How would you describe your social media strategy? Is it simply an add-on to your marketing campaigns, or do you have a social media marketing plan? Social media used to be seen as more relevant to B2C – but not anymore. Today, B2B marketers are increasingly using social media to generate leads, build brands and reputation, and even help with recruiting. To answer the question: social media is certainly relevant in B2B marketing!
The way your prospects purchase big ticket items, like enterprise software platforms, or sophisticated medical equipment, has changed. Now, prospects do as much as 90% of their research online, before interacting with a sales person. Your digital marketing, and your activity on social media – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or Snapchat – might serve as the starting point for this research activity, or might help to validate the research your prospect has already done.
The fact is, no matter how ‘traditional’ your company or product, you need to have a social media presence and strategy. But it doesn’t have to be a huge undertaking. The beauty of social media for B2B is that you probably don’t need, or even want, hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter or Facebook. And while you won’t ever achieve the volume of traffic that you might see in B2C, remember that the value of the B2B leads you do generate – and the ROI of your social channels – will be much higher.
You likely have a very specific set of customer personas, or types, that you’re interested in reaching. The challenge is to figure out how to reach these targeted prospects, and provide the types of content they want.