3 Easy Steps to a Successful B2B Strategy
When it comes to B2B social media marketing and what’s considered a success, most people in the field of B2B sales are unlikely to give it any praise. In most cases if you were to ask a B2B company what they thought of the whole process of social media and lead generation, they’ll laugh and say its non-existent (do you have any source or website for this?). I’m going to take a wild bet here and say that they’re social strategy sucks.
Whilst everyone else gives their social strategy the time off, you can be sitting down and getting hyper focused with your approach. Besides if everyone else has a lack of adoption of B2B social strategies that means there’s less clutter out there to try and get over. It’s a win-win situation and all for you.
So firstly we need to get an idea of what the mindset is of someone who is tasked with a B2B social strategy. They’ve probably been told that social will be considered a success when it becomes a viable lead generation tool, one that brings in something more than followers and Likes. So with this mindset the B2B marketer (who in most cases is a member of the sales team and is tasked with dedicating a couple of hours per week on social) then goes about promoting the company and most importantly promoting the products that you offer with an added reminder as to why they’re the best at it.
This style of social strategy is destined to fail, a very slow and long winded failure. All you need is to flip the switch on one or two aspects of your strategy and the difference will be visible right away.
1. Designate Someone:
You should have someone specifically working on the social strategy, it’s not just about a simple update or share of a company topic, it’s about communicating throughout the web (which is huge by the way) to your audience in the hope they become customers.
When you’ve got the social strategy handled by someone else who’s got a whole host of other things on their plate it’s unlikely they will give social the focus and attention it deserves. Make sure that someone who is designated to the role already has some understanding of your company. Social media should be used as a medium for communications with prospective customers therefore response to key traffic/audience will need to be efficient and quick — there’s rarely enough time out there to be able to go and ask around what the right answer to a question might be.
2. Content Strategy:
Run a keyword research, compile your findings of successful articles that rank well and see how you can add to their content. This will ensure you have an understanding of the content out there and will push you to create your own content strategy.
By taking time to check your metrics and look deeply into who your followers are you’ll be able to see what content is loved and what doesn’t work so well. The end game here is for you to create exceptionally educational content that helps and guides your audience — become a thought leader in the industry and instantly you’ve got leads — people love to follow the best and smartest in their industry.
Content strategy takes away a lot of trial and error but it helps if you start by looking at who the key influencers in your industry are and what they are working on or writing, and if you can get their input, do it!
Realistically a content strategy is all about knowing what’s coming up, having it all done in good time and being able to build hype, maintain the hype and follow it up with something else from analyzing the data.
3. Give it Time
This is the most crucial aspect of any social strategy. For many companies the seniors just want business and that means leads and sales being a numbers game, managers know that if X calls are made today then the % chance of a lead coming in increases. With social being hard to track and monitor it begins to fall down the rankings for lead generation.
Given time though, most decent social and content strategies can and do begin to work incredibly well. However it’s a case of testing and learning constantly before a single effective and efficient strategy is found.
Most B2B managers need to take a step back and give the social strategy time to see fruition; otherwise their lack of patience will just turn the social strategy into another wasted opportunity. Social is a long term investment so long as the investment is made into the right areas of social.
