Any fool can steer a ship: B2B Social Media Strategy

Any fool can steer a ship, it’s just know­ing where to take it.

The Boun­ty

Some things change. If you build’em, they won’t nec­es­sar­i­ly come. Unless they find you on social media, because that’s where they are now. Con­sumers have changed their habits. They are increas­ing­ly seek­ing ref­er­ences of ser­vices and prod­ucts on social media, because peo­ple trust people.

Some things change, but oth­ers don’t. 

Social media have a direct influ­ence on how peo­ple buy and con­nect with com­pa­nies. And clients, of course, are peo­ple, and expect to be seen and heard. Who doesn’t? Their feed­back, which you can get by engag­ing with them on social media, is a vital asset to make informed decisions.

It is not a wild esti­ma­tion to say that about half of online shop­pers use social media to help them make pur­chase deci­sions. Or that one in four inter­net users between 16 and 64 use social media to research brands and prod­ucts. In fact, they’re quite humble.

When it comes to B2B, num­bers rise like waves in Nazare.

75% of buy­ers and 84% of C‑level/​vice pres­i­dent (VP) exec­u­tives report using social media to make pur­chas­ing deci­sions. B2B com­pa­nies increased their social media mar­ket­ing bud­gets by 15% and will con­tin­ue to do so.

Why? Because their reports allowed them to track sales, and they have tracked them to social media. It works. If only there was a way to plan, orga­nize and assess your actions to save time and mon­ey and make the best of your company’s social media efforts, right? There is.

TADA! SOCIALMEDIA STRATEGY

A social media strat­e­gy is the sum­ma­rized ver­sion of your plan to take over the world, one social plat­form at a time. It includes what you hope to achieve on social media, guides you to get there, and lets you know how you’re doing. An incred­i­bly use­ful nav­i­ga­tion­al instrument.

There’s nev­er been a bet­ter time to cre­ate a social media mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy like right now. But there are some clouds on the hori­zon, and things move fast. There’s more of every­thing: more releas­es, more plat­forms, more pri­va­cy issues, more tools, and more con­tent. A smart social media strat­e­gy can help B2B and hybrid busi­ness­es weath­er the storm of pos­si­bil­i­ties, enhance their brand growth and reach new audi­ences. Busi­ness­es not seek­ing to enhance their brand growth and reach new audi­ences are not real­ly that keen on suc­ceed­ing, are they? Let them be, and read on for some tips on how to stay the social media course.

SETCLEAR GOALS

If you don’t know where you’re going, any road can take you there .

Worse, you could learn you’ve been tak­ing sev­er­al wrong turns AFTER you arrived at what you thought was your des­ti­na­tion. You need to set clear goals. Com­mon social media goals for B2B may include brand aware­ness, engage­ment, lead gen­er­a­tion and conversion.

You need to know what you want to achieve, to pri­or­i­tize smart­ly and make deci­sions about where to focus and the time you must devote to each goal. Set clear goals and spe­cif­ic, mea­sur­able KPIs, because you also need to know what suc­cess for each goal will look like.

For exam­ple, for your brand aware­ness goals, met­rics to focus on include direct traf­fic, brand men­tions or brand search vol­ume. For your lead gen­er­a­tion goals, you should look at clicks, cost per lead and close rates per chan­nel. To dri­ve more con­ver­sions from social media, the KPIs you should focus on are reach, click-through rates, and con­ver­sion rates.

IDEN­TI­FYYOURAUDI­ENCEANDYOURCOMPETITION

Read the room before you go in.

A social media strat­e­gy will not let you con­trol if peo­ple fol­low you, because that’s up to them, but it can help you select the right chan­nels to meet the peo­ple you want to talk with. Seg­ment your audi­ence. Under­stand­ing who they are, where they are and what inter­ests them will help you tai­lor your con­tent to meet their needs. 

