is important to clear out your cost of running social media strategies. Now you have a full target to moving forward with further work: How can we do social media marketing successfully?
2. Create Original Content
Content Marketing Institue found out that there was 93% of b2B marketers using content marketing for your website(2019). Why did almost all of them count on creating their own content?
Because it shows our voice and brand image through what we write down. Sometimes, you can share great articles from trusted and famous resources. However, if you always share others’ content, eventually, you create nothing on the audiences’ minds about your brand.
Using your own voice in social media marketing is the next thing B2B companies should spend time on. You can share your blog post, news or any article related to your industry and company that is useful to the audiences via social media.
If your B2b website hasn’t had a blog page for sharing, think about opening it right away because it is not only the great proof for your professional but also helps Google rank you better. Short articles with videos are also a good piece of content that should be shared on social media.
3. Use Various Media Platforms
Also reported by Content Marketing Institute, B2B marketers use 4-5 social media channels on average to share their marketing content.
As far as we can see from the bar chart, the most popular channels used are Linkedln, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and Google. So that you can see the big picture: Almost B2B websites are using multiple social channels to do marketing, regardless of different purposes.
There are some reasons for that. Firstly, this increases the reach and extends your business to new customers. Since not all your potential customers are active on one social channel.
For example, people who like to post their status on Facebook also are likely to use Instagram.
Secondly, if you are wondering what is the most beneficial channel for doing your social media marketing, try it on several most popular ones will let you know the results. Therefore, it can be said that doing multimedia is a way to test your most effective platform.
4. Get Testimonials
Social media are published and open platforms for anyone to join, hence the voice of each individual is transparent and objective. B2B websites can utilize customer interactions and comments on different social channels to feature it on their websites.
You can feature the comment and review of customers on your Twitter, Facebook channels, etc. Using social channels widgets to integrate those reviews on your website, not just screenshot it.
For example, Mageplaza Magento 2 Facebook plugin can help you showcase your Facebook page into your websites. Customers can verify the credibility of them by clicking to the featured pieces of comments then they will be redirected to the corresponding social channel.
So it can be said that these social proofs are much more trustable and realistic than other kinds of testimonials. The more social reviews you have, the more trustable and well-known you are. Knowing how other businesses have used and found success with your product and services could significantly affect your b2b customers.
5. Provide Support and Free Consultation
Customers’ comments are not always positive words. Sometimes, it can be a complaint or a reported issue with your products and services. And because it is a social channel, you should prove that you are always ready to help your clients and support them in need.
Leave your support contact (email, phone number) on your post is recommended. Especially, you had better have the social page admin to regularly check and reply to customers’ comments. So, you are able to support them in time, which definitely enhances your customers’ relationship and customers’ trust in you.
Further than that, if you want to prove that you are an expert in your industry, let’s provide your audiences with free consultation services. It’s exclusively helpful for your B2B customers.
6. Post Regularly
The reach of your brand on social channels depends on how much content and frequency you share with audiences. It is easy to create one or some posts on social media.
But how about several posts per day in a long period? Obviously, that will need investment in time, money and human resource.
You can pre-schedule your post by social media tool. Facebook, for example, allows users to schedule their posts. You can pre-upload the content and images/videos of the post then select time for publishing it. They do not limit the number of posts pre-scheduled so that you can always prepare the content when you have time and pick up the wanted occasions to show it out.
By planning and scheduling for your b2b social media posts, you can save a lot of time and always keep track of your frequency on the audience’s eyes.
7. Encourage Customers’ Interactions
One of the best ways to draw customers’ attention to your social media posts is by encouraging them to interact with your post. Interactions here can be comments, likes, shares or follows. The more customers engage, the more reach and spread your websites have.
However, B2B social channels must be a place for two-side interactions, not just customers’ stage. In other words, you need to reply and make conversations with customers whenever they leave a comment.
Sometimes, you can even actively create new topics on social channels that match your targeted audiences’ interest. Even if the topics are not related to your products and your company, still you can raise it.
For example, asking your audiences how was your Christmas holiday. Everyone loves to share their stories and to be listened to. The more you hear and share with your audience, the more love you might have.
8. Partnership Showcase
Letting audiences know which businesses you are working with is another great strategy for robust your social brand name. Partnership related posts are not only important for maintaining the relationship with your partner but it also proves that you are doing well and many merchants want to work with you. So it can be seen that the partnership showcase is of utmost crucial for building your credibility on the customers’ eyes.
The example following shows that you can share partnership news on Facebook with a link to your detailed blog. And remember to hashtag the keywords, which also is a very useful tip on social media posting.
9. Sharing Valuable Things
Ebook
If you are having your blog page, that could be a great source for your ebook. You can collect the most-read articles and combine them into an ebook. Obviously, those blog posts must be on the same topic.
Then, the last thing to do is designing a cover and table of content as well as adjust the styling. You will have a stunning and informative ebook to share with your readers.
Infographic
The most powerful value using an infographic is that it can turn the very boring white paper into fun and lively images with numbers and keywords. It turns the very complex knowledge into more simple and comprehensive information.
Sharing interesting infographics on your social post can acquire a lot of leads to your websites.
Industry reports & Statistics
Industry reports and statistics are the valuable results of experts through researching. Those pieces of data include insight and general statistics which are not available anywhere, thus, people often highly appreciate and concern about it.
B2B companies can use it as a lead magnet to attract potential customers who care about your industry.
Webinar
A webinar is an online conference hosted by specialists in specific topics. You can have experts in your industry and use your company’ s managers to host a webinar in order to draw attention and participation of potential prospects.
Social media is the best place to operate and manage webinars since it can remind targeted audiences how long the webinars will be held so that they can register soon not to miss it out.
Free Templates
Free templates can help people save a lot of time and choose the best structures they want for their work. If you are selling in the education industry, PowerPoint templates for presentation are highly welcome by your audience, for sure.
If you are an HR recruitment agency, that would be great if you can share the CV template for your readers on social channels. You can have the leads of potential candidates who leave their info to have your templates.
10. Social Media Giveaways
Another good recommendation for b2b companies is opening social giveaways. In the eCommerce industry, they are holding giveaways very effectively. Since people love free stuff, why couldn’t we do it with B2B customers as well?
To set up and operate a successful giveaway, you should keep in minds some planning steps:
- Choose a good background or theme for your giveaway poster
- Write down the rules of the giveaways
- Select the deadline
- Choose the prize and quantity limit
- Think about how you can deliver the prizes to lucky audiences
- Promote your giveaways on multi-platforms
11. Q&A, Live Stream
It can’t be denied that Livestream is now the most popular marketing approach on social media, especially Facebook. It is effective in drawing large customers’ joining and attention since Livestream is so lively and timely.
By sharing the good courses or interacting with your b2b audiences via Q&A format, you can gain their love and have a chance to convince them to try your services or products.
Through this approach, you can reach your most potential customers who really care about your company (hence they spend time watching your online videos).
One note for doing Q&A Livestream effectively is using professional people. The host of the Livestream must be an expert in your industry and have a sense of humor or just make people comfortable watching them.
This person is considered a representative of your company, so choose them carefully.
12. Backlink to your Website
All in all, the last tip has been mentioned in some social media strategies above. Here, I want to highlight it once again. You cannot showcase your products and services directly or in detail on social media as it seems to be too promotional and no one should care about you in the long run.
Therefore, adding a backlink to your website on your social post should be highly recommended. Please make sure it is put in suitable places on your post and redirect to a relevant page. That would help to bring more valuable traffic to your websites.
Also read: How to Configure Social Media Promotions in Magento 2 Store?
Before you go
Nothing is impossible, doing social media also can be better for B2B businesses soon since they always try to improve and do not resist to change themselves.
We hope that with 12 best strategies to do social media, B2B companies can implement some best-suited techniques for their own businesses and have more traffic and sales in very near days.
