With so much misinformation out there on how to effectively use B2B social media marketing to attract more mid-market and enterprise tech clients, how do you even know where to start?
Let’s go back to the basics and identify the top channels, tips on creating an effective strategy and calendar, tapping into overlooked opportunities, and preparing for where B2B social media is headed next.
Top Channels for Attracting Mid-Market and Enterprise Tech Buyers
The B2B tech companies I work with concentrate most of their social media efforts on LinkedIn (organic content, paid ads, and Sales Navigator).
YouTube (which is really hybrid social and search) is the second-highest priority.
Facebook and Twitter are usually a distant third and fourth priority.
For some more progressive companies looking to build a digital brand, podcasting in general (including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible) should be prioritized over Facebook and Twitter.
Creating an Effective B2B Social Media Marketing Strategy and Calendar
All social media strategy needs to start with
- identifying who your most important buyer personas are
- researching and creating detailed buyer persona documents
Once you understand the goals, challenges, preferences, watering holes, and targeting parameters for your primary and secondary buyer personas, most prioritization with social media strategy and content calendars becomes much more straightforward -- and most important, buyer-centric.
Without this check and balance, the social media strategy and content calendar are driven by the whims and egos of internal stakeholders -- and will fall flat.
There's so much competing for people's attention -- if you don't knock it out of the part on relevance, value, and playing the long game, your social media is doomed before you even start.
Tapping Into Overlooked Opportunities
LinkedIn organic -- and the content quality and quantity needed to power that growth -- is still very much underrated.
For the kinds of technology companies that I work with that sell to mid-market and enterprise technology buyers, their internal champions, by definition, are on the leading edge of digital transformation projects and all on LinkedIn.
Most companies' mistake is trying to "close the sale" way too prematurely before they've used content to educate and build trust.
The Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study found that 89% of buyers were influenced by thought leadership content ("enhanced their perceptions of an organization").
Yet only 15% of decision-makers rate the overall content quality on LinkedIn as excellent.
In other words, nearly all (89%) B2B decision-makers are craving excellent thought leadership content. Yet 85% of that content is less than excellent.
Preparing For Where B2B Social Media Is Headed Next
To get the growth that you’re looking for from social media, you’ll need to build a digital brand so that your company is seen as the go-to experts, thought leaders, and trusted advisors in your space.
Scaling the unscalable will give companies a competitive edge.
Biggest barrier: too many controlling the budgets are living in the past, waiting for a resurgence of newspapers, printed phone books, and AOL.
The best B2B companies are blurring the line between B2B and B2C (think product-led growth: Zoom, Slack, Dropbox, Asana, HubSpot, etc.)
And they're also blurring the line between broadcast (streaming) video and social video.
Hulu is already working on a self-serve ad platform that will allow advertisers to buy ads next to specific shows with the same self-serve ease of buying YouTube preroll ads, LinkedIn video ads, or Facebook video ads.
We're heading to a place where there will be no distinction between marketing and digital marketing. It's all just marketing.
And there will be no distinction between social media and traditional, outbound media. It will all just be media. Nearly every traditional media company is being forced to adapt a social component to survive and remain relevant.
What’s been most effective in your B2B social media marketing toolkit? Let me know in the comments.
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