Some important tools and tips for business to business Social Media Marketing

Knowing the following tips, you can develop a business-to-business social media strategy for effective customer service, marketing, and social selling.

What is B2B social media marketing?

B2B is the abbreviation for business to business. B2B social media marketing utilize social media platforms for marketing services or products to other businesses or organizations. It includes using social media to reach out to purchasing agents who make decisions for business purchases. B2B marketers should develop a clear, concise marketing strategy to reach the decision-makers, leading to a significant increase in sales.

Some inspiring B2B social media stats

To understand how and why B2B marketers use social media, let’s have a look at the following data:

According to SproutsSocial B2B Social Media is here to stay and a staggering 83% of B2B marketers practice it.  The most cited benefits are as follows….

• Creating Brand Awareness (86%)
• Educating Audiences (79%)
• Building Credibility & Trust (75%)

How to create a successful B2B Social Media Strategy

A strategic B2B social media plan is important for short-term and long-term gains. 60% of successful B2B marketers develop a marketing content strategy. You can also create a successful B2B marketing strategy by keeping in mind the following points:

1) Align your goals with the objectives of the business
The top three goals of B2B marketers are to increase brand awareness, build trust and credibility among customers and educate their audiences.

2) Identify the opportunities
You can try the SWOT framework. It helps you identify the threats, strengths, opportunities, and weaknesses compared to your competitors.

3) Get personal
You should know who your audiences are. This will give you a chance to put yourself forward.

4) Use the best social media platforms
You should be aware of your customers’ social media demographics. More than ninety percent of B2B marketers use LinkedIn. It is considered a top organic platform. According to your business size and type of industry, you can also consider different channels for different markets, verticals, and products. These may include career channels, customer service accounts, and news channels.

5) Find an interesting angle
With the help of social media, you can develop relationships that result in sales in the long run. People will not follow you for a long time if your content is not interesting and informative. It would help if you came up with new ideas on how you can make peoples’ lives easy or worth enjoying. Your content should have some interesting angle that delights the followers.

6) Plan strategically on how you will identify your efforts
Mostly successful B2B content creators measure their performance over time. This ensures you that your social media content is performing well. Now the data and metrics that you should monitor deepen the goals of your business. Your focus might be the sales, response time, engagement rate, impressions, and conversations. Give special consideration to the net promotor scale, customer satisfaction ratings, and qualitative reviews.

6 Tracking Tools for B2B Social Media Marketing

In order to gauge your customers interest and/or concerns, you’ll need to implement some tracking or analysis software.  The following are tried and true industry standards:

• Google Analytics: Track what your customers do when they visit the site and where they’re coming from.
• UTM Parameters: You can track the links you share on your accounts by adding UTM parameters.
• Hootsuite: It allows you to track customers’ queries and send messages designed to engage them.
• Brandwatch: It gives you an idea of customer sentiments, online conversations, and customer interests.
• Salesforce: It allows you to develop a strong relationship with consumers and customize your contact list.
• Sparkcentral: It helps manage customer service via live chats, SMS, social accounts, and WhatsApp.

Examples of B2B Companies that have significant Social Media Use

Learn from the pros. Some teams that have top social media post ideas include:

• Adobe
• Google
• Slack
• Twitter
• IBM
• Gartner

Visit their webpages where you’ll find links to their various social media profiles.  Then have a look at the ways in which they’re using these profiles for their B2B advertising.

Keep in mind, they also market to the individual consumer so be sure to focus on the marketing they do that’s specifically geared toward Businesses.