Best Practices for B2B Social Marketing

Social marketing is nearly inescapable in the modern marketing sphere. Similar to celebrities’ need to keep their fans up to date on their daily doings, companies have to be taking advantage of the opportunity to reach customers, peers, and prospects through social media. These channels provide the chance to connect with business updates on a personal level.

However, B2B companies struggle with social marketing. Not only can it be difficult to determine the value of the time and resources put into it, but it is also a challenge to determine what content, original or shared, is most effective and when. Social marketing is still not as well understood in the B2B world as in B2C. All it takes is a little guidance, and a lot of experience!

As a social marketer for a B2B organization (Relationship One), I’ve experienced the same struggles and have gained a toolbox of best practices. I’m here to help you become a Kardashian in the world of B2B social marketing.

Reach a relevant audience

Modern marketers know that having a defined target audience is crucial to maximizing engagement. But once you have this defined, how do you reach these targets via social media? Good question.

At Relationship One, we use Oracle Social Relationship Management for nearly all of our social marketing. Within this platform, there is a capability to set up “Topics”, which search the web (social media accounts, message boards, blogs, etc) for keywords and other specifications.

In the screenshot above, we are targeting anyone or anything talking about the Oracle  Marketing Cloud. SRM also gives us the option to dig deeper into a specific geographic area or medium using the Advanced and Targeting options. This comes in handy when you are looking to engage with people of a certain area for an upcoming event or if you are trying to expand into another region.

LinkedIn Paid Advertising

If you aren’t using paid advertising on LinkedIn yet, you should be. Why? Because LinkedIn is the king of B2B social platforms. Due to it’s professional purpose, you can better target the people who will take your ads seriously. Not only are there 450 million members today, 3 million companies are also members. That is a lot of opportunity! This fact, combined with the platform’s awesome targeting options should make it easy to invest in ads.

At Relationship One, we’ve found that sponsored content give us the most success. We started our advertising adventure by experimenting with small budgeted campaigns in which we tested various targeting options (communities/groups, geographies, keywords, imagery) in order to see what was working before we made a larger investment.

Here are the other advertising options LinkedIn provides. 

My best advice as a B2B marketer is to do as much experimentation as possible. No resource online is going to tell you what will work best for your business, you need to get in there and see for yourself!

Luckily, LinkedIn has made it easy to implement and measure success. Their targeting options are straight-forward to understand and their analytics will allow you to see how each of your campaigns stack up against one another.

Invest time daily

You get what you give when it comes to social marketing. If you want people to read and engage with your posts instead of scrolling past them, be thoughtful about every post and comment. Engage like you mean it. Social media marketing is way more than posting and walking away. It’s a continuous forum for sharing, discussing and connecting.

Can’t think of anything original to say? Curate! Content curation is a strategy marketers have used for some time, but not widely on social media. In order to be an industry expert, it is crucial to reshare, comment on, and promote content from sources you believe are credible or provide value related to your business. This not only shows your followers you are looking out for the best content for them, it create social partnerships in which others will hopefully curate or engage with your content.

Regardless of whether your posting something original or curating content, before posting, make sure you ask yourself a few simple questions.

• Who am I speaking to? This helps you tailor your messaging to resonate with a specific audience. You want the post to feel specified to them.
• What is the value? You need to be sure your post has some sort of value for the end target. They won’t pay attention otherwise.
• What is my call-to-action? This is crucial for engagement and analytics. Whether it be to click on a link, download a white paper or watch a video, your posts should ask your audience to do something. Not only does it engage them, but its important for you to monitor the success of your posts.

We use Oracle SRM to monitor and engage on social. Check it out.

The Engage inbox allows us to monitor what people are saying about Relationship One and other important subject matters specific to our industry online. If someone retweets, likes, comments, or engages with our brand in any way online, we know it immediately. We can quickly answer questions, engage in a discussion, or reply to a negative sentiment in a timely manner. This keeps our brand credible and helps us to build strong relationships with followers as we continue to interact with them.

Use data to drive decisions

Which social channels should you be using? How do you know when the best time to engage is? Do your followers like images, videos, infographics or gifs? Data is your best buddy for social marketing.

It seems logical to post on every possible social channel because more people seeing your message means more engagement, right? Wrong. Figure out which channels are worth your precious time and resources. Experiment on different channels and change up your post content, timing, call to action, media and so on.

Use the analytics natively included in each platform or invest in a tool to tell you exactly what works best for your company. Relationship One has been using Oracle SRM for a couple years, and we have only recently discovered what our optimal post looks like. It took plenty of trial and error before we found a formula that worked for us. Thanks to the Listen & Analyze feature, we now know which channels and what type of content drive the most engagement.

The one takeaway I urge you to walk away with is to start experimenting and monitoring your social posts now! Only you know your audience and only you will be able to master how to speak to them via social.

I hope I have given you a good starting point, if you have any other tactics or resources to share please let me know by commenting below, or contacting Relationship One!