Social media B2B marketing has come a long way from dull, text-packed infographics and promotional posts. Modern B2B social media marketing is a healthy mix of educational, entertaining, authority-building, benefits-led, and collaborative posts on various platforms.
But before you jump into investing resources into social media channels, you must understand your ideal client’s journey, touchpoints, and pain points to solve them in the best possible way.
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Understand client touchpoints on social media
The modern B2B client does not follow a straight path, such as Google search → Clicking through to your website → Navigating to the conversion page → Booking a sales call → Closing the deal. That rarely happens.
Today, your clients are entertaining and educating themselves simultaneously on social media. If they don’t see the value or connect with your story, they’ll be quick to unfollow you.
How to map customer touchpoints for effective B2B social media marketing?
Set a clear objective and collect data on the KPIs you want to track.
Identify your target customer personas. Your Ideal Client Persona (ICP) should be well-defined.
If your branding and marketing team has a defined ICP that you’ve been targeting for a while, it’s a good idea to refresh the research and chart it out again to account for the generational and behavioral shift. Millennials have moved up the corporate ladder, the pandemic has caused some fundamental lifestyle changes, and the C-suite’s priorities have changed.
Research the behavior and pain points of the ICP.
Build an omnichannel presence to map their essential touchpoints and help you understand their journey.
Survey your existing customers to understand their journey and friction points.
Set a schedule for reviewing and course-correcting.
Social Media B2B Marketing Strategy
With social media, it’s always show—don’t tell and don’t sell. That’s not to say you shouldn’t showcase your products and promote your services; it’s more about how you present them in a way that your prospects know how it will benefit them right from the first interaction.
Identify opportunities
Social media is an ever-evolving space. Use social media platforms to show the world what’s possible, share your vision, and be open to incredible innovation. Identify opportunities, explore insane collaborations, and be an early adopter of technologies.
Use social proof to your advantage
Show how your customers are successful—precisely what benefits they enjoy most with your product or service. How have you impacted the lives of your clients? And what can you do for your prospects?
Video is better for building trust. Keep it concise and entertaining, lead with a hook, and close with a resounding message.
Most marketers suggest that B2B videos be 2 minutes or less. You can choose longer formats if the need for value-rich content is there in your niche, but make sure you create snippets from it and repurpose that content.
B2B Social Media Platforms and Channels
You may use every social media platform for B2B marketing. But you must thoroughly research whether your audience is actively engaging on that platform. If so, what kind of posts are they engaging with?
Currently, the following platforms are preferred by B2B marketers:
LinkedIn: 97% of B2B marketers trust LinkedIn to be the best platform for content marketing. The platform’s numerous search filters and targeting options help you reach out to your ideal prospects and start a conversation organically. You can seamlessly engage in conversations with industry leaders, prospective buyers, and influencers who may benefit from or are looking for recommendations on products and services.
Twitter: A fantastic platform for building a distinct brand voice and personalized interaction with clients, Twitter is where brands stay current and relevant. Many brands offer client support accounts on Twitter for increased customer advocacy.
Twitter is also an excellent platform for social listening, gauging market and brand sentiment, and identifying content opportunities.
Facebook: Yes, it’s relevant for most B2B businesses. Meta found that business decision-makers spend 74% more time on Facebook than others. Facebook groups are an essential space where you can build brand authority and find common ground for conversation with your target group. While organic reach is often limited on the platform, you can count on Facebook ads to grab the right eyeballs.
Instagram: Instagram is not just for dancing Gen Z with fancy filters. It is a platform that over 200 million users use to interact with at least one business page daily. It’s a highly engaging platform with visually appealing and value-rich content that can grab eyeballs. Influencer marketing also sees a good response on this platform.
YouTube : It is an incredibly powerful platform for building trust and educating your target group. YouTube is the trusted platform for 87% of global video marketers. More than 122 million daily active users stream billions of videos on YouTube.
Test. Analyze. Repeat.
Get comfortable with emerging content formats and test everything, from your Instagram bio to LinkedIn posts to Facebook Ads. Commonly, these forms of content perform the best:
Reels on Instagram
Benefits or offers led carousel ads on Facebook
Retargeted Personalized Ads on Facebook and Instagram
Thought leadership and unique take on personal LinkedIn profile
Case Studies and Updates on the brand’s LinkedIn page
Community-building content on Twitter
Educational videos on YouTube
Tips to support the entire customer experience journey on social media
Content Bank
Now that you know what kind of content works and where, start building a content repository for various stages of the funnel in relatable, valuable, shareable, and relevant formats. Begin with your primary channel, and you can then repurpose the best-performing content for your secondary channels to optimize the content creation time.
Account for Dark Social
Dark Social media is what you can’t track. This part of social media is mainly used for personal conversations. This includes WhatsApp marketing and sharing on Messenger applications. You can share value-packed snippets easily over chats. Optimizing your blogs and video content for shareability, segmenting your contacts based on their stage, and personalizing the communication to their needs can result in an uptick in ROI.
Collaborate with experts
Brand collaborations and strategic partnerships can play a huge role in winning attention and earning the trust of top and bottom-of-funnel prospects, respectively.
Whatever marketing efforts you execute, social media marketing can be the missing puzzle piece and the thread that ties everything together – when done right, it can transform investment into results. Social media B2B marketing is not a choice but a must for all winning brands.
B2B marketing is not a choice but a must for all winning brands.