I invited Adrian Cordiner (who founded DigitalRhinos) to write a post about B2B social media for us today.
Do’s and don’ts of social media for B2B companies
For business to business marketing campaigns, you really want to get it right the first time. How you engage with your audience online shows how much or how little you actually understand your audience. Social media for B2B takes analysis and strategy, and like everything else in marketing, it must continuously evolve. The best way to make better marketing decisions is by using real data. Here are a few tips on how to (and how not to) approach your audience and create content they want to click on.
Know your audience
You have to determine where your audience is and decide if your account is going to be global or localized to specific country/location – this is extremely important, as audience location will determine the time of day you share content. Learning when your audience is tuning in, and therefore when to post, is mandatory for any successful campaign. You can easily access all of these details through the analytics sections of your Facebook Business Manager, Twitter and YouTube accounts.
Choosing the right content for your audience
Content creation is easily the hardest thing to get right when it comes to marketing. A slip up in the content creation can cost you an entire campaign. Your content marketing has to be tied into the core marketing efforts of the company as a whole, so before you can expect to nail B2B content marketing successfully, you need to know why you’re doing it. What are your goals in content marketing? Lead generation? Sales or brand activation? Define it. Write it down, and then roll out a content marketing plan that supports those goals. Once you have those goals set, choose your content.
DO Use Imagery – A great photo provides a great opportunity to illustrate and promote your company’s culture, values, and philosophy and to showcase important events.
DO Use Video – not just video, but GREAT video footage. Don’t allow bad videos or imagery representing your brand or product to go online. Quality is the key to success.
In your video content – be straight to the point. Don’t tell the story you think people should hear, tell the story that people want to hear.
Know what is trending socially
Knowing what is trending is one of the most difficult tasks for a marketing department, and especially when your marketing budgets are done annually, you might fall behind rather quickly if you don’t have some sort of marketing clairvoyance. A great tool for monitoring trending content is Buzzsumo where you can search for currently trending content by keyword searches or set up alerts for competitors’ activity and your own content.
Apart from the obvious, and already touched on video content, one of the latest trends for B2B marketing online is live video broadcasting. Two of the apps which make livestreaming possible are called Periscope and Blab – and both are currently creating a ton of buzz in the online world. These two apps are extremely valuable for platforms like e-Learning (creating a live ‘classroom’ for viewers).
Make your campaign easy to access
Mobile devices are currently being used more than any other form of media viewing, so make sure your campaigns and content are easily viewed in mobile format, and don’t forget your website. There’s nothing more tedious than clicking to a seller website, and not being able to navigate on your mobile phone, except maybe not being able to get there at all. Don’t forget to ask yourself “Can people find you?” Optimise your social profiles so that you can be at their thumb tip with ease.
The ultimate goal for a marketing campaign is to brand build, and brand build as effectively as possible, (leading to sales). Don’t lose track of that long-term goal. Always remember the importance of B2C in your B2B campaigns and don’t be afraid to use these techniques that worked before.
Adrian Cordiner accidentally stumbled into digital marketing after starting an online travel company and realizing there was a whole world out there of SEO, SEM, Analytics, CRO and so on that he knew absolutely nothing about. Many years of reading, researching, testing and making lots of mistakes along the way have lead him to where he is today, running his own digital marketing agency (Digital Rhinos) and founding a content marketplace startup (Prozely), still reading, still researching, still testing and hopefully making a few less mistakes.
Lucy is Editor at Corporate Eye
