Why Your Social Marketing’s Missing the Mark

Last week I had an opportunity to present Growing Your Brand in Social Media at the Digital Marketing Institute in Munich.  My slides are available at the end of this article.

Here's the gist: Despite millions spent on marketing teams, content, campaigns and promotions every year, most of the B2B marketing see each day in social media platforms gets ignored. It’s a shame because social media used correctly enables marketing organizations to cut through multiple organizational disfunctions and create a better buyer experience. 

Social media is the ultimate marketing hack, but many companies continue to use it for poorly coordinated broadcasting rather than targeted branding or irresistible invitations to engage.

Consumers are so inundated with content that even high quality content gets overlooked. To stand out takes powerful messaging, valuable content and compelling visualization, which in turn requires strong alignment and purpose across the marketing team.

So... what's our strategy again?

Like any other part of the business, marketing is vulnerable to fuzzy thinking, self-optimization, weak leadership and frantic busyness. 

Lack of alignment may stem from an unclear strategy or simply from having too many priorities, which creates bottlenecks in key service functions like creative design and web development.

Poorly aligned marketing teams ‘do marketing’ but most likely miss opportunities to create a compelling strike, or crescendo, with their campaigns and promotions.  They fail to be sticky. But even well-aligned teams may miss the mark.

For example, inappropriate tactics may include things like promoting B2B white papers in platforms like Facebook, or prioritizing SEO ranking when your target market is the fortune 500, as if key decision makers at these companies decide who to talk to or make six-figure decisions based on a Google search. To use social media effectively you need to understand your market, your audience and how they engage with different platforms. 

Weak branding is another common failing in social media, where the first thing people see is a visual ‘thumbnail’ that represents the content or promotion and (hopefully) invites scrollers to stop, look again, and take action. High quality visuals create a positive impression of your brand but inconsistent styles make your marketing look sloppy.

Short-term thinking results from the common practice of measuring leads on a quarterly basis, and pulling campaigns or content rather than re-examining or expanding the channel strategy.

Finally, while the ten-page white paper still has a place in modern solution marketing there’s no prize for having the highest word count or the longest words on your banner ads. Leave academic speak to the academics.

Campaign hacking with social media

A typical B2B campaign has a lot of moving parts and can take months to launch. Even if the execution and handoffs between different teams happen smoothly, the entire process is likely to hit a wall at localization. By the time the campaign is fully launched, most of the local marketing teams have moved onto greener pastures and do the bare minimum on the now inconvenient global campaign. 

When the campaign subsequently underperforms, the initial idea or content are more likely to be blamed than the dragging digital execution or unenthusiastic field execution. (Just sayin’.)

‘Always on’ and ‘fail fast’ mindsets, while useful in themselves, typically result in poorly coordinated drip feed marketing in the absence of a clear strategy.

What if we reverse the order and use social media to improve time to market and field test key messages before investing in expensive campaigns and promotions?

You still need great content

Content strategy is a full-blown topic in its own right, which I covered in my article Content Strategy’s the Why not the How.

Make a plan

To avoid committing ‘random acts of marketing’ in your social media strategy, you’ll need to do a bit of thinking and planning. This social media strategy guide from Net101 is a good starting place, as it includes goals, content, platforms and most importantly, CTAs.  

CTAs matter because if you don’t tell your audience what you want them to do and make it easy, chances are they won’t do it. In social media you have an opportunity to pack a compelling key takeaway on a thumbnail visual, so your KPI could be #views or #likes/shares instead of the usual #clicks or #downloads.

If you’re trying to maximize your ROI from social media without increasing budget or headcount here are a few tips to get started. Notice the emphasis on alignment, re-use, clear ownership and branding.

Don’t sell, solve

The first step any product marketing takes when building out a messaging framework is to define the problem(s) solved by their solution and the ‘persona(s)’ for whom that problem is solved. However, an important next step is to define the pain of not solving the problem.

Even with a good business case, if the cost of ignoring the problem or postponing a solution is low the sales process will typically end in ‘do nothing.’ For more about closing enterprise B2B business, check out my blog post The 3 C’s of Closing in Enterprise B2B.