The oth­er group to keep an eye on is your com­pe­ti­tion. Not to repli­cate what they are doing, but to iden­ti­fy what works for them, where they fall short, and where you can step up and fill some gaps in your market.

CHAN­NEL STRATEGY

Many plat­forms to engage them all: take your pick(s)

Now that you know who they are, you must focus on where to engage them. Insta­gram, Tik­Tok, Face­book, Linkedin, Twit­ter. The list is not end­less, but it can get long. Pick the ones you want to focus on and cre­ate a spe­cif­ic plan for each one. 

Things have Meta-changed in the past few years, but Face­book remains the most used social media plat­form with 2.96 bil­lion active users. True, it is most­ly a plat­form for peo­ple to con­nect and share expe­ri­ences with peo­ple they know, but it’s not just a B2C spe­cif­ic chan­nel. Busi­ness deci­sion mak­ers spend 74% more time on Face­book than the aver­age user.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is much more than a use­ful job search tool. It’s the top pro­fes­sion­al social net­work, a hub for indus­try news and valu­able insights, and a true lead mag­net. With 750 mil­lion active users, it’s the pre­ferred social media chan­nel for B2B mar­keters, 93% of which find it the most effec­tive way to gen­er­ate leads. And they are right. More than 80% of social leads for B2B come from LinkedIn.

Tik­Tok

Nope, it’s not just an app for cen­ten­ni­als to share dance moves and lip-sync chal­lenges. This ​“new” social plat­form has great poten­tial for con­tent cre­ators and com­pa­nies with its viral­i­ty super­charged algo­rithm. Seen those ​“Tik­Tok made me buy” trends? Well, they can make you sell too. Tik­Tok has an out­stand­ing 11.83% engage­ment rate.

Suc­cess on the fastest grow­ing social media plat­form will require some exper­i­men­ta­tion and cre­ativ­i­ty, though.TikTok can be an amaz­ing chan­nel for B2B and Hybrid com­pa­nies will­ing to loosen their ties and show some enter­tain­ing, per­son­al, behind the scenes details of their staff and oper­a­tion. It’s the per­fect chan­nel to edu­cate audi­ences about using your prod­ucts, share tips and hacks and announce new prod­ucts and updates.

Twit­ter

Twit­ter remains the top glob­al hub for news, trends and con­ver­sa­tions. Like a mas­sive vir­tu­al water cool­er, where every­one gath­ers to chat, share opin­ions, dis­cuss ideas and some­times, throw a glass at some­one you dis­agree with, but let’s not get into that now. Love, hate and every­thing in between, Twit­ter is all about rela­tion­ships. With 368 mil­lion active users and 500 mil­lion tweets post­ed every day, it’s a plat­form that allows for real-time engage­ment with clients and prospects, and a super pow­er­ful tool to build brand aware­ness. It’s also a great chan­nel to show­case indus­try exper­tise and address inquiries. 63% of Twit­ter users fol­low small-to-medi­um sized busi­ness­es. Depend­ing on your indus­try and band­width, it can be even more engag­ing: Twit­ter users vis­it B2B tech brand sites at a much high­er rate than aver­age Inter­net users. (59% vs 40%) 

Insta­gram

Insta­gramis a very pow­er­ful visu­al based plat­form. Like with Tik­Tok, you may think it’s only pop­u­lar among teens, but 54.4% of its 1.3 bil­lion users are between 25 and 55 years old. More than 200 mil­lion users check out busi­ness pro­files every day and 60% of Insta­gram users use the plat­form to dis­cov­er new prod­ucts. 80% claim their buy­ing deci­sions are influ­enced by what they see on Insta­gram. After all, it’s not about B2C or B2B, but about peo­ple, and Insta­gram is chang­ing how peo­ple make buy­ing deci­sions, so it’s def­i­nite­ly the right place to B2B. 

