If you’re like most companies, you’ve probably experimented with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as part of your marketing campaigns. Maybe you’ve looked at how Instagram or Pinterest can differentiate you from the competition. Here are a few quick tips for making sure that you’re getting the most from your B2B social media marketing campaigns.
Tip #1: Really listen to your customers
There are two ways to think about social media – as yet another broadcast medium to get out your marketing messages or as a listening platform, to really understand the needs, preferences and behaviors of your users. Social media marketing company Spredfast (which acquired Shoutlet) refers to this as “deep listening.” And the more data you have about your customer, the stronger your content is going to be.
For example, Spredfast makes it possible to surface different conversations that customers are having about your products. This enables you to chime in at exactly the right time. In the era of social media, you may no longer have absolute control over how customers interact with your brand, but thanks to the new era of deep listening tools, you are often able to take action in real-time via social media. Even if it’s just a re-tweet of a glowing customer testimonial, that’s a significant way to amp up the success of your social media marketing.
Tip #2: Find your influencers and engage them
“Influencer marketing” may not be quite the hyped buzzword it was just 12 months, but it’s still an increasingly important component of any company’s B2B marketing strategy. These “influencers” can be industry bloggers, CEOs with a wide social media following or super-users who continually post reviews, photos and updates. The key is being able to engage them and have them talking about your products and services.
For example, say that you are trying to improve the results of your Twitter marketing. You might experiment with a tool like Tweepi, which helps companies find relevant followers on Twitter. Using Tweepi, it’s easy to @mention them in a tweet, which is a popular way that brands and companies use Twitter to interact with influencers. Maybe you have a new whitepaper coming out – this would be a great way to build buzz ahead of its initial publication.
Tip #3: Build your social media marketing funnel
The classic marketing funnel visualizes the entire process from initial lead to final sale as a process of slowly nurturing customers through a “funnel.” At each stage, the number of potential prospects narrows, until at the very end, you are left with a narrow funnel opening where all the “conversions” pop out.
You need to apply this same kind of thinking to social media. It’s not just about creating a Facebook page with a thousand followers and adding a few updates to it every week – it’s about thinking through the strategy for converting some of the followers into sales. Here’s where free digital media assets – ebooks, videos, whitepapers and infographics – can play such an important role in helping to guide your Facebook and Twitter followers through the social media marketing funnel.
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.