Social media is becoming increasingly important for B2B marketers – not just as a way to find new prospects and leads, but also as a way to convert more of those leads into sales. As a new eMarketer report (“B2B Social Media 2017”) points out, there’s a newfound emphasis on tying back social media efforts to larger business goals. In other words, there is more effort to convert Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts into a real driver of business sales.
According to eMarketer, B2B marketers need to do more listening and less broadcasting. OK, because it’s easy to think of Facebook and Twitter as just another distribution platform for all the content your business is creating. Instead, however, brands should be thinking of how use social media data as part of a comprehensive sales and marketing strategy. There are several good ways to achieve this, as outlined below.
Tip #1: Use a social media dashboard
It may seem obvious, but tracking all of your brand’s social media activity if it’s all gathered together in one place (in what’s commonly known as a “dashboard”). At a glance, you should be able to see where people are talking about your brand and your products, as well as the types of trending topics that are generating the lion’s share of the conversations. Yet, according to eMarketer, only 39% of B2B marketers currently use social media monitoring tools.
And there’s one other big advantage of using these social dashboards – it’s much easier to schedule and post content according to a calendar. In a single place, too, you can see comments and reactions to content that you are posting.
Tip #2: Use social media for both upstream and downstream marketing
The upstream marketing occurs when a prospect is first entering the sales funnel, while the downstream marketing occurs when a prospect is close to becoming a sale. What eMarketer found was that most marketers only focus on all the downstream activity. In other words, they only focus on blasting out content across all their social media channels to get to that final “yes.” What they should be doing, however, is integrating social media marketing into more of their upstream activities, and making it more integral to the process of creating customer personas.
Tip #3: Focus on engagement not on reach
It’s not how many people you reach on social media, it’s the level of engagement (as measured by shares, likes and comments). This requires some re-thinking of traditional metrics. For example, the goal should not be creating a certain number of fans on the Facebook fan page – it should be making sure that as many of those fans as possible are liking and commenting on content.
In just the past 18 months, there’s been increasing momentum around social media for B2B brands, and for good reason: these social media networks are a great way to learn about your customers and engage with them well before it’s time to make a final sale. The results may take some time to see, but they’re well worth the wait.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.