B2B Social Media Marketing

Be at the forefront of your target B2B buyers by leveraging the right social media platforms. Expand your reach, increase your brand visibility, and establish thought-leadership to generate more leads.

Social media marketing for businesses is a powerful way to reach your prospects. For B2B sellers, social media marketing is vastly underused and often misunderstood. Your business avatars are using social media channels. They’re also using major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, and Pinterest. You should be doing what you can to get your services and products in front of them.

Great marketing on social media can bring remarkable success to your business. Social media is perhaps the best way to introduce and reinforce your branding.

Additionally, tying social media marketing with search engine marketing will boost your digital visibility and target audience reach. The better you do with social media marketing for your business, the better your business will do in the search engines. This means more of your business avatars will be able to know about what your business offers.

The challenge is, most business owners are not aware of how much social media content and shares play into search engine rankings. Therefore, on this page, we will explain how it all works together. We will also share how Crushing B2B can help you with all of it as part of our digital strategy solutions.

Social Media Marketing 101: What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of marketing that involves creating and sharing content on social media networks. This type of marketing includes activities like posting text, images, and videos on social channels. It also includes sharing other content like articles and blogs.

The biggest part of SMM that most people fail to do is driving engagement.

You must remember that most people like to go on social media networks for entertainment and to talk about themselves or their interest. Most B2B buyers use social media channels such as LinkedIn for professional networking and to seek solutions to their business problems.

Which is why businesses need to find a way to entertain and educate their audience outside of simply marketing to them directly.

Our team of digital marketing professionals excels at SMM just as much as we do search engine marketing (SEM). We have defined the 14 Step Crushing B2B Digital Strategy System, so we can help business owners put it all together in a way that makes sense.

Our CB2B implementers and training team will help you develop a solid social media marketing plan that is specific to fit your business avatars.

How to be Successful in Social Media Marketing

Everything we do at CB2B follows the DMAIC process. DMAIC is an acronym for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control. When you have a strategy that is built using the DMAIC process, you set your business up for success.

Successful social media marketing starts with defining your goals

Before you do any SMM or SEM, consider and define your business’s goals. Marketing on social media or in search engines without a plan is like hiking an unknown jungle without a guide. You’ll have fun at first, but you’ll most likely get lost as you go further and perhaps get eaten alive.

Here are some questions to ask when defining your social media marketing goals:

What are you hoping to achieve through social media marketing?
Who is your business avatar and what social media platforms do they spend their time on?
How does your business avatar use social media?
What is the main message you want to send to your business avatars?

There are a lot of questions beyond these you should ask yourself before putting your social media marketing in action. Our CB2B implementers will help you answer those questions. Keep in mind that your business type should inform and drive your SMM strategy.

For example, an e-commerce or travel business can get a lot of value from Instagram or Pinterest. These types of businesses do well on these platforms due to their being highly visual in nature.

A B2B, SaaS, or tech company usually finds more success on LinkedIn and Twitter. This is because these types of companies are expected to share knowledge that is related to their product and service offerings. Plus, their ideal buyers are professionals which are best found on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Still, all these social media platforms help with SEM if you’re doing things right. Our CB2B team will help you maximize your ROI no matter what type of business you have. We will help align your SMM to SEM to achieve utmost success.

How Social Media Marketing Can Help You Make Sales

Measuring the results of your SMM as well as its impact on your SEM is vital to long-term success. If you’re doing your social media marketing right, the results will come much faster than solely focusing on an SEM strategy. Organic SEO may take a long time to show results, but aligning it with SMM can show gains by looking at the following:

Increase in website traffic
More sales leads generated
Escalation of conversions
Raising and strengthening brand awareness
Creation of a positive brand association
Identification of new business avatars
Improvement in communication and existing satisfaction
Helping feed SEM results by indexing links and producing searches about your business

The bigger and more engaged your audience is on social media the better. You must remember that the B2B buyer’s customer journey has changed. Gone are the days when B2B companies would go door-to-door, knocking on doors to do a sales pitch. With the convenience of social media, B2B companies can now leverage the platforms to share how their solutions can help their target buyers.

Use Tools to Analyze SMM Data

Data analysis will prove if something is working or not. If you measure

We will help you ANALYZE the data your SMM produces

Our team, being strong followers of the DMAIC process, has a lot of experience analyzing data from SMM. They’ll also be able to help you gauge your results and adjust the digital marketing strategy on an on-going basis. We will analyze and evaluate your social media efforts, the website traffic and specific goals using analytics tools.

Some of our favorite monitoring tools include:

Google Trends
TwitterFall
HootSuite
SEMRUSH

Our team will do all sorts of work to get a firm understanding of how your SMM efforts can improve. We will also make sure that your team knows what to do to help with the effort in-house.

