12 Reasons why your B2B marketing should include social media
It’s a common misconception that business-to-business (B2B) social media marketing isn’t effective in comparison to social media marketing aimed at individual consumers.
This is more than a misguided belief – it’s nonsense!
Social media marketing can work just as well for B2B companies as for business-to-consumer (B2C).
Why?
Because the people representing businesses make purchasing decisions just like consumers do. They look for products or services that meet their needs. They’re looking for ease of use, support, valuable content and great feedback from other customers.
Keep that in mind and you’re off to a great start.
B2B social media marketing has so many potential benefits for businesses. Here are just a few of them:
1. It gives you a direct route to your customers
More than half of the world’s population is now on social media. This means that there’s a better than one-in-two chance that your customers are out there using social platforms.
Now, I’m not a betting person, but those are great odds if you’re looking for the best way to reach potential customers!
All you need. to do is work out which platforms your customers use.
LinkedIn is a professional network where B2B marketing dominates but it may be that the decision-makers that you want to reach are active on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, for example.
You don’t need to be everywhere at once. It’s better to use one or two platforms well than try to appear everywhere but resonate nowhere.
And remember that, even if someone doesn’t want to buy from you today, showing up on social will keep you front of mind for when they do need what you sell.
2. You can gain a greater understanding of what makes your customers tick
Social media platforms offer several ways to learn more about your customers and what matters to them.
As well as the data insights about what you post, you may be able to see (depending on their privacy settings) what groups your potential clients belong to, the pages and brands they like, what they comment on, their contacts and more.
This helps you to build up a picture of your clients that goes so much deeper than their age and location. You can speak to them as a person, not their job function.
And the more you know about your clients, the easier it will be to get your marketing messages right.
3. Social media marketing breeds better brand awareness
Sharing unique content on social media – content written for your audience – is one of the best ways to position yourself and your business as a thought leader.
Not only will this help to build brand awareness but it will also grow your reputation and that all-important ‘know-like-trust‘ factor.
And did you know that it’s not just your customers who care about how trustworthy your business is?
Google also looks for signals about expertise, authority and trust to decide where to rank pages in search results.
If you can get people talking about and sharing your content on social media, and leaving positive reviews, you should see your organic web traffic go up (see point 7 for why this matters).
4. Customers feel supported via social platforms
Social media offers businesses and customers an easy way to communicate. You can keep your clients up-to-date with news, product features. or services, what your staff are up to and so much more.
The immediacy of social media also means that you’re able to offer real-time solutions, support and advice. When businesses are quick to respond to their customers, it builds loyalty.
Every business faces customer service issues sometimes, including complaints, but social offers. personal route for resolution.
5. Your business partners and suppliers are on social media
You can make your business an integral part of the conversation with your industry peers, growing your network and your reputation by consistently showing up and being strategic.
6. You can gain valuable competitor insights
While you don’t want to get too bogged down by what your competitors are doing, it’s sensible to have a sense of what sets your business apart from others.
Social media is a powerful tool for listening and observing, as well as seeing what matters to your potential customers. It offers an up-to-the-minute reflection of what’s happening in your industry and a platform to stand out from the crowd.
7. Social media creates more web traffic
One of your goals for using social media should be to drive potential and repeat customers to your website so that you can move them along your sales funnel.
While it’s important to have social media followers for all of the reasons we’re talking about in this article, it’s important to remember that social media companies own their users’ data, not us.
Facebook’s unplanned outage in October 2021 was a stark wake-up call to businesses that hadn’t been building their mailing lists away from social media when it became clear that they could lose contact with their followers in an instant.
One of the most powerful ways to use social media is as a channel to bring people to your website.
8. You can create a marketing strategy that’s backed by data
Each social media platform offers in-depth data for you to learn about your audience and track how content is performing.
If you combine this with the wealth of data available through tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you can start to build up a clear picture about what your audience cares about and how they behave when they land on and move through your website.
This is pure decision-making gold because you can definitively see which channels work best for your business, the kind of content your customers want and the return on your investment (ROI).
Armed with these insights, you’ll know how to use your marketing budget for the best results, saving time, money and energy when compared to that ‘spray and pray’ marketing you were doing before.
9. It gives you affordable advertising options
Social media offers businesses one of the most affordable forms of marketing/advertising, especially when you compare it to mediums like TV, billboards, radio or print ads.
You can also cap your spending on each campaign or set of budgets against different key performance indicators (KPIs) to keep your spending under control.
Getting to grips with the best ads for your target audience can take a bit of time. This is where the experience of a good social media marketing agency is priceless because they’ll already have a handle on what works and how to get the best ROI for your budget
10. The targeting options for ads are awesome!
When it comes to the precision of advertising targeting options, social ads are pretty much unmatched.
Let’s take Facebook as an example.
Imagine you have a small group of customers who are a perfect fit for your business. They love what you do, share rave reviews and make repeat orders. Well, through Facebook advertising, you can target ‘lookalike audiences’, ie people who share common interests and behavioural traits with your existing best clients.
Other platforms, including LinkedIn, offer equally sophisticated advertising parameters.
And by running highly targeted high-quality ads, you can bring high-quality leads to your business.
11. It helps you get more value and mileage from your content
If you’re investing in content such as blogs, videos, podcasts, infographics, white papers and ebooks as part of your marketing strategy, it makes sense to get as much bang for your buck as possible.
As well as sharing links to your content from social media (a great way to generate website traffic), you can repurpose content in myriad ways. How about turning the key stats from an article into an infographic or capturing stills from a video?
Although it’s important to keep generating fresh content as a business, it’s financial common sense to reuse your existing content too.
Every new article, podcast, video, live stream, image etc. is another opportunity to get in front of new customers, bring repeat business back to your website or build brand awareness.
A happy by-product is that all of these benefits are great for getting seen by and on Google too.
12. Social media marketing generates more sales
Above all, strategic and customer-focused use of social media should lead to more sales and greater profits for your business.
Time to get back to basics.
If your B2B is struggling to make an impact with marketing, consider stepping back to reassess. Ask us about our 30-Day Audit where we run a complete and comprehensive audit of your marketing strategy and present our findings along with a roadmap on how to communicate your message in a way that will cut through the noise and connect with your target.