Whether you have a B2B or B2C business, social media is a great place to reach your target audience.
But why?
Because over 3.8 billion people use social media. That’s about 40% of the world’s population. As a result, a good chunk of your target audience is active on social media.
However, when it comes to social media, B2C companies steal the show. B2B businesses don’t seem to be as active.
That said, if you haven’t begun your journey on social media, you shouldn’t ignore the opportunity. In fact, about 61% of B2B marketers have said that they’ve increased their social media usage.
Image via Content Marketing Institute
To help you through it, we’ve put together this detailed guide on how you can create a B2B social media marketing plan for your business.
Steps to Create Your Social Media Strategy
Here are the steps involved in creating a B2B social media marketing strategy.
1. Determine Your Goals
The first and most important step of creating a B2B social media strategy is to select your goals. After all, without a solid goal in mind, you won’t be able to figure out where to channelize your efforts.
You need to decide what is it that you want from your social media marketing efforts. Is it more leads, increased traffic, or better sales?
Whatever it is that you want to accomplish through social media, make sure your goal is SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely).
What’s more?
It’s only based on your goals that you’ll be able to determine the various key performance indicators (KPIs) that you need to monitor to figure out your progress.
2. Identify Your Audience
It’s critical to figure out your target audience. Without knowing who you’re creating the content for, you’ll never know how to get it right.
You need to determine your target audience based on their demographics, geographics, and psychographics.
It’s also recommended that you create different buyer personas so that you can further customize your content for them.
3. Determine Your Brand Persona
Look at your brand as a person and assign a brand persona. This involves not only the sort of content you post but also the language and the tone that your brand will use on social media.
For instance, some brands use humor to keep things bubbly online. Others maintain a formal tone.
You should decide on this tone based on your target audience. Figure out what sort of tone they’d prefer and accordingly set your tone.
Wendy’s, for example, uses humor in every tweet that they post.
Image via Twitter
4. Use Multiple Platforms
B2B businesses often stick to LinkedIn as their choice of social media platform. In fact, it’s one of the most popular social media platforms used by B2B marketers along with Facebook and Twitter.
However, using LinkedIn only will limit your reach. The reason for this being that you can create a wide variety of content and reach out to audiences on other social media platforms too.
Your social strategy should include information about the platforms that you intend to use to grow your brand online.
The best part about using different platforms is that you can reach a wider audience and you might even discover a part of your audience that you didn’t know existed.
5. Create Your Content
To grow your brand on social media, you need to create high-quality content. Based on your target audience, you should create content that’s suited to their interests.
When you publish content, try to mix it up. Share blog posts, infographics, images, videos, live videos, and other types of content.
That’s not all.
Apart from coming up with original content, you should also curate high-quality content from authoritative sources. While this doesn’t help you drive traffic to your website, it does can help you increase your engagement.
Additionally, sharing such content regularly also helps position your brand as an authority in your industry.
6. Engage, Engage, Engage
While creating and sharing quality content can help you get the attention of your audience, you need to know how to hold it too.
One of the biggest reasons why entrepreneurs are turning to social media is that it provides you with a platform to engage with your audience.
This is something that no other form of marketing is able to provide you. On social media, you can directly communicate with your audience and customer base.
But, how can you engage with them?
Reply to their comments and messages promptly. You must also monitor your brand mentions and respond to those appropriately.
If your customers post some complaints on social media, you should ensure that you reply to them immediately and try to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.
Potential customers will observe how you’ve responded to concerns raised by your current customers and decide if they’d like to do business with you. It speaks volumes about your customer service.
7. Monitor and Optimize
The last step in creating your B2B social media marketing strategy is that of monitoring your KPIs (key performance indicators).
But why should you track them?
By tracking your KPIs, you can figure out how your social media campaigns are performing. Based on the results, you’ll be able to find out what’s working and what’s not for your small business.
As a result, you’ll be able to optimize your social media strategy and get better engagement from it.
Ready to Create Your B2B Social Media Marketing Strategy?
Social media provides you with a great platform to reach out to your audience and engage with them. What makes it special is that you can directly connect with your audience, unlike other marketing methods.
To create a B2B social media marketing strategy, you need to identify your goals, audience, and brand persona.
You should also leverage multiple social media platforms and create and curate high-quality content. Lastly, you should monitor and optimize the content to improve your engagement even further.
Do you have any questions about the methods mentioned above? If so, let us know in the comments.
