B2B Social Media Marketing

Part #5.5

Introduction

B2B Social Media Marketing is an essential channel to utilise as part of you broader B2B marketing strategy. Across several platforms, your target audiences are actively consuming and interacting with content to guide them along their buying journey from problem identification, all the way to solution decision and beyond. You can think of social media networks and platforms in the same way you think of your website – essential tools for driving both business and customer value.

B2B Social Media Strategy

Objectives: Defining what you want your social media strategy to deliver and what is important to your organisation.
User Discovery: Refers to identifying and understanding the needs and questions that your target audiences have to provide the insight of what content to create and conversations to participate in.
Content: The content you will create to attract, engage, and educate your target audiences across social platforms.
Community: Refers to the conversations you will start and join to drive relationships with target audiences.
Logistics: Key elements to consider when operating and maintaining the B2B social media marketing channel.
Measurement: Identifying objective success, general performance and opportunity.

1. Objectives

Refer back to the ‘Level 3 – Marketing Team Objectives’ (Part #1: B2B Marketing Objectives) you set and build your specific Social Media objectives around these (along with general best-practice/secondary objectives).

2. User Discovery

Similar to many of the other channels, the first major step with your B2B social media marketing strategy is identifying and understanding the key challenges, questions, needs and information preferences that your target audiences have.

2.1 – Off-Platform Discovery

Off-platform discovery relates to the buyer persona and customer research you have already carried out in Part #2: B2B Marketing Intelligence. In some cases, this alone will be enough to equip you with a clear idea of what you target audience’s information needs are.

2.2 – On-Platform Discovery

On-platform discovery relates to carrying out discovery and capturing not only the questions and information needs of your target audiences, but what content and topics they are already engaging with through the social media platforms themselves. Through social monitoring/listening you can drive user discovery through:

Hashtags/Topic Tags: You should firstly develop a list of hashtags that relate to key topics relevant to your business and your personas – then monitor these tags to provide intelligence into popular/trending content topics & highly engaged content topics, popular profiles, persona questions among others.
Keywords: Similar to the above, a list of keywords should be developed that are relevant to your business and personas, then you can monitor these keywords to extract intelligence.
Trends: The goal here is to capture insight into popular topics and themes currently being discussed that you can ‘piggyback’ off by creating your own content to join existing conversations (or start your own).
Influencer: Like industry trends, by monitoring the outputs and posts of experts and influencers within your core industry and target markets, you get a good sense of the topics and themes that currently matter most to your target audiences.
Competitors: Monitoring the topics and themes that your competitors (particularly larger, more authoritative players) are actively engaging in provides highly valuable insight into where you should be focussing your efforts (or where there are gaps that are currently underserved).

Using social monitoring/listening as detailed above will provide real-time data into topics, themes, questions and needs related to your target audiences that can be converted into the insights you need to create highly relevant content to engage and start/join conversations.

3. Content

Now that you are armed with deep insight into the questions, needs and information requirements of your target audiences – you can begin creating content that is relevant to them. When it comes to social media, your content is not only key to reaching, engaging, and converting your audiences – it’s also key to building your brand credibility and influence so keep this in mind.

3.1 – Pre-Planned Topics

This relates to creating content mainly from off-platform discovery and adheres to your content strategy outlined in Part #4: B2B Content Marketing.

3.2 – Real-Time Topics

This relates to creating content mainly from on-platform discovery and considers currently popular topics, trends, questions and conversations within your industry and target markets – then formulating content topics related to this insight.

3.3 – Microcontent & Interfacing

Although the key content marketing assets covered earlier in this guide will form the basis for the content you distribute throughout your social profiles – you will commonly need to ‘layer’ this core content with multiple pieces of microcontent. To better understand this, think of microcontent as being the ‘interface’ for the core content that sits behind it.

This however isn’t the only reason for utilising microcontent, as by carving up a core asset into multiple smaller pieces you are given the opportunity to craft multiple different posts that contain varying messages, call-to-actions and sub-topics that ultimately maximises the performance of the single asset.

3.4 – Leveraging Your People

In B2B social media marketing, if possible, you should leverage the subject matter experts and leadership within your organisation – and utilise them to build your brand credibility, influence, and position as a thought-leader. The days of B2B brands lacking personality and character have long gone, and the modern day requires a certain level of ‘humanisation’ that is particularly valuable across social channels.

