Social media marketing is often overlooked or not planned properly. Many companies assume that social media is not an efficient way to market B2B products and services. The truth is that social media can be a great way to grow a B2B business, improve on branding efforts and generate leads as long as there is an established plan as well as brand protection in place.
Here is a list of three of the necessary steps to take in order to properly prepare your B2B social media marketing strategy.
Strengthen the Brand Awareness
We are constantly being told that social media is for brand awareness, but rarely does anyone talk about specifically how this new brand awareness can be beneficial for our brand. The truth is that brand awareness will not only drive sales, but it can also be the driving force in proactive online reputation management. The best way to increase brand awareness is not to constantly pump out content about your brand, but to find people and companies that would be willing to talk about your brand in a positive way, so-called brand advocates.
How can you do it?
When dealing with B2B, however, this is easier said than done. In order to efficiently find those potential brand advocates, you can use tools like Socedo. This tool allows you to sort people by career, bio, region, etc. and make the brand advocacy outreach much easier. Socedo will search Twitter profiles, compare your followers to other brands, and allow you to follow people right within their product. If you follow the people you find, share their content and then reach out, these users will be familiar with you by the time you contact them. Then you can ask them to take a look at your product to share or talk about. You can even offer these influencers a free trial or service to entice them.
Create a Content Calendar
Keeping a content calendar is a part of the social media process that is almost always overlooked by all companies, not just for B2B. Creating a clear schedule of what content you are going to post, who you are going to target and when will give you a better perspective on where to add new content, shares, mentions, etc.
How can you do it?
Creating a calendar can be done, for instance, on a spreadsheet or in Google Docs. However, there are tools for this which include features such as sharing your content through the calendar and monitoring its success. For example, Coschedule and Oktopost are both great social media calendar tools to use to oversee your content and content success. In Oktopost, you will have the possibility to monitor feeds, schedule your calendar, post to your social media accounts and export reporting. With CoSchedule on the other hand, you can connect directly with WordPress and you can schedule blog content, social media posts, and assign tasks to your team members. So depending on what your content needs are, one of these tools could be quite useful.
Monitor Your Brand Reputation
Often, people are so focused on what the brand is saying that they forget to look at what people are saying about the brand. The most important thing you can do for your brand (especially if you are B2B and operating with several sales people) is to add brand monitoring and protection.
How can you do it?
There are many ways to monitor your brand, and the type of monitoring you do should depend on your business’s size and number of employees. Tools like Nuvi and Mention will allow you to set up alerts for your brand mentions which are delivered to your inbox and give you sentiment value. For more robust protection, and to prevent employee contributions from causing problems whether they are positive or negative, tools like SecureMySocial are great to use. SecureMySocial will not only monitor and address posts that employees make related to your brand, but it will also notify employees in real time if they are making other kinds of posts that may be problematic: such as giving away sensitive information, saying things that could help competitors, making posts that break laws, or even giving hackers information they need to hack you. Alerts will be delivered privately to the employees and let them know that the content they have posted may be potentially harmful and ask them to remove it, or, if you authorize SecureMySocial to do so, it can even automatically remove such posts immediately. For larger businesses, SecureMySocial is a must.
When marketing a B2B brand on social media, we must be aware that we are dealing with intelligent people and companies that have several employees. Do your due diligence and find your audience, create a content calendar and protect your brand’s reputation. If you have those three things in order, everything else will be much easier and more effective moving forward.
Written by Cynthia Johnson.
Originally posted on socialmediaexplorer.com