SOCIALMEDIASTRAT­E­GYIMPLE­MEN­TA­TIONORHOWTOGETIT DONE

THEWHO (NOTNEC­ES­SAR­I­LYTHE BAND)

There are many dif­fer­ent func­tions and roles involved in man­ag­ing Social Media: strat­e­gy devel­op­ment, con­tent cre­ation, pub­lish­ing, social media mon­i­tor­ing and analy­sis. That’s a lot of deci­sions to make. The first step to imple­ment your social media strat­e­gy is to sort out who will be call­ing the shots for each func­tion and have a work­flow in place that out­lines respon­si­bil­i­ties, such as cre­at­ing con­tent, review­ing and approv­ing sug­ges­tions, pub­lish­ing con­tent, mon­i­tor­ing social media chan­nels and engag­ing with com­ments and questions. 

Depend­ing on the size and com­plex­i­ty of your orga­ni­za­tion, you may decide it’s bet­ter to fill gaps in your team with con­trac­tors or spe­cial­ized agen­cies. Hir­ing an agency can save you time by tak­ing over the respon­si­bil­i­ty of cre­at­ing and imple­ment­ing the social media strat­e­gy and prove more cost-effec­tive for B2B com­pa­nies than hir­ing in-house staff. How­ev­er, to make sure the cure is not worse than the dis­ease, it’s impor­tant to choose one that has a good under­stand­ing of the B2B indus­try in gen­er­al, and of your com­pa­ny in par­tic­u­lar, to pre­vent mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tions, mis­un­der­stand­ings, mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tions, and assort­ed miseries. 

THEWHAT 

Con­tent strat­e­gy is a cru­cial ele­ment of your social media plan. While there are some sim­i­lar­i­ties between B2B and B2C con­tent strate­gies, there are also key dif­fer­ences. B2B con­tent should be edu­ca­tion­al and infor­ma­tive, rather than just pro­mo­tion­al, as the main focus is to build rela­tion­ships giv­en the longer, more com­plex B2B sales cycle. Your con­tent should be cus­tomized accord­ing to each stage of the sales fun­nel, from aware­ness through con­sid­er­a­tion to decision.

Once you have set your goals, iden­ti­fied your audi­ence and com­pe­ti­tion, and cho­sen your social media plat­forms, it is time to cre­ate and imple­ment your con­tent strategy.

This will require exten­sive research to deter­mine the type of con­tent that best suits each plat­form and the fre­quen­cy and best times to pub­lish. Your team should iden­ti­fy trends and gaps and cre­ate con­tent series that users can find use­ful, rel­e­vant, or emo­tion­al. You should also plan the con­tent for each plat­form sep­a­rate­ly, even if you are repur­pos­ing the same con­tent for dif­fer­ent plat­forms (which you most def­i­nite­ly should).

Cre­at­ing qual­i­ty con­tent requires plan­ning and organization.

Deter­mine what types of graph­ics, images, or videos you plan to use in your cam­paign, based on your bud­get and the needs of your cam­paign. Define your brand voice and tone to ensure con­sis­ten­cy and nuance across all social media plat­forms and use a con­tent cal­en­dar to out­line the type of con­tent you will post, when you will post it, and on which social media platform.

Paid pro­mo­tion can help you reach a broad­er audi­ence and ampli­fy your con­tent’s reach.

You can use paid adver­tis­ing to tar­get spe­cif­ic audi­ences, pro­mote your con­tent, or gen­er­ate leads. It is essen­tial to set a bud­get and define your tar­get audi­ence and goals to max­i­mize the effec­tive­ness of your paid advertising.

THEHOWANDTHEWHATNEXT: TOOLSAND METRICS

Plan­ning and exe­cut­ing a social media strat­e­gy is a lot, but it’s not all. Ana­lyz­ing results and track­ing key per­for­mance indi­ca­tors (KPIs) is cru­cial to deter­mine the suc­cess of your strat­e­gy and iden­ti­fy areas for improvement.

