Many businesses are sleeping on the true potential of B2B social media in their digital marketing strategies when in reality it’s a game-changer.

In fact, according to recent statistics (Source), 83% of the B2B marketers leverage the power of social media services, which comes second in terms of efficiency to only search engine marketing. This makes it the perfect place to explore their influence on the audience and further nurturing them into clients.

Though it is also true that designing perfect B2B social media strategies isn’t exactly a cakewalk and needs to consider the brand’s key business objectives well. That’s why we’ve put together a list of the best practices that you can consider while making a B2B social media marketing plan to beat the competition and delight your customers.

Set Goals Before You Begin

The avenue of social media marketing services is a must for having an edge as a B2B brand nowadays, but you can’t enter this realm without figuring out what you want from it for your business.

This part of the process will decide the amount of effort your strategy would require to be effective in terms of converting leads to customers over time.

According to research (source) on the top benefits of B2B marketing, brands must prioritize focusing on implementing the following goals.

• Creating awareness for the brand
• Educating your audience
• Building the brand’s credibility and trust

These factors encompass many other tasks that we will look into and learn about how to achieve them.

Creating Awareness for the Brand

Brand awareness is the very foundation of the direction that your B2B social media will head towards. If you use this space to reach out to your customers, you must first build an identity that will appeal to them.

This obviously isn’t easy with so much competition in this virtual space, so putting out more about what your business has to offer and what sets it apart from the rest is very crucial.

These attributes make social media a great space for showcasing the details of your products, create a community, and find ways to turn them into loyal customers.

Do your research of Buyer Persona

Before you start investing the time and resources in putting together the most efficient social media marketing strategies, you must think about the ideal customers first.

They might be looking at a bunch of different options, planning according to their problems, and aren’t interested in the brand beforehand.

You might need to consider – what kind of social media platforms they exist on? What do they consume over there? And are they browsing for work or leisure? All these queries will lead to a better understanding of what value your B2B social media must provide to them.

Educating your audience

The reality is that the B2B buyers are extremely information savvy and they spend a great amount of time gathering information about their next purchase. A study by Gartner explains that their journey is quite arduous and doesn’t lead to fruition easily if the companies they consider don’t convince them hard enough (source).

The solution here is in this problem itself – your task as a business is to establish credibility by providing ample information about your offerings. Consider the mediums like blog posts, e-books, guides, and other such material that your target audience can consume and take action immediately afterward.

Deliver Trust to Your Audience

B2B brands function in a very competitive space, so if you manage to build trust between your brand and the audience then you have a great edge in the game.

In order to do that you must amalgamate testimonials, verified reviews, awards, corporate milestones, in your social media and share them at the right places. Not only is social media a great place to gather such social proof, but it also helps convert more leads into loyal customers.

Avoid sounding (too) corporate

The netizens have learned to speak their language across the virtual platforms, and they do not want to hear a business pitch through your social media handles when they’re scrolling through.

The right prospects will always show interest in what you have to offer, regardless of how exciting of an industry it might be for them or not.

To really have great engagement and an overall enjoyable social presence, you might need to inculcate some of the recommendations below.

• Serve content in a social-media friendly fashion

The attention spans of social media consumers are remarkably shorter than what you might want to put out on these platforms. In these cases, you just have to adjust the content to a presentable manner.

Simply put, do not put dreary links, extremely lengthy videos, or long-form posts out there directly, instead use link in bio tool to show all likes and profiles on one page.

Instead, put out snippets of your videos, infographics of the blogs, Twitter threads, and other such ways to keep the viewers interested enough to follow a CTA for the bigger picture of your content efforts.

• Showcase Employee Advocacy

Since your brand’s social media persona is all about building a connection of trust between the customers and you, telling them what your employees believe can greatly help.

The human side of your brand can be brilliantly showcased through the workforce behind your company. The employees can be a great way to amplify your brand’s voice as well as the culture.

This form of content also fares better than most other types for business accounts, which can be a great hack when focussing on building a community online.

Prioritize on B2B favoring platforms

By this point, you must’ve realized that your brand would need to be present across multiple platforms to where your prospect clientele is the most responsive. But the emphasis in this part falls on the customization of the content for each platform that you use.

The same message needs to be presented in the right context of the platform that you use for communicating it. We recommend choosing a fixed number of channels from the ones below to rake in the best results.

• LinkedIn – A multi-faceted B2B network for information sharing, leadership conversations, business networking, and great ad features.
• Twitter – A great space to share ideas in a concise manner, where you can interact with business leaders and customers alike.
• YouTube – An ideal space for putting out information in the form of videos such as how-to tutorials, interviews, commercials, and more.
• Instagram – A growing community for harboring business engagement through social-media-friendly content and great features to promote it.

Analyze to refine your B2B social media strategy performance

Probably the most crucial part of devising a great social media strategy for your company is checking its performance through analytics.

Some of the most trusted platforms that you can use are –

• Google Analytics
• HubSpot Social
• CoSchedule
• BuzzSumo

Through numbers you can really understand if a certain platform is more effective than the other, trying out A/B testing on campaigns, checking how much traffic turns into leads, and many such touchpoints that will later help in perfecting the approach.

Is your Social Media Strategy performing well?

If you stuck out till the end, you might be in the search for a robust B2B social media strategy, or one that actually works.

Whether you’re looking for boosting your brand’s awareness or reach out to a bigger audience of online customers – we can do it all for you. Litmus Branding takes great pride in providing stellar social media marketing services in India, and yours could be one of them. Get in touch now!