Social media for B2B marketing?
When Facebook first launched, it was a platform used by college students. However, once the world realized how social media could be used for marketing purposes it became a game changer for organizations worldwide. Traditionally, social media has been used for B2C (business-to-community) marketing due to its informal setting. Today, its new use is for B2B (business-to-business) marketing as well. Although some businesses are still skeptical to use social media for B2B marketing, it’s essential for B2B market survival and driving sales. In fact according to Hootsuite, 92% of marketers use social media as a content marketing tactic to drive sales.
Although social media marketing approaches differ between B2B and B2C, both have the same main advantage – building relationships with current and potential customers. B2C marketers’ main focuses is to create community engagement and awareness while B2B marketers reach to be known for lead generation. Social media for B2B marketing also poses many benefits such as to find content inspiration, to monitor your competitors, to showcase your partners, to engage customers, and to use social media for content promotion.
- Finding Content Inspiration: If you’re new to B2B social media marketing, that’s okay! Finding trending content to discuss or to share is just clicks away. You can look for trending topics through twitter hashtags and viral Facebook posts that have thousands of shares. Social media is one of the best tools to get the latest content ideas.
- Monitoring Competition: When you’re chasing the same leads via social media, you’ll want to know what your competitors are offering. Social media listening is a great way to keep track of the information your competition is posting. You’ll want to tune into the conversation to see just how strong your competition is and become aware of their areas of expertise. Use this information to realize your competitive advantage and areas of expertise where you can capitalize on.
- Showcasing Partnerships: If you have partners, social media is a great way to engage with them in a non-invasive manner. Both partners can be actively involved with one another and showcase each other by sharing, retweeting, favoriting, hash-tagging and so on to show their support. New opportunities can arise with both parties’ networks.
- Engaging Customers- Likewise to B2C marketing approaches, B2B marketing needs to have a personal approach to engage audience members. However, B2C needs to be more thought out with value proposition. Social media also allows for maintaining B2B connections at a low cost.
- Using Social Media for Content Promotion: For any social media marketing strategy, content is vital. Content includes video, photos and text that acts to visually educate viewers about your company, showcase your offerings and tell your brand's story. However, B2B and B2C content creation is much different. B2C creation is known as the “classic” types of content that focuses on blogging. B2C marketers also use video, photo and other visual aids to share with their audience. B2B marketers however need to use a more professional and less casual approach. Some examples of content that B2B marketers should share are case studies, webinars and infographics.
B2B marketing Channels:
The most effective channels for B2C marketing may not be the best for B2B marketing. It’s important to note which platforms are the most optimal for B2B marketing strategies. For B2C, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube are the best social networks for marketers. However the three main networks for B2B marketing are LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. LinkedIn is by far the most important B2B marketing platform to date. Here, discussion groups can be created and should be leveraged for engagement and content distribution.