There are sev­er­al met­rics to con­sid­er depend­ing on your goals. If your goal is to increase brand aware­ness, met­rics such as reach and impres­sions can pro­vide insight into how many peo­ple have seen your con­tent. On the oth­er hand, if your goal is to dri­ve web­site traf­fic, you should focus on met­rics such as click-through rates and refer­ral traffic.

To effec­tive­ly ana­lyze, report, and opti­mize your social media strat­e­gy, it is essen­tial to set a report­ing rhythm. This could include quar­ter­ly, month­ly, and week­ly reviews of progress. Dur­ing quar­ter­ly reviews, you should eval­u­ate the over­all per­for­mance of your plan, what’s work­ing, what’s not, and what’s next. Month­ly reviews can focus on review­ing the plan and month-to-month trac­tion. Final­ly, week­ly reviews should focus on review­ing progress and a score­card of key metrics.

Invest­ing in the right tools can help make the process of ana­lyz­ing and report­ing on your social media strat­e­gy more effi­cient. Social media man­age­ment tools can help stream­line work­flows and sched­ule posts, and ana­lyt­ics tools can pro­vide more in-depth insights into your performance. 

Social media strate­gies are not set in stone, very few things are. Adjust­ments may need to be made along the way based on the data and insights gath­ered. By reg­u­lar­ly mea­sur­ing and adjust­ing your social media strat­e­gy, you can improve your per­for­mance, reach your tar­get audi­ence more effec­tive­ly, and achieve your busi­ness goals.

BONUSTRACKS:

SOCIALMEDIATOIMPROVE SALES

Cre­at­ing a seam­less shop­ping expe­ri­ence is cru­cial to enhanc­ing cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion and loy­al­ty. Cus­tomers crave con­ve­nience, speed, and ease when shop­ping on social media. Anoth­er good use for social media is to lever­age social plat­forms to stream­line your pur­chas­ing paths to meet their needs. 

Insta­gram Shops allows busi­ness­es to set up online stores and tag shop­pable prod­ucts in their posts, Sto­ries, and Reels, which is a great way to speed up the online shop­ping process, and eli­gi­ble busi­ness­es can use Insta­gram Check­out to enable users to pur­chase prod­ucts with­out being redi­rect­ed to an exter­nal web­site, sav­ing them the has­sle of switch­ing between mul­ti­ple tabs or apps.

Alter­na­tive­ly, you can add links to spe­cif­ic prod­uct pages on your posts with a link to your ecom­merce store in your bio. 

THISJUSTIN: AI

Here to take our jobs, here to save our lives, every­one talks about what AI will do to our future. But as the world still tries to fig­ure out what it can do, and whether issues like accu­ra­cy and bias can be solved and how, there are many spe­cif­ic ways in which AI can enhance your social media/​eCommerce strategy. 

For exam­ple, it can be used to ana­lyze data and iden­ti­fy pat­terns and trends in order to cre­ate or improve your buy­er per­sonas, or to out­line and sched­ule con­tent to ensure the company’s con­tent is time­ly and relevant.

It can also be used to mon­i­tor social media plat­forms for men­tions of your brand, as well as key­words and top­ics relat­ed to your indus­try, allow­ing you to use that infor­ma­tion to cre­ate tar­get­ed con­tent or to improve your cus­tomer service.

Lever­ag­ing rec­om­men­da­tion fea­tures, such as sug­gest­ing prod­ucts based on what oth­er cus­tomers have fol­lowed, liked or bought can improve cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion and increase your order val­ues. Imple­ment­ing AI-dri­ven per­son­al­iza­tion dur­ing check­out or in post-pur­chase com­mu­ni­ca­tions is anoth­er way to offer more value.

Yes, Chat­G­PT may have made all the head­lines, but it can’t write real­ly good ones yet. Hype and pan­ic aside, it is unde­ni­able that AI, bal­anced with human cre­ativ­i­ty and intu­ition (is there any oth­er kind?), can be use­ful for a vari­ety of tasks to boost your social media strat­e­gy, and your sales.

