5 Ways to take your B2B social media marketing to the next level

Who’s your audience?

Before you start implementing your social media plan you need to concentrate your effort on finding your ideal customers. Stand up comedy attendees come from different backgrounds, but they share one thing in common: they are there to watch your stand up comedy. So you need to know how to engage efficiently with all these different demographics and personalities. The concept is the same when it comes to managing social media. Users differ from one social platform to another. Your job is to harmonize all those different users, which are your target audience in order to keep them visiting and engaging with your business.

If you are creating personas for a B2B business you need to ask these questions so you can understand who they are and what they care about:

• What is your job role in life?Your title?
• What industry or industries does your company work/is your role in?
• What are you responsible for?
• What are your biggest challenges?
• Age, Family, Education
• Do you use the internet to research vendors or products?If yes, how do you search for information?

It takes some time to create your specific personas but it pays off throughout the customer lifecycle, not only for getting people to know your brand but also in attracting potential buyers, converting them to leads, customers and finally to happy promoters.

Be remembered

Once you found your personas information you need to start applying your marketing strategy by finding out how you are going to engage with your audience across the different social channels.

Just like the standup comedy example in which some people from your audience are really looking out to hear some good funny quotes regarding politics some other just want to hear some funny jokes about celebrities. So your content really needs to be tailored to your target audience’s preferences. You need to decide if your content will be based on: text posts, images, webinars, or a mix of all of the above.

The other thing you will need to do is to search and decide where your target audience “hangs out”. Choosing the right communications channels isn’t easy. As a B2B firm you need to combine sales data with desk research so as to establish your personas job functions and key characteristics. You need to choose between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat or Google+. Take this as a tip: Linkedin is the key B2B network. Econcultancy suggests that it accounts for 64% of visits to all corporate websites after tracking two million visits to 60 sites over two years.

Educate first

The most important thing to do when implementing your digital marketing strategy is to build a relationship with your audience. In the end, that’s what social media is all about.

Buyers conduct a great amount of research online before even considering contacting your business. So your Website or your Social media page needs to solve engage with their questions and solve their problems.

So create educational content on your website that shows awareness of the problem and offers solutions for your potential buyers problems.

Listen for feedback

Conversations about your brand can take place almost anywhere, so it’s a good practise for B2B business to use social media as a customer service tool that adds transparency and can help in providing real-time responses to your customers.

Refine and Rearrange

Whatever communications channels you are using, always evaluate your campaigns in the end and if something it’s not working, leave it behind.

So now that you ‘ve attracted your potential buyers, you need to convert them to visitors, leads and in the end to customers so that after they complete their purchase can be converted to happy promoters.