For example, if you are a services based company selling digital transformation consulting services then you can use you internal experts/consultants to deep-dive topics as a way of displaying the type of value your organisation offers on day-1 of a collaboration. So, in this example, you are using your people to build credibility in the value your services offer.

3.5 – Paid Social Ads/Retargeting

Like every component of B2B marketing, social media marketing takes time to build and even longer to be effective. This is where the usage of paid social advertising and promotion comes into the picture as it can quite literally accelerate your social channel success. With this is mind, all major social platform offer an advertising feature built-in.

4. Community

Now you are actively posting relevant and valuable content for your audiences – it’s time to focus on building your social communities, professional networks/relationships and starting/joining real-time conversations.

4.1 – Community/Network Building

The first and most obvious tool for building your community and network is by connecting with users that fall under key stakeholder groups – certain social platforms allow a custom message to be sent during the connection request, if this feature is enabled then make sure you use it. As a tip, briefly introduce who you/your company is and touch upon what value you will add to the proposed relationship. For social platforms that don’t offer this, then ensure your profile/feed contains content that the particular stakeholder group will find useful, hence why it’s wise to begin posting content before you start heavy network building

Employees/Internal Experts
Customers
Media
Industry Leaders/Influencers
Strategic Partners
Industry Analysts/Commentators

4.2 – Real-Time Conversations

Through social monitoring and listening, you are able to setup alerts associated to particular keywords – meaning you are notified of conversations taking place across social channels that you can enter and add value to (with the goal of forming a relationship).

Identification/Consideration/Decision Stage: These refer to user questions, posts and comments related to the first three stages of the buying journey. For example, if your business is focussed on selling Enterprise AI SaaS products that solve challenges surrounding data and process automation to cut costs – then you could setup a trigger for related keywords.
Usage Stage: These refer to the user questions, posts and comments related to the fourth stage of the buying journey. This is where the user has already purchased your product/service and is actively extracting value from it. This will fall under the category of social customer service and the broader topic of customer retention.

4.3 – Social Selling

This relates heavily to the ‘real time conversations’ section above and involves your sales function/team locating, engaging with, and forming relationships with prospective customers through social media channels as a way either replacing or complementing existing sales tactics. Although the topic of social selling is possible through several different platforms, the key network for your sales team will be LinkedIn due to its innate professional-leaning approach.

To maximise the success of your sales team’s social selling initiatives primarily through LinkedIn, there are three key components and several guiding elements that need to be followed.

Build Credibility: This is where sales team members will build an appealing and effective profile that builds upon their education, experience, and expertise.
Build Influence: This is where the linkage with the marketing department really comes into play as it relates to sales people not only sharing company/brand content (generated under your B2B content marketing function) but also creating and posting personal opinions and perspectives.
Build Relationships: This is where your sales team begin actively prospecting through LinkedIn, using the search function to identify and locate potential customers and partners for your company. By building credibility and influence first, your sales team may find building relationships easier and earlier discussions to be more productive.

5. Logistics

With the B2B social media channel containing multiple moving parts and potentially involving many different internal (and external) stakeholders, there are several processes that should be considered when forming your strategy.

5.1 – Posting Calendar & Scheduling

Very similar (if not fully absorbed) to your content marketing calendar, your social media posting calendar takes on the same role as to enable planning of your activities.

5.2 – Social Monitoring & Listening

As previously touched upon, social monitoring & listening (via a tool) allows you to perform automated, on-platform discovery to extract real-time insight from several key areas relevant to your strategy.

There are commonly four key areas of interest that social monitoring & listening will be used for:

Company: Relates to social posts and content related directly to your brand and organisation.
Customers: Relates firstly to existing customer questions and queries (so a form of customer service) who are using brand/company-based tags and keywords.
Industry: Relates to social posts and content related directly to your core industry/target markets as a way of gathering intelligence on trending topics and popular subject areas that can be used as a basis for creating content and conversations.
Competitor: Relates to social posts and content both from your competitors and from other users focussed on these same competitors.

5.3 – Social Media Policy

If your organisation utilises social media in any capacity, then it’s essential to formulate at least a basic policy or playbook that lists guiding principles and behaviour guidelines to be maintained by all internal stakeholders across social platforms.

Whether social content posted from the marketing department, or social insights and opinions posted from sales team members – at the very least your policy should ensure brand and communication consistency.

6. Measurement

A combination of hard and soft metrics should be used to allow measurement of your primary and secondary objectives in relation to the social media channel. Jump to Part #8: B2B Marketing Measurement for ideas on what metrics and KPI’s you can utilise as part of your strategy.