THENOWBIGTHING: INFLU­ENCER MARKETING

As the world of social media evolves, so do the strate­gies busi­ness­es use to reach their tar­get audi­ences. The now big thing is influ­encer mar­ket­ing. Over 83% of peo­ple believe influ­encer mar­ket­ing to be an effec­tive form of mar­ket­ing. Busi­ness­es are mak­ing $5.2ROIfor every $1 spent on influ­encer marketing.

The goal of influ­encer mar­ket­ing is to lever­age the influ­encer’s cred­i­bil­i­ty and rela­tion­ship with their audi­ence to pro­mote a brand or prod­uct. Influ­encers may pro­mote the brand or prod­uct through var­i­ous chan­nels such as social media posts, videos, blogs, or pod­casts. They may also pro­vide prod­uct reviews, give­aways, or dis­counts to their followers.

NOTJUSTFOR B2C

Yes, it’s com­mon­ly asso­ci­at­ed with B2C, but B2B and hybrid com­pa­nies can also ben­e­fit from this approach. By part­ner­ing with influ­encers, B2B and Hybrid com­pa­nies can tap into new mar­kets and reach a wider range of poten­tial cus­tomers. Here’s a cou­ple of things to bear in mind, though:

First­ly, you need to iden­ti­fy whether influ­encer mar­ket­ing is suit­able for your brand and your tar­get audi­ence. You should select an influ­encer who is an author­i­ty in a spe­cif­ic area that’s rel­e­vant to your brand. For instance, if you’re sell­ing pho­tog­ra­phy equip­ment, you might want to work with a well-known pho­tog­ra­ph­er. It’s impor­tant to choose an influ­encer who is respon­si­ble and whose rep­u­ta­tion won’t neg­a­tive­ly impact your brand.

One of the main advan­tages of work­ing with influ­encers is their abil­i­ty to con­nect with your tar­get audi­ence. True, many peo­ple are doing it. Still, enlist­ing a Kar­dashi­an for your influ­encer mar­ket­ing will not always be a good idea. It’s cru­cial to care­ful­ly select an influ­encer who is a good match for your brand and product.

To exe­cute an effec­tive cam­paign, cre­ate a data­base of suit­able influ­encers who align with your brand val­ues. Then, you can man­age com­mu­ni­ca­tion with them and nego­ti­ate the val­ue of their ser­vices. It’s also essen­tial to track the progress of your cam­paigns and ana­lyze what works and what does­n’t. Have a clear bud­get in mind and pri­or­i­tize the type of con­tent to pro­duce based on the plat­form you’re using.

It’s worth not­ing that influ­encer mar­ket­ing may not be suit­able for small busi­ness­es with a lim­it­ed adver­tis­ing bud­get. How­ev­er, larg­er com­pa­nies with sol­id knowl­edge of their audi­ence and brand val­ues can ben­e­fit sig­nif­i­cant­ly from adding it to their social strategy.

FINALSMOOTHSAILIN’ TIPS

Out­lin­ing and imple­ment­ing a social media strat­e­gy goes beyond cute videos and memes (not that there’s any­thing wrong with them). These guide­lines may help you devel­op yours to build brand aware­ness, con­nect with your tar­get audi­ence, and dri­ve sales. Remem­ber to take the time to con­sid­er your goals, your tar­get audi­ence, and what con­tent can help you con­nect. Know where you want to take the ship.

Above all, don’t be afraid to exper­i­ment and try new things ‑social media is a dynam­ic space. What works today may not work tomor­row, so be ready to change tack along this long jour­ney. Build­ing a loy­al fol­low­ing and see­ing results takes time, so be active but also patient. 

If you have any ques­tions or thoughts to share, just get in touch. Ahoy!