Interacting with your customers on social media in a business to business setting is much different from interacting directly with consumers. That doesn’t mean you should ignore social media marketing; it just means that you need to focus directly on the needs of business customers who have less time and interest to spend on frivolous posts. What does good B2B social media marketing look like?
Keys to good B2B social media marketing
Interacting with your business customers via social media requires a more serious and focused approach than if you were selling directly to consumers. Like you, your business customers don’t have time to waste on content that isn’t useful to them.
With consumer social media marketing, you can get away with light posts that are fun, but don’t have any real life application; however B2B marketing requires more substance. The only exception to this is if your typical B2B customer is younger than 35 years. Younger site visitors are shown to be influenced by lighter, fun content that would generally turn away their older co-workers.
The best B2B social media marketing is fueled by content: both content you create and content you share. You really can’t have social media marketing in the B2B arena without great content. Your B2B social media posts should focus on user problems and how to solve them. Most, but not all, of your content should connect with the customer’s problem in some manner. You cannot endlessly feature your product or service. Other posts can be sharing articles from reputable sources within your industry that help to educate your customer and help make his or her job easier.
How successful is your B2B social media marketing?
How do you know if your B2B social media marketing is working. The short answer is by your sales numbers. While it’s tempting to get excited by vanity metrics like the number of visits, “likes” or comments on your posts, these numbers don’t equal conversions. While it’s nice to interact with your site visitors, those people who are “liking” your posts may not have any interest in buying your product or service. They may just like your profile picture. The only real way to tell if your social media marketing is working is to measure the number of conversions you get from a specific topic. This can be tracked to the number of sales, but it can also be the number of people who download an ebook, the number of people who subscribe to your newsletter or who RSVP to attend an event.
Good social media marketing for B2B companies is an awareness strategy. It needs to lead to something that’s relevant to your customer. If you always send them to gated content, promotional videos or sales pages, you will lose them quickly. You need to be generous with the content you offer through your social media content.
The good news is that you don’t have to do all of the work of your social media content alone. At Pollock Marketing Group, we understand the importance of first, having a good content strategy before working on a B2B social media campaign. We can develop a complete marketing plan that includes effective B2B social media marketing that is tracked to your bottom line.