Best Social Media Marketing Tips

So you want to start social media marketing? Here are a few tips to help get going on the right foot:

Social Media Content Planning — The first place to start with SMM is planning because you never want to do anything in business on a whim. Successful SMM requires that you have a good plan. We suggest that you start by taking a look at what your competitors are doing. This should give you an idea of what’s working and not working so well for them. You’ll also want to do some keyword research to get an idea of what you’re business avatars are searching for.
Great Social Content — Content reigns supreme in online marketing. Therefore, you should always strive to post content that regularly offers value to people especially your business avatars. There should be a good mix of business and pleasure no matter what products or services that you offer. Think of how brands like Wendy’s are using social media to grow their share of their market space.
Create A Strong Brand Identity — You should tailor your SMM to fit the platforms that you’re using. However, you should also be as consistent as possible with content, so you build a strong brand identity that people like and trust. Building trust on social media with your business avatars is so important for making money.

Bonus SMM Tips You Should Know

Social Media for SEO — SMM is perfect for sharing your website and blog content with your followers and friends. Social media shares are also great for improving your DA. Most business owners do not realize how much good SMM can help your SEO efforts.
Curate Relevant or Entertaining Content — It’s also smart to curate relevant content. Every time you share internet content of any kind, you’re telling your audience a little about your business or personal brand. Sharing good content can make you look smart, seem fun, or build trust. You can also find good content a lot easier than creating it on your own. Mix it up.
Track Competitors — We have been able to turn around a lot of struggling businesses for our clients by simply seeing where their competition is succeeding. Sometimes it’s best to not try to reinvent the wheel. For example, if your competition is killing it on Twitter and you’re not even on Twitter, then you should probably get on Twitter. You can also see what hashtags and content are working for them by watching their engagement. If you see what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, then you just have to do it better.
Measure Success with Analytics — Google Analytics can help you track your SMM success due to the way it shows you how visitors get to your site. You can also attach tracking tags to each SMM campaign. This will help you know what’s working and what’s not working. You should also use what each platform offers for tracking.
Social Media Public Relations — There are times when your employees or upset customers and your competition will do things that hurt your business. This is why some business owners fear social media. However good old fashioned PR fixes a lot.

How to Choose the Best Social Media Platforms for Marketing

Here’s a brief overview of how to use SMM according to each platform’s unique user base and environment. Different social media marketing sites require different approaches to succeed. Therefore, it makes sense to adjust your strategy to fit each social media platform.

Using Facebook for Social Media Marketing

Facebook’s casual, friendly environment requires an active SMM strategy. Start by creating a Facebook business page and including all the info you can about your company. Know that Facebook is a very visual platform so make sure you’re using good images and colors.

Facebook is all about fun because people on there to relax and chat with friends. Facebook also has a small organic reach due to its pay-to-play approach. The more entertaining your content the better it will do. You should plan on having a cost-effective ad strategy if you want to succeed on Facebook with most products and services. The more success you have with their paid ads the better you will do organically over time as you build fans.

Using Pinterest for Social Media Marketing

Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social media marketing trends and the world’s second largest search engine. Pinterest’s image-centered platform is ideal for retail, but anyone can use it to drive traffic. You can also use Pinterest and IFTTT to team up for sharing on different social media networks.

Using Twitter for Social Media Marketing

Twitter is the social media platform that most people don’t seem to understand. It’s also one of the best ones for SMM. There are many reasons you see Twitter handles on all the major sporting events, newscast, and everywhere else on TV. Twitter works.

If you learn how to mix your tweets about specials, discounts, and other business with content with fun, then you’re going to be successful with Twitter. Twitter is a great way to nurture relationships with your followers and customers if you’re good at responding. This social media platform revolves around dialog with followers. It can also add a lot of SEO value to your website and YouTube videos too!

Using LinkedIn for Social Media Marketing

LinkedIn is the most professional social media network. The LinkedIn groups are a great way to network within your industry and with your business avatars. It’s also a great platform for posting jobs and general employee networking. If you sell B2B products or services, then you really need to be on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn also allows your customers and professional network to give you and your business recommendations. Recommendations can make you appear more credible for new customers. There are also over 630 million people on LinkedIn with 2 new people joining every second. That is insane.

Using YouTube for Social Media Marketing

YouTube is the number one place for creating and sharing video content. It can also be an incredibly powerful SMM and SEO tool. Most people create videos in the hopes of going viral. However, anyone that has been trying knows how hard that can be. There are plenty of really amazing videos that no one will ever see. Focus on creating useful, instructive “How-to” videos and you’re going to get results if you do the basics correctly. YouTube videos with the right content, title, and descriptions can do very well on Google.

Improve your SMM as you go

The best thing about SMM is the internet, for the most part, has a short memory so you can always improve. No one will remember how bad you did when you start doing better. You can improve every bit of your SMM as you learn and grow.

Control Your Social Media Content

One of the best things about social media is the ability everyone has to control what sticks around. You can always delete social media posts and clean up your timeline. You can also highlight the positive things you’re doing.

Summing up SMM

No matter what you’re doing on social media there is always room to improve. Our SMM team knows all about it because we have been in the industry for a long time. We’ve also made most of the mistakes that people can make on social media. The 14 Step Crushing B2B Digital Strategy System is the fruit from a lot of labor, trial, and error. We have spent a lot of time and money figuring all the different social media platforms and the best ways to build a brand on them. Please feel free to schedule a consultation anytime.