How to “organically” strengthen your B2B brand presence through social media marketing?

As the average cost for advertising on Facebook becomes higher and higher, it seems like marketers currently have fewer areas to encourage the interaction between their brands and the target audience. However, I observed that there’s still room for improvement while analyzing our new client’s social media circumstances. Should the companies invest more in advertising budget if they want to get more traffic and more leads? To be honest, there’s still many “organic” ways to engage your followers, make them trust your brand then the boost in the trust will result in more engagement, more followers, and more traffic. That’s what I suggest our social media clients to do before spending a huge advertising budget, even for the B2B companies.

Below are the four key points that I suggest marketers to do while optimizing the company’s social media, especially for Taiwanese local brands or global ones which want to be localized in Taiwan:

Point 1: visual branding

incorporate the branding into the design, including logo, brand color schemes, and the brand’s unique style.

Brand consistency across all marketing touchpoints is a challenge for every company, let alone each social network. The first question you would have is: how to ensure customers recognize my brand even if it’s their first time seeing the brand on social media?

1. The basics can be done right away:
   Make sure to have a consistent logo, color palette, biography, and boilerplate. If you are a marketer at the local branch, make sure that all the basic brand materials mentioned above you plan to publish on the local social networks are consistent with the ones on the global channels.
2. Let’s go further: make sure that the post materials including colors, fonts, and formats are consistent on all the social channels. You can define a visual brand guideline to include fonts, their uses, colors, and other brand elements then make your marketing team follow it.

Point 2: brand voice and tone

Social media is about showing off who your business is, so try to embody it in brand voice.

You might have a brand voice for your other marketing focuses, the things you have to do next is to extend that to the social media platforms and make it differentiated based on the traits of different social networks. For example, keep your brand professional on LinkedIn but it's okay to have some humorous posts on Facebook. If you don’t have a defined brand voice yet, don’t worry you can still figure it out by identifying your target audience and what they expect to gain from the channel.

Point 3: time is money

The content should catch the target audience’s attention at first glance and drive them to read to the end.

Did you know that the average human’s attention span is… shorter than Goldfish? Yes, it’s true, the results of the research show that the average human attention span has fallen to 8 seconds! So it would be good to use an eye-catching title indicating the main points of the post and make your content easy to understand.

Point 4: a two-way street

Identify your target audience, deliver the relevant content to them then build meaningful, mutually beneficial relationships.

Remember before the brands promote the services and products via social networks, social media are the channels on which people connect with each other. If your brand doesn’t get much attention on those channels, you should re-consider with whom your brand wants to communicate (who are the correct target audience)? and what content do they like? Did you deliver valuable contents to them?

For example, I am cooperating with an international semiconductor company on the social media project, one of our goals is to localize this Dutch brand into the Taiwan market and recruiting more local talents. In this case, we won’t use all the contents from the client’s headquarter and promote Dutch culture in an Asian market. Firstly, we recognized our target audience would be the students with relevant backgrounds and young professionals in the industry. After trying diverse contents from different topic direction, I find that the posts related to the client's technology perform the best. That’s why I decided to create a series of posts that introduce the high-tech innovation this company has and the theory behind their complicated equipment which is the key to support TSMC, one of the largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world. The series gets the target audience’s attention quickly and gains an average of 1k likes, 30 comments, and 50 shares after being published by 2 weeks.

Thank you for reading and don’t hesitate to share your opinion in the comments!