The digital world is the future of B2B, and sales meetings, business decisions, and conferences are all part of it. Nevertheless, social media is important in building connections and bringing in contracts.
Nevertheless, if you don’t have any social media plan for your B2B business, you might be held back and miss out on a lot of things, and you don’t want this to happen, do you?
Well, let’s not waste any more time because, in this article, we will find out what are some of the best social media tactics you can use across most of your businesses.
8 B2B social media tactics you can use for your business
Align your goals with your business objectives
Similar to any other B2C strategy, you must align your B2B social media plan and answer the following questions:
- What are some of the company’s business objectives?
- How will B2B social media marketing help you achieve them?
However, the similarities do come to an end here. Both B2C and B2B social media managers use social platforms for various reasons. In a B2C purpose, campaigns drive sales, while in a B2B, it’s more about focusing on long-term business objectives.
However, some of the primary goals for a B2B marketer are:
- Increase brand awareness
- Build trust over time
- Educate your audience
All of these goals have some sort of contribution to lead generation. Successful B2B marketers could also use content marketing for the sake of gaining subscribers, increasing leads, and targeting their audience.
Consider the SMART approach
Furthermore, you can consider using the SMART approach for your B2B social strategy. Regardless of the size of a business, all of them must have a specific goal to focus on. Each B2B business has different social media goals, which is why most B2B businesses will set it at the top of their funnel strategies rather than being fully sales-focused.
The SMART technique is one of the best ways to define social media goals for a business and is represented in the following ways:
- Specific
- Measure
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
In order to succeed, you need to define your success first. Is it to bring new leads? Increase your website’s traffic? Or what? This covers the specific stage. For example, you can consider increasing your weekly social media posts or anything else you can think of. Therefore, you can make your goals measurable too. These are attainable goals and not something that sounds like a fairy tale and impossible to achieve.
Nevertheless, no matter your goals, it’s important to pick a considerable number to reach based on the data you have gathered. That ensures your goal is relevant to what your business stands for.
Last but not least, you have to include a time-bound. How long will it take to achieve this goal? Set a realistic time frame that you think will allow you to achieve your goal.
Nevertheless, it’s important to include goals and internal objectives within your plan.
Measure your brand awareness
You can’t ever succeed in building a business if your customers aren’t aware of who you are and how you can help them. If this is done effectively, brand awareness can create a high level of excitement whenever your product or service is mentioned.
Nevertheless, brand awareness directly impacts your growing audience and lead generation. Therefore, it’s one of the most fundamental parts of your B2B social media strategy.
Furthermore, brand awareness can be separated into a few parts:
- Increasing your brand awareness with your new products
- Increasing your purchase frequency
- Increasing the attractiveness of your products
Above all, different metrics can measure brand awareness on social media. Here they are:
- Direct traffic: This is whenever users visit your site by typing in your URL from the site. However, direct traffic can sometimes recall dark social channels, meaning users need to recall your domain name to find you.
- Reach: The total number of people you can on social media channels and search engines.
- Mentions: This is the number of times your product or brand gets mentioned on social media platforms. Mentions can include tagged mentions and more.
- Search appearance: This includes the number of times you have been mentioned in a search, such as the related keywords to your brand.
Nevertheless, there are many more brand awareness measurements, which more often require some type of third-party verification. Again, however, you must take everything step by step.
Use transcription services
You may wonder how transcription services are related to social media? They play a more prominent role than you may think and can significantly help users watch videos without sound by reading the captions.
You can do this by using transcription software and automatically transcribe your video to text. Not only does this save you hours of your time, but it also allows users that can’t listen to video sound to read the text (captions) from a video.
You may think this isn’t as important, but according to statistics, 92% of users actually watch videos without sound. Considering this fact, you now see how important it is to convert audio to text.
Develop a brand personality
On a business level, most B2B companies will make the same mistake of not being interesting enough. However, since you’re entirely targeting professionals and not a regular customer, you may see the fact that personality and style go together.
Nevertheless, sharing boring content on social media isn’t always an effective way of grabbing anyone’s attention, whether a younger audience or a group of executives. As a result, brand personality is a priority in B2B social media marketing, maybe even more than you think!
