It’s hard to promote your business these days without having some sort of social media presence. However, among the companies with a social media strategy, many are B2B, or business-to-business, oriented. Unfortunately though, some of them are doing it the wrong way. A misguided B2B approach to social media will usually end up doing your business more harm than good, but here’s how you can fix it.
A Guide to Creating a Successful B2B Social Media Strategy
B2B Marketing
Before getting into too much specifics, it’s extremely important to outline and determine what B2B marketing even entails. As its name suggests, B2B marketing takes place between two businesses. It occurs when a company markets products or services to other companies, rather than to the consumer.
Businesses Working with Businesses
In some cases, a company’s whole business strategy relies on selling to other businesses. However, in terms of successful digital marketing, a B2B social media strategy is often too narrow and dry to work out the way it’s intended.
That isn’t to say that your B2B strategy is too far from saving though. In reality, you just need to know exactly where to start.
Choosing the Right Platforms
When it comes to social media, you have your pick of the litter in terms of the platforms you can choose to publish on. Of course, there are the obvious fan favorites like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, but are these ones really the best option for successful B2B marketing?
Instead, businesses should put a much greater emphasis on LinkedIn, where the top 10 most popular brands are all B2B retailers. In fact, according to LinkedIn’s internal records, 94 percent of all B2B marketers utilize this platform.
In other words, you always should try to occupy the space where your customers can be found. Otherwise, your marketing efforts will be completely misguided and ill-advised. In those cases, you will be wasting your marketing budget in all the wrong places.
While LinkedIn is certainly the most effective social media platform for B2B companies, businesses should still try to have some sort of presence on the other platforms. This will create general awareness about your brand. However, it’s still key to dedicate a fair share of your resources and time to LinkedIn.
Brand Personality
One common trap that B2B marketers fall into is developing a boring, generic brand personality. In these cases, their social media profiles may be full of dry, uninteresting content that fails to serve any purpose for their target audience.
This is one of the primary ways that businesses lose followers on social media. It’s incredibly important to conduct market research to discover how your competitors behave on social media, as well as which types of content have been more successful than others.
Besides being interesting, a brand’s personality needs to be entirely unique. There are just too many similar businesses on social media, so it can be incredibly difficult to stand out from the crowd. There needs to be a defining feature about your brand that interests and delights your target audience.
If your B2B social media strategy seems like it’s going off the rails, use these essential tips and tricks to help you get back on track.
