B2B Social Media Strategies

Best Practices and How to Create One for Your B2B Business

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When you think of social media marketing, you immediately think of businesses spreading brand awareness among their target market and influencing them to purchase their product or service. This is not the case for B2B social media marketing. Business-to-business transactions require a longer decision-making process and involve more than one person in making the decision. Because of this, B2B social media marketing cannot take the same approach as business-to-consumer social media marketing.

Instead, B2B social media strategies focus on creating brand awareness, building trust and credibility, educating your audience about your product or service, and establishing connections with your target audience. Although it may also occur in social media, nurturing these relationships and converting qualified leads to customers are often done in other marketing channels and, sometimes, in person or over the phone by those representing your company.

What Effective B2B Social Media Strategies Have in Common

Whether you are creating social media strategies for small businesses or enterprise-scale organizations, the following principles are what it takes to create effective social media strategies for your B2B business:

The best social media strategies have clear goals and KPIs

The content engages the target audience

It maximizes different mediums available in a social media platform

The employees are involved in B2B social media posts

Use a recognizable brand voice

They proactively engage their target audience in social media

They use analytics to measure their social media marketing efforts

They test and optimize their social media marketing strategy continuously

6 Steps for Creating a B2B Social Media Strategy

You can create engaging content by using your audience’s interests and passions as avenues to draw them in. You can also listen in on their conversations on various platforms online and in your focus group discussions to find out about common concerns and problems they have related to your industry and the solutions you offer. Nothing is more engaging than content providing actionable solutions without you asking for anything in return.

Identify your goals in social media marketing

You need to first define your goals before doing anything else in your B2B social media strategy template. Whatever your goal may be, there should be KPIs that will indicate if you are on the right track in the achievement of your goals. Here are some social media metrics for the different social media marketing goals you might have:

Brand awareness

direct traffic, mentions, brand search volume, reach

Engagement

comment, applause rate, share rate, video views, video completion rate, clicks per post

Lead generation and conversions

cost per lead, marketing qualified leads, customer lifetime value, close rate per channel, average close rate

Conduct a SWOT analysis of the social media landscape of your industry

You need to know of any internal and external factors that may influence your success in social media marketing. You can identify these factors through a SWOT analysis. On the internal side, it will give you a good understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of your current social media and digital marketing efforts. Here are some questions to help you discover the strengths and weaknesses in your business and marketing strategy:

What are you doing well in social media marketing?
What advantages does your business have?
What advantages does your brand have?
What are the areas that you lack in social media marketing?
What are the internal factors holding you back or may hold you back from achieving your social media marketing goals?

As for the external factors in the SWOT analysis, these are the opportunities and threats existing among your competitors, audience, industry, and location that may contribute or hinder the success of your social media efforts. Here are some questions to help you identify these opportunities and threats affecting your business:

What are the unfulfilled areas for content in your industry?
What can you gain from your social media efforts?
What are the B2B social media strategy examples in your industry that you should emulate? What are the ones that you should avoid?
What are the emerging B2B social media trends?
Who is your competition in your content niche?

From your answers, you can determine your performance in your social marketing efforts. You can identify which areas you should improve, which ones you should continue, and which ones are ineffective. You can also identify areas that you can capitalize on to gain significant competitive advantage and that you need to be careful of.

Research your target audience

As a B2B marketer, you are attempting to engage business owners and decision-makers of businesses that have a use for what you offer. However, for the best results, it is not enough to know their positions in the companies you are targeting. You need to take a personal approach for your brand to engage effectively with them. The best way to go about this is with audience personas.

Audience personas are fictional profiles that represent members of your audience. These serve as your guide for developing your B2B social media strategies, creating high-quality content, targeting social media ads, and engaging them in social media. To create these profiles, you will need to:

Identify the prevailing commonalities in your audience

Identify the pain points and goals relevant to what you offer

Conduct a quantitative and qualitative survey of your audience

Organize your findings into audience persona profiles

Determine your angle for social media content

You need to create original and valuable content to attract your target audience. However, other brands with the same offer as you do already post content on social media. To attract and retain their interest, you need to have a unique take on the content already out there. Moreover, you should provide information that can establish your brand as a thought leader in your niche.

Analyze your results for continuous improvement

Your work in developing a social media strategy does not end. You need to improve continuously upon it by using analytics to measure your results. Monitor how well your content is doing in terms of impressions, engagement, conversions, and more while also conducting qualitative reviews on the quality of your content and traffic. When you identify any problem areas, address them and apply corrective action for future iterations of your social media strategy.

Are You Ready to Create a Social Media Strategy Template of Your Own?

B2B social media marketing can bring your brand closer to the owners and decision-makers of the businesses you are targeting. With the best practices and the steps for creating a social media strategy of your own, you can take full advantage of social media in engaging your audience and nurturing them in your clients.

Do you need an in-depth discussion for creating a B2B social media strategy? Or, do you want to create a general digital marketing strategy for your business? Contact us today and schedule your free marketing consultation with us.

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