Nevertheless, before creating your next campaign, you should invest time into seeing what your brand will look like and what it should look like. If you haven’t managed to do so already, it’s now the right time to do so. You can create your own brand style guide, and the type of approach you take will depend on who your target audience is and their niche. Most importantly, here are a few guidelines to follow:
- Write in the first person
- Use some humor in your content
- Post consistently throughout all of your social channels
Furthermore, no matter what you do, it’s important to be interesting and not bore your audience. This is precisely how you find your ideal buyer.
Engagement
Another key factor in social media is engagement and interactions. As a result, boosting your content’s visibility to a larger audience is one of the primary keys to a successful strategy.
In marketing terms, engagement is one of the most important terms of a funnel. Nevertheless, this has become a top priority for B2B companies in the past years. According to a published report, more than 70% of B2B companies have high engagement levels, which is the main goal for content marketing efforts.
However, keep in mind that engagement isn’t a direct influencer in business growth. However, it shows you if you are properly communicating with your audience, which is why measuring engagement is essential.
There are several metrics used for measuring social media engagement, and they are:
- Conversion rates: The average number of responses and comments on each post. A higher conversion rate significantly impacts the conversion rate you have with your target audience and requires you to add value to your followers.
- The number of clicks per post: This helps you identify if your article headline was compelling or not.
- View duration: It doesn’t matter how often someone viewed your content but how long they viewed it. For instance, you will get better results if someone views your content for the entire time rather than if they just click on your content and leave your page instantly.
- Shares: Shares are significant when you are in the B2B world. The more shares you get, the farther your message will get across. After all, word of mouth is one of the most potent global marketing tools.
- Likes and comments: No matter which social media you are on, the number of likes and comments you receive will highly affect your results and exposure on social platforms. Therefore, it’s important to consider these measures!
Focus on building stronger relationships
Relationships are important in our business life. Nevertheless, this is one of the primary reasons why B2B businesses exist and how they grow. Even if your product or service is more expensive, people who are committed to your business long-term will offer you much more value than those who aren’t.
Above all, your B2B social media strategy should focus on creating loyal customers. There are several ways to do this, such as:
- Maintaining a friendly and informative tone with your audience
- Seeking potential buyers and not waiting for everyone to come to you
- Ask questions, share helpful information, establish ongoing conversations, and more
Relationships are a two-way story, so focus more on what you can do for your customers rather than only expecting them to do more for you. Simply offering them helpful information and sharing valuable insights can be more than enough to form strong relationships in the long term.
Be consistent
Whatever you do in business and your life, consistency is something you can never leave out. It takes time to set up your goals, create a plan for them, and thoroughly research the topic. For example, if you start a B2B social media marketing strategy, you must create exciting content to share and reach a larger audience through word-of-mouth. Sharing content that promotes reshares and online discussions is much better than posting small content each day.
Another way of being consistent with your B2B social strategy is to schedule posts in time. Don’t think of what to post daily, but think this through and create a plan that will last for months. That way, you’ll not have to invest additional time into your posts. We recommend you use a social media scheduler and schedule your posts with an automation tool. Some powerful tools include Buffer, eClincher, and more.
Besides considering the amount of time you save, this gives your social media channel a fresh look and increases engagement. Moreover, you can check your calendar, review scores, and compare them by using a report panel. Furthermore, if you are confused about which social media scheduling tool you should use, you can try using their free trials to see if the tool fits your needs or not.
Keep your team close, but your competitors closer
Yes, you heard it. Your competitors are pursuing the same goal you are, and the last thing you want is for them to be one step ahead of you. Especially if you are a larger company, focusing on your competitors is essential to your success. And if your company’s target audience is similar to theirs, you can become motivated for something they are doing better than you.
However, keeping an eye on your competitors doesn’t mean you should copy everything they do. Instead, it means that you should continuously stay updated with trending news and not allow your competitors to react to trends faster than you do. Whatever you do more than your competitors will indicate you are a step further than them and give you a significant advantage.
Wrapping it all up
This is the end of this article. These are our top eight B2B social media tactics for increasing business growth and operational efficiency. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, it’ll depend on how much you listen to your audience and what you are willing to do for them.
You should sacrifice for your audience just as much as they offer for you. Each business has a brand personality and should focus on building more robust relationships. After all, everything is about the long-term, and it matters the most. Therefore, even though you are dealing with B2B, you should focus on delivering the best experience you can for your customers.