When we think about B2B businesses with a great social presence, many great examples, including IBM, Adobe, Microsoft, Hubspot, and many others, come to our minds. 

Have you ever wondered what these companies are doing when it comes to building and managing their social media presence across several different platforms? 

The answer is simple: they are finding the right balance between innovative social media marketing strategies, understanding the audience requirements from content, engaging a broader audience through unique ways, and building communities around their brands.

Projected for 2023, the global count of social media users is expected to reach 4.89 billion, with 75% of B2B buyers using these internet communities to make purchasing decisions. 

But just having a social media presence is not cutting it anymore. The audience demands transparency, responsiveness, and value from brands on social networks.

To fulfill that requirement, B2B businesses need to know how to build social media marketing strategies for building their brand, engaging potential clientele, staying informed about the industry, driving sales, and boosting social media ROI.  

So Keep Reading..!

What is B2B social media marketing?

B2B stands for business-to-business. B2B social media marketing utilizes digital or social media platforms to market products or services to potential business clientele. 

Social media marketers at B2C companies use various digital channels, primarily social media for lead generation. A B2B sales plan requires digital marketers to use an entirely different approach. 

They must adopt a more strategic mindset to connect with business proprietors and key decision-makers. Subsequently, they cultivate connections that have the potential to culminate in substantial purchase agreements.

Every social platform can easily find a role in B2B marketing. Still, the equilibrium and nature of a social media plan will look different for a B2B social media strategy instead of one focused on consumers.

Why does B2B social media marketing matter?

The overarching advantage of social media marketing lies in its ability to grow organic social media reach, ultimately boosting sales. 

Although most B2B sales aren't conducted online, social media platforms immensely contribute to pinpointing and fostering potential customers. Hence, it positions your product to resonate with them while concurrently establishing and nurturing relationships with them.

The benefit of social media for B2B businesses

Social media offers numerous benefits to B2B marketers and businesses, but below are some of the most essential social media marketing advantages: 

Growing brand reach and awareness 

Increasing your B2B company’s online presence over social media platforms helps promote brand reach and awareness and allows you to construct long-lasting relationships with your customers. 

Your social media interactions and behaviors send a pretty clear message about the type of business you are, so here are a few things to keep in mind to ensure you successfully increase exposure through social media:

1. Post or publish relevant and high-quality content frequently. 
2. Remain consistent and up-to-date with your brand and industry. 
3. Interact with your audience through comments/messages. 

Keep posting valuable content for your audience to share further, thus increasing your brand visibility, alluring fresh clientele, and positioning yourself as a frontrunner within their industry.

If you are suffering from the “lack of ideas” problem and not sure about “what to post” and “how to post,” then these five habits can help you generate unlimited content ideas at your fingertips. 

Qualified lead generation 

As your B2B company’s social media presence increases, new leads are likely to be boosted due to the increased website traffic. Now, businesses must use these social media platforms' potential to foster customer engagement and relationships and implement a wide range of strategies, such as sponsored ads or personalized business proposals, to entice well-suited leads and guide them toward conversion.

Improving client engagement and loyalty

Social media platforms enable B2B enterprises to effectively engage with their audience, delivering optimal social customer service and fostering positive growth in customer loyalty and relationships.

How to create a B2B social media marketing strategy?

A solid B2B social media marketing strategy is imperative for short and long-term business goal-setting for your B2B social media plan. 

Here’s how you can create a social media plan for your brand.  

1. Unify marketing goals with business objectives 

Your B2B social media marketing strategy must provide satisfactory responses to the following two inquiries: 

1. What are the business objectives of the company?
2. How will B2B social media marketing contribute to their attainment?

It's worth noting that, unlike B2C social media marketing, which often emphasizes boosting sales as the outcome, B2B social media strategies center around longer-term business goals. 