Even if you’ve already done this entire exercise, it’s worth revisiting to try to capture the problem you solve and/or the pain of not solving it on a thumbnail or banner graphic - just on the off chance that not everyone wants to read your 10-page white paper to find out what exactly it is you can do for them.

Insist on high quality visuals

I'm all for agile and decentralized but research shows you have about 37 seconds to hold someone’s attention and most people only read 20% of what they see. Blogs with images get nearly twice as many views and of all types of content, infographics are most likely to be shared. 

My point here is that the visuals you post in your social account to promote your content matter. It’s fantastic to encourage individual creativity, but not without quality control. Nothing makes your brand look unprofessional like a poorly executed design from someone who clearly didn’t read the brand guidelines. 

Modern marketing is social and social marketing is… wait for it… SOCIAL!!

When people I know like and share one of my posts, everyone they know sees it.  Still, employees – even marketers - may be reluctant to like and share because ‘that’s not my job.’ To break through organizational resistance to embracing modern marketing practices, executive buy in can help.

Note that when I say ‘buy in’ I mean commitment to set the example by liking and sharing. If your executive team doesn’t actively endorse your message to the market, why should anyone else?

To get noticed in social media it’s useful to look at what social media influencers are doing, particularly individual influencers. Notice how they are everywhere, on multiple channels, they have a blog and a podcast series, they vlog while jogging, they like and share other people’s content, they provide a platform for conversation… you get my drift? 

It’s a full-time job and as a B2B marketer it isn’t necessarily your goal to be everywhere, but in order to influence it helps to have a team of multipliers who help you spread the word with likes, shares and comments.

Start in your own organization, getting your colleagues across the business involved with building the buzz. You’ll also want to build influence and support outside your organization. Top influencers are difficult to win over so look for opportunities to connect with aspiring influencers. 

This post How We Got 1,000+ Subscribers from a Single Blog Post in 24 Hours from Alex Turnbull at Groove offers some valuable advise about engaging with external influencers who will help you promote your brand. The blog post Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk also offers an excellent reminder to give before you’ve earned the right to ask for something.  

Putting it all together

Here's how a small B2B marketing team used organic social media to promote content faster, triple its followers and generate 12% of all sales accepted leads at $0 cost per click in less than six months, without any additional budget or headcount. 

1.     They focused on Linkedin and Twitter – Marketers have no shortage of great ideas, like, ‘Let’s have a Youtube channel,’ but if you don’t have infinite resources it’s more impactful to start with a channel strategy that will be most effective in your market. That doesn’t mean lose sight of underserved B2B platforms like Facebook and Instagram that are still relatively cheap – because that is certainly going to change in the near future - but to get started I recommend staying focused on doing fewer channels better.

2.     They re-used existing content – While certain content types perform best in specific platforms, chances are if your company’s been around awhile you have a surplus of content.  Just because you’re sick of that white paper, there are still a few billion people who haven’t seen it yet so don’t rush to create a new one until you’ve exhausted its utility. In addition to promoting new assets created for ongoing programs, why not recycle some older content to see if it’s still relevant, with a steady side of customer success stories?

3.     They collaborated and brainstormed – Since the creative team was completely swamped, they outsourced the ideation to a mixed of team of marketers from different disciplines. Using very simple visuals created on the fly in Powerpoint, they solicited creative ideas on a bimonthly call and voted for the best ones. The winners were forwarded to the creative team for professional production to be used in the social posts.

4.     They tested what worked – Social media platforms like LinkedIn give immediate feedback about audience engagement, so they were able to see how different visualizations and messages were performing, as well as conduct free A/B testing to resolve any differences of opinion. The insights were then fed back to the campaign teams to avoid spending time and money on messages and content that didn’t resonate with the market.

5.     They involved everyone – They sent a regular social media summary to the entire organization with quick links an suggested post text, as well as engaging with sales and the executive team with successes and reminders to help build the buzz.

Social marketing is here to stay and will continue to evolve and offer new opportunities for businesses to connect and engage with customers. However, to avoid getting overwhelmed when you’re just getting started, start with razor focus to get some quick wins and build out from there.

Here are my slides from the event: