How to Build a B2B Social Media Marketing Strategy: Top 10 Insights for B2B Startups

Social Media Marketing
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It’s difficult to think of a better place to build brand awareness, to reach and engage with your potential customers, than social media. It should come as no surprise that it’s the place to be, especially if you’re new to the market.

When done right, social media marketing can benefit B2B companies in many ways. By delivering relevant content not only do you create a strong industry presence but also gain trust as a knowledgeable thought leader. Good content is usually shared, which helps you to broaden your audience, drive more website traffic and eventually get more leads. Additionally, you can get valuable insights and even improve customer service!

If you’re stuck with how to put your social marketing strategy right, don’t be. Because we are here to provide must-do practices so you can snap your B2B social media into place. Let’s get into it!

1. Align Your Social Media Strategy with Your Marketing Strategy

Your B2B social media strategy should fit into the bigger picture — your marketing strategy. Social marketing is not your marketing strategy as a whole, but it is an integral part of it. And for that reason, the two should work in harmony.

Decide how social media can help you to achieve your strategic marketing goals. If your marketing goal is to build brand awareness then your social media marketing approach should, and can, enhance it!

Now that you’ve clearly established the trajectory of your approach to social media, it’s time to think hard about what unique possibilities it might bring. It’s good to know that social media marketing can help you to directly connect with your current and future customers and to maintain those connections in a much more informal and relaxed way than through more traditional channels.

Always remember that the content you offer is the essential bridge between your social media and marketing strategies. Make it the link that aligns your goals. Having said that — this is perhaps the right place to have a bit of fun and to allow yourself to play around a little.

2. Set Your Goals and Track Progress

Because you want your social marketing program to support your overall strategy, the specific goals that support that strategy should first be defined, as well as achievable and measurable. You need to monitor them — don’t stray off the path and let your social media efforts go to waste.

For example, if you want to build brand awareness, get more leads or increase your website traffic, you have to think about metrics that will inform you about this specific objective. Analytical data such as the number of subscribers, the number of website visitors coming from other social networks, engagement levels (e.g. likes, comments, etc), are important here.

Thankfully, all social media platforms offer analytic tools to collect this data. Make sure your strategy incorporates ways to take advantage of this particular aspect of social media.

Importantly, don’t forget to track whether you’re achieving those all-important KPIs or not. Make adjustments as you go, and fix what needs to be fixed.

3. Know Your Target Audience

As with any marketing strategy, it all starts with the customer. Understanding who your target audience is will help you to decide where to be present and what type of content to deliver.

The ultimate goal here is to build a highly-engaged community that is willing to strike up conversations and keep up with them. And the good news is — social media is perhaps your best tool for this. You can interact with your prospects on a more personal level, especially in the early stages.

Objective indicators such as shortening the buying process or attracting new and dedicated customers might become that little bit easier to achieve.

4. Think Outside the Box When Picking Platforms

When we think of B2B social presence, what are the first platforms that come to mind? We bet that you’ll say: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter! And you’ll be totally right — they are the absolute leaders.

Don’t be too quick to narrow it down to these three. Is it possible that your potential customers are also on Instagram or YouTube? Are there any industry communities that they use? If yes, go for them.

Keep in mind that your content will not perform the same on each channel. Take some time to research each platform so you will know what might work well.

5. Don’t Broadcast, Engage

Way too often B2B companies end up simply posting links to their blog posts or promoting products. Especially now, when users are bombarded with tons of messages online, lookalike non-engaging messages just roll off the back. You don’t want to be one of them, do you?

Remember, social platforms are about engagement rather than outright pitching. Emotionally connect with your audience, interact with them, initiate conversations.

And even if you directly promote your products, make your messages speak to them so they will be willing to engage in discussion or even debate. Honestly, we can’t think of any other channel where you can be that close to prospects!

But let’s admit it, creating highly-relevant catchy messages might become a stumbling block, especially for a start-up. That is where you need AI Content Generation tools that will help you to create texts that are specifically generated to be shared and interacted with!

6. Find a Sweet Spot for Posts

When you’ve decided on your social media content, you might be thinking ‘How often do I post so that users receive welcome reminders about my business but are not pestered with too many posts?’ and ‘When is the best time to post?’

Align your social media content with your other marketing activities. Making a post calendar will help you to see the overall amount of content you are planning to release over a specific time period. Thus, you will have a clear picture of when you have an opportunity for your exclusively social content to run a bit more wild.

A bunch of other things that you can do is to consistently track times when visitors are more active and notice posts that engage the most. This will help you to come up with the most relevant content on a schedule that works best for you.

7. Listen to Your Audience

Delivering high-converting content is indeed important. But how about listening? As simple as it sounds, listening to online conversations of your current and future customers will help you to dive deep into company and industry insights.

What are they discussing online? What matters to them? What are their pain points? You can get answers to these questions simply by monitoring hashtags or using advanced social media tools to track conversations. Imagine how much information you can get. Information such as:

what content might be interesting,

what changes in products you can make,

what they think about you and your competitors,

who is showing interest in products similar to yours.

For a B2B startup this data is the wellspring, isn’t it?

8. Keep Up Appearances

When it comes to companies just entering the market, what can be more important than making your brand recognizable?

One of the simplest ways to do this is to create a unique look across all platforms. Use your company branding so users can easily identify your account and recognize it later.

The same advice applies to the information you give your prospects and customers. Whether it is content or communication — make sure it’s relevant and in line with your brand.

9. Engage Thought-Leaders or Become One

People always trust people more than brands — use this to your advantage. Cooperating with industry thought leaders can be a great start for your B2B social media program.

Thought leaders have their loyal audiences built through expertise, and you have a great product. Looks like a win-win!

Who is your industry thought-leader? A journalist, a blogger, or your own employee?

10. Invest in Advertising

This recommendation may seem too simple, but let’s be honest, for a start-up it can be a bit tricky to grow a social marketing audience organically and fast. Re-posting and cooperating with industry thought-leaders are great but they might not give you that dramatic surge you’re after.

Luckily, it’s not much hard-work to now start driving quality traffic towards you. With Demand Generation Platform you can collect target accounts, identify strategies that work, and automate your ad campaigns.

And don’t forget about paid advertising on platforms you’ve chosen: Facebook’s Boosted Posts, Promoted Tweets for Twitter, and LinkedIn’s Sponsored Content are just a few features on the list.

Wrapping Up

It’s no longer a question whether B2B should be on social media or not. And now it’s time to figure out how to make it work for your startup.

Get on board and make your first breakthrough!


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