In fact, the top 3 overall goals for B2B content marketers are: 

1. Create brand awareness (87%)
2. Build trust and credibility (81%)
3. Educate audiences (79%)

Suppose the B2B businesses and marketers focus all their social marketing efforts toward achieving those three objectives. In that case, they can easily grow their audience and business, nurture them into becoming potential leads, and ultimately lead to an enhanced social ROI. 

Pro Tips: 

• Don’t forget to merge your company’s internal aims and objectives with the B2B social media marketing strategy because B2B account managers can effectively perform social media competitive analysis, yielding valuable product and industry insights.
• Using the data gained through social media marketing campaigns and experimentation allows businesses to execute growth marketing, boosting customer loyalty. Learn more about growth marketing through these incredible ten websites. 

2. Spotting social opportunities

A productive B2B social media marketing strategy always includes using the S.W.O.T framework, which identifies your competitive landscape's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. 

Engaging in thorough social listening is essential to utilize the S.W.O.T. framework effectively. This practice allows you to vigilantly monitor various social media platforms for any references to your brand, competitor brands, and relevant keywords. 

3. Heed towards customers

Every marketer (B2C or B2B) should clearly understand their target audience, but unfortunately, about half of the B2B content marketers utilize personas as a foundation for shaping content development. 

Within every challenge, an opportunity resides; in this context, it offers you a favorable occasion to secure an edge. Embrace the optimal B2B social media marketing approaches and construct audience and buyer personas.

4. Choose the appropriate social media platform 

As a general rule of thumb, B2B businesses establish their social media presence on platforms where customers are active. But, because an average person bounces between seven different social networks per month, determining the preferred platform might be difficult.

So what’s the solution?

We recommend defining and categorizing the audience through demographic profiles based on things like age, gender, income, education, occupation, or industry, such as home furniture.

Analyzing these demographic profiles helps businesses decide the appropriate social media platform for their marketing efforts.

An overwhelming majority of B2B content marketers employ LinkedIn. Moreover, they ranked it as the most effective organic platform.

Regarding paid social posts, the situation is similar, yet not entirely the same. LinkedIn again takes the lead (80%), with Facebook, X (formally known as Twitter), Instagram, and YouTube in 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th position respectively.

Some of the few other channels that may also be relevant and used for different products and markets, depending on the industry and size of your business, include: 

1. News channel
2. Careers channel
3. Social customer service account 

Ultimately, you have the flexibility to utilize any account, platform, or medium to reach your target audience as long as you can deliver the desired information at the appropriate time and in a suitable location.

5. Identify a different perspective for B2B content 

Initiating conversations and building relationships that ultimately result in long-term sales on social media are two of the founding pillars of B2B social media marketing. 

Your audience won't remain engaged if your content fails to capture their interest. Hence, don't allow the perception of B2B content as mundane to hinder your progress.

Sharing technical details and product specifications periodically is fine, but this shouldn’t be the primary content shared on your social media channels.

Come up with various approaches that enhance the work lives and add enjoyment to the experiences of your followers. Publish or post content and material that brings delight and comfort in various ways. 

Some of the best examples of such content include how-to guides, industry updates, emerging trends, insightful tips, strategic insights, and similar content. 

One way to ensure that your content stands out is by making your employees a part of your content. Give them a shout-out, share their experience, and showcase their achievements. Real people and their voices give a human touch to your social media identity and brand communication, enhancing your recruitment endeavors.

Additionally, be certain to integrate video content; it generates fivefold greater engagement than other forms of content. 

Furthermore, you can also use AI tools to dominate the social media realm by increasing the engagement rate and drive more meaningful interactions with your audience. Learn about the top 10 AI tools that every social media marketer must know to stay ahead of the curve in the competitive digital world of today.

6. Use analytics to evaluate your marketing efforts

Regularly evaluating your B2B social media marketing efforts is crucial to maximize their effectiveness. Nearly all (94%) of the highly accomplished B2B content marketers evaluate the performance of their content, as opposed to merely 60% among the less successful ones.

This is logical; without measuring through distinct metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), how could you accurately gauge the effectiveness of your social content?

