Social media is an important tool for almost every B2B marketing campaign. But that means almost every business is using it to boost their marketing efforts. So, it’s hard to stand out from the sea of other businesses who have their own social media strategies and marketing campaigns. Luckily, there are a number of ways you can improve your social media marketing campaign and help pair it more effectively with your other digital marketing strategies.
Why Is Social Media Marketing Important for B2B?
Social media marketing provides a number of benefits to your business, including:
- Engaging with Your Audience: Social media marketing gives you a direct channel to communicate with your audience. This can help you establish relationships with them, learn how they feel about your products and services, and even discover new pain points you might not have known about.
- Distributing Content: Social media is one of the best ways to distribute content to your target audience. That’s because it gives you the ability to share content with your followers, but it also gives your followers the ability to share it with their own friends and coworkers. This creates a quick and effective content distribution system.
- Driving Traffic: As you share more content on your social media page, you create more opportunities for people to click on that content and follow it to your website. This helps to increase your site traffic and bring people to eye-grabbing landing pages to turn your social media audience into leads for your sales team.
How To Improve Your Social Media Marketing Campaign
Here are some guiding principles to help you improve your social media marketing campaign and stand out from the competition:
1. Know Your Audience
The first step to creating a powerful social media marketing campaign is to understand your target audience. That includes what content or social media posts they like to engage with and which social media platform they use most regularly. Though the most useful social media platform for your campaign will vary depending on your specific audience, it’s important to keep in mind that almost every successful B2B social media campaign includes a LinkedIn strategy.
That’s because LinkedIn has over 58 million active companies on their site, creating a large audience base for your marketing efforts. However, it’s critical to understand which platforms might be most effective for your marketing campaign and focus primarily on those. Choosing which platforms are most beneficial to your marketing efforts can help you allocate your resources effectively and ensure your campaign is a success.
2. Provide Value
Though social media is a great tool for advertising your products and services, it’s important that your posts and content do even more. Use your social media page to provide immediate value to your audience. Demonstrating your industry expertise and showing your audience that you have the solutions to their pain points or problems allows you to engage them earlier in the buying process.
For example, let’s say your company sells construction and agricultural aftermarket parts. When you create a social media post, highlight one of your audience’s problems. That might include finding replacement parts that aren’t too expensive or buying equipment that requires maintenance less often. Then, in the same post, discuss possible solutions to these problems. What you want to do is provide your audience with a solution that they might be able to accomplish themselves, but show them why that solution would be easier with your products or services.
For instance, in terms of avoiding or minimizing unplanned downtime. Use your social media post to share a blog you wrote on how to perform consistent maintenance checks on pieces of equipment. This can help your audience identify problems more quickly and buy replacement parts or arrange for servicing right away before the problem gets any bigger. How can your audience get quick replacement parts or repairs? By using your aftermarket services.
3. Create Consistent Theme Topics and Style
Creating theme topics for your business’s social media allows you to develop a brand that your audience can recognize and help you develop a consistent content strategy. For example, some businesses use their social media profiles to create and post content about the life of their business. That includes their employee’s achievements and posts that talk about the work environment of the company. This is a great way to recruit for your business, while simultaneously showing your audience that your company cares about the professional well-being of its employees.
Another way to focus on theme topics or style is to decide upfront how you’re going to interact with your audience. That includes the language and tone you use in your posts and in how you reply to your audience’s comments. This can create a consistent brand voice for your company and help you develop more ideas for social media content.
For example, decide if your social media page will be more humorous or business focused. Decide if you’re going to use more provocative or positive language. After some time, see what best resonates with your audience and what receives the most engagement and make adjustments to your theme and style to match that information.
4. Generate a Content Plan
Creating a content plan is important because it helps make sure you post content consistently, keep up with trends, and take advantage of popular posting days, like holidays or industry events. Most importantly, it helps you post at the right time to receive the most engagement from your audience and show them your business is consistently active on social media.
Create a calendar that lists what you’re posting and when. This can be something as simple as a spreadsheet you share with your marketing team. But it can also be something more intuitive, such as a social media posting platform like Hubspot or Hootsuite.
Once you develop your content calendar, run it by the rest of your marketing and sales teams. See if they have other ideas on posts that might resonate with your audience or if they have ideas on how you can tweak your content calendar to make it more effective and efficient.
5. Engage with Your Audience
Don’t just create a post and ignore the people who like it or interact with it. If someone leaves a comment, reply to them and engage in conversation. Engaging with your audience can help show that your brand is active and willing to help with their struggles. You can also engage with your audience in other ways. For instance, instead of creating social media posts that just share content, create some that ask your audience questions. Let your audience respond and use those posts and opportunities to build relationships with them before they become leads or prospects.
6. Use Visuals and Videos
Visuals and videos are often the best ways to engage with your audience on social media. That’s because they attract your audience quickly and help your content stand out from the sea of other social accounts on their feed. Using proprietary graphics and art can also help you generate more engagement and clicks. That’s because companies often share blogs or other content from their site and use a stock image to promote it. Using proprietary content and images can help your posts stand out and make it more impactful to the viewer.
7. Create a Comprehensive Digital Marketing Strategy
Social media marketing shouldn’t be the end-all be-all of your marketing efforts. Most often, it works best when it’s a part of a larger digital marketing strategy. It’s important to develop a comprehensive digital strategy that pairs well with your social media marketing efforts.
Fusable currently offers a multitude of marketing services that can contribute to your social media marketing campaign and your digital marketing campaign as a whole. Whether you need expert programmatic advertising solutions or you’re looking for a long-term content marketing partnership, Fusable has the tools, data, and experts you need. Contact us today and set up a call with one of our marketing experts to see how we can help your digital marketing campaign succeed.