To gain some insight into how businesses are reaching the B2B audience, Molly Raycraft attended SevenC3 to mingle with social media masterminds and gain some expert tips (and really great snacks).
We’ve acknowledged social media is a vital asset when marketing in B2B, but many still struggle to reach the right audience. With ad blockers, hard-to-crack algorithms, and social platforms being even more selective over what content appears on personal feeds, marketers are looking for new ways to create valuable content around their intangible products and reach an appropriate audience. As part of Social Media Week, SevenC3’s Maxine Marshall sat down with Jon Bowd, head of content marketing at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Carol Briggs, associate director – global marketing and thought leadership at Grant Thornton International, and Jon Watkins, head of content (business) at SevenC3 for a discussion about using social to reach the elusive B2B audience. Here are the nine key points I took away from the panel discussion.
1. Know who your audience actually are
The big social platforms have made it increasingly difficult for content to be seen organically. This means businesses are having to shout louder to be heard, but this doesn’t help if you’re shouting in the wrong direction.
Knowing who your audience are and where they can be found is an essential foundation for building your social presence. You need to understand your audience from the get-go to ensure you’re creating the right content to coax them from their virtual shell.
You also need to know where your audience base is most active – there’s no point spending time and money on Facebook if they spend most of the their time on LinkedIn.
2. Use paid advertising in your social toolkit
Paid advertising has become a staple of B2B social and if you don’t buy into this the bottom line is, your posts won’t get noticed.
It’s essential to put funds behind your best content to propel it towards your target audience. This is prime example of why marketing must prove the value of social media to the board, as a successful campaign will need a contribution of the budget.
3. Understand the role of social media in your business
Among other purposes, social media is there to help nurture a prospect on their journey to purchase: a common mistake and expectation is that social media can complete a sales journey in its entirety. This often leads to a sense of underachievement concerning social, so it’s important to clarify from the start what social’s primary goals are.
4. Be consistent and focused in your content
You need to create a solid presence in the industry, so try to avoid only posting sporadically. This also means avoiding a splurge of unnecessary content: you need to offer something that’s rich and valuable to your audience, especially the c-suite.
For example, you could establish yourself as a thought leader by not just starting discussions around your niche, but by leading it. Choosing the content agenda itself shouldn’t just be randomly determined by whatever comes to mind.
Use social and content listening tools like BuzzSumo or Sprout Social and you’ll be able to see what topics and formats gain the most attention. Social is a great opportunity to receive feedback early on in your campaign and this can also guide your hand in the content you write.
5. Understand the future of the businesses you’re working with
The best bait for the B2B c-suite audience is content that offers true value. This means while others are posting about the current, you need to be posting about the future.
The c-suite relies on trusted resources, and you need to establish yourself as one of them. Understand the future direction of the businesses you’re working with and write about future development within those areas. This also opens up the opportunity for these businesses to share your content, boosting its reach and creating a thriving community of brand advocates.
6. Your internal community is just as important as your external one
When your internal community are busy on their own projects, it can be difficult to get them to engage with and promote your content: yet it can provide a massive boost for your reach.
Explain the objectives and targets of social to your colleagues to highlight the importance of their involvement. Teams are more likely to share content if it relates to their topic of work and a good way to draw attention to your latest content for social promotion is through a weekly email, complete with links and assets to simplify the process.
7. Evaluate and measure with good objectives and analytics
At the beginning of a social campaign, results can come across as rather patchy, but this will solidify as your campaign grows. The business community is a great place for gathering feedback, while using analytics can help you decipher where your users are coming from and how they found you. It’s important that you’ve established the right objectives so you can measure your results against your projected aim.
8. The B2B audience is human too
Pique the interest of B2B audiences by appealing to them on a human level. This could mean content that promotes personalities within the company (again, internal communities are important) – this will offer a place for relatable emotion in your social campaigns. In turn, this will make the content you promote on social more enjoyable to consume and will hopefully transfer to a potentially higher interaction rate.
9. Don’t fret over the best time to post on social media
There’s a lot of analysis and research out there for what time is best to post on social. Interaction analytics tend to rise around commuting and lunch times but it’s always 5pm somewhere in the world. If you’re posting to a global audience don’t worry too much about religiously posting within strict time slots – if you’re content is valuable enough, it will be shared.
