5 Ways To Improve Your B2B Social Media Marketing Strategy

In the B2B world, sales cycles can be long and retention is a continual challenge. Social media is a way to focus on accelerating connections and shortening lead times while also helping to retain existing customers (read our Social Media Pocket Guide for additional strategic insight).

If you’re looking for ways to improve client retention while attracting new prospects through B2B social media marketing, check out these five helpful tips:

You can’t improve your B2B social media marketing strategy unless you understand what goals you’re trying to reach. According to Search Engine Land, “social media has the potential to drive the hundreds of small actions along the way that result in the sale.”¹ Even if your ultimate goal is making the sale, it’s important to identify the actions and touch points along the way where social media can nurture your leads.²

Social media has the potential to drive the hundreds of small actions along the way that result in the sale.³
– Search Engine Land

Here are a few questions to ask yourself to better understand your customer’s actions and define your B2B social media goals:

• Are you gaining more knowledge to build more robust customer profiles?
• Are you driving more traffic to your website from social media? More email sign ups?
• Are your Net Promoter Score (NPS®) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) improving?
• Are leads converting to sales more quickly?

Just because you’re a B2B company doesn’t mean your content has to be ho-hum. Making an emotional connection with your buyers is just as important for B2B as B2C. Remember, you’re selling to a person, not a company. One excellent way to make a connection is through video content. Instead of dryly explaining your offering’s features, think of how to tell a compelling story to illustrate each benefit. “Online video can take many forms, from simple promo videos, diaries, and testimonials to architectural flythroughs, timelapse, animations, and more.”⁴

Want to take your B2B social media video content to the next level? Since users spend 3x longer watching video when it’s live,⁵ produce a scheduled show on YouTube or Facebook Live. Software provider SAP store did just that. Through Facebook Live, they created a series of half-hour programs in an interview-style show hosted by a social media influencer. To add another level of engagement, they took live questions from fans.⁶

Facebook Live is a gift that B2B brands should be exploiting for greater trust, engagement, and reach.⁷
– Social Media Examiner

Influencer marketing is not just for companies using Instagram stars to sell cosmetics, headphones, or healthy snacks. Customers value the opinions of other customers no matter what you’re selling. Influencers can explain the benefits of your products or services on a personal level without coming off too “salesy.” Enlist them to show off your product through a review, by sparking discussion, or by producing content for your social channels. Note that influencers can be employees too since no one understands your products and services like they do.

Customers value the opinions of other customers no matter what you’re selling.

For B2B marketers, LinkedIn is proven to be the most effective of the major social media platforms — 80% of leads come from LinkedIn, which means that all other social media networks combined amount to only 20% of leads. Whether promoting whitepapers to high-level decision makers through Dynamic Ads or inviting prospects to your latest webinar with sponsored InMail, B2B companies are using LinkedIn ad campaigns to target specific audiences. We can’t tell you exactly what Linkedin Ad strategies will work best for your business, but we can tell to test multiple campaigns across all social media channels, measure performance and optimize accordingly.

Check out 4 Ways to Boost Your LinkedIn Marketing Strategy for more tips on using LinkedIn as a content distribution channel and source for generating quality leads.

Speaking of leads, do you know how many are coming from each of your social media networks, and which of those are converting to buyers? In addition to tracking which posts and channels are generating the most engagement, the best way to measure the effectiveness of your B2B social media strategy and improve it is by tracking lead attribution.

According to Marketing Land, there is more than one social media lead attribution model to consider. The single-touch model attributes leads to the first channel where a prospect discovered your brand or the last point before conversion. This model gives you an incomplete view of each platform’s performance. A multi-touch model “allows you to measure the effectiveness of each and every touch point that leads to the ultimate conversion,”⁸ which gives a deeper understanding of your metrics so you can make smarter decisions to optimize your B2B social media efforts. This is particularly helpful when trying to determine which channels you can eliminate because they aren’t influencing conversions.⁹

For more information on improving your marketing strategy on social, read our Social Media Pocket Guide.

¹ Search Engine Land - How To Run A Successful B2B Social Media Marketing Campaign
² Search Engine Land - How To Run A Successful B2B Social Media Marketing Campaign
³ Search Engine Land - How To Run A Successful B2B Social Media Marketing Campaign
⁴ Adweek - Why B2B Marketing Still Lacks Emotional Appeal
⁵ Social Media Today - Top 5 Facebook Video Statistics for 2016 [Infographic]
⁶ Social Media Examiner - 5 Ways B2B Marketers Use Facebook
⁷ Social Media Examiner - 5 Ways B2B Marketers Use Facebook
⁸ Marketing Land - Two social media attribution models to use instead of single-touch
⁹ Marketing Land - Two social media attribution models to use instead of single-touch