But, the metrics and data you must keep track of highly depend on your business objectives. You could center on factors like response time, impressions, engagement rate, conversions, sales, etc. What holds significance is establishing benchmarks and attainable objectives.

Keep a practical perspective regarding the efforts that will yield concrete figures and those that pose challenges in quantification. 

Remember that the ability to measure something doesn't necessarily equate to its importance. Similarly, the difficulty in measuring something doesn't undermine its potential value.

Top tools for B2B social media marketing

Ensure your brand is armed with these top-notch B2B social media marketing tools.

Google Analytics

Obtain a comprehensive view of your B2B social media endeavors through the eyes of Google Analytics. A web analytic service that assists users in recognizing trends and patterns related to visitor interactions on their websites. These features facilitate data collection, analysis, monitoring, visualization, reporting, and integration with other applications. Utilize these insights to fine-tune your strategy effectively.

Salesforce

Salesforce enhances sales, service, and marketing by offering industry-specific products and smooth software integration. 

Additionally, by enabling Salesforce and GA4 integration, users can trace the origins of each lead and opportunity. This advancement leads to improved relationships with potential buyers.

Expandi.io

A LinkedIn automation tool facilitates an effective B2B lead outreach and nurturing through a comprehensive omnichannel strategy. Using intelligent, automated sequences, you can seamlessly connect with prospects on LinkedIn or through email.

Ringblaze

Ringblaze offers valuable assistance in the realm of B2B social media marketing by helping you manage and schedule posts across various platforms, track engagement and analytics, interact with your audience effectively, and ultimately maximize the impact of your social media campaigns. 

UTM Parameters

Urchin Tracking Module or UTM parameters are short text codes that work with analytics programs to track the performance of a webpage or an online marketing campaign across traffic sources and publishing media. 

Vista Social

Vista Social is a feature-packed all-in-one social media management platform built to deliver unparalleled value to marketing agencies, freelancers, and social media managers. They are the most advanced, user-first platform that sets a new benchmark for collaboration, efficiency, and effectiveness in social media marketing. Vista Social supports all major platforms, including Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Threads, and offers endless integrations

Some of the main features are:

• Publish and Boost
• Unified Inbox
• Customizable Reports
• Listening Tools
• Review Management
• Employee Advocacy

Vista Social supports marketers to amplify their efforts and crush their goals, try Vista Social for free!

Final Thoughts

B2B businesses can not afford to shy away from social media anymore. Whether you want to primarily build brand reach and awareness, boost lead generation, or improve client engagement and loyalty, the marketing practices above can help you achieve your business goal. 

When creating a social media marketing strategy, always align your business and marketing objectives, spot social opportunities, choose the appropriate media platform, and evaluate your every effort. 

However, one thing that holds all the components together is the simple fact: Where are your customers? You want to be present where they are most and meet them in the right context. 

In addition, with a cabinet full of social media networks, make sure you don’t spread yourself too thin and only target platforms you want your brand to be present on and develop focused, tailored social media marketing campaigns. If you're finding it challenging to keep up with your social media tasks or need additional support, hiring a virtual assistant could make all the difference.

FAQs

What is the most used social media platform in B2B?

LinkedIn is the most used social media platform in B2B, with about 93% of B2B content marketers using it to promote products and services and connect with audiences.

How are B2B leads generated via social media?

Advertising, outreach, referrals, and influencer marketing are super effective strategies to boost brand awareness, increase web traffic, and drive leads on social media—especially in a B2B context.

What are the 4 pillars of B2B social media marketing?

The four key aspects of B2B social media marketing are Insights, Strategy, Creative, and Metrics. 

About the Author: Jack Chadwick is a highly skilled content marketing specialist with over a decade of experience helping businesses achieve their marketing goals. He has a proven track record of creating effective content marketing strategies that drive traffic, engagement, and conversions. In his free time, Jack enjoys hiking, cooking, and exploring new places.

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