Social media is now considered as one of the major components of a business-to-business marketing strategy, which includes the product development, customer sales, and service. It is a big surprise to see that a lot of business-to-business companies often overlook this important task. If you think that social media marketing is just simply adding a Twitter or Facebook logo on your marketing collateral, then you still have a lot to learn.
There are many ways that you can use social media for your marketing that goes beyond the basics. Below I’ve outlined a few ways you can take advantage of social media for your B2B marketing.
Company Brand
Always make sure that your company’s social media profile is branded properly to match the look and feel of your brand. You can easily use branded wallpapers on your Facebook or Twitter.Make sure that your profile’s theme is also related to your company and the product or service you are offering.
Search Engine Traffic
You can go through the search engine traffic and look for the keywords that are often used that will drive to your own website. Keywords are very important, especially when you use them on your articles on your blogs. You can also build an automatic search feed for those specific keywords in your social media like Twitter so that you can find people who have specific conversations using those keywords on your Twitter account. They can be your Twitter followers and potential prospects, so tweet them.
Microsite
To combine all the social media activities, try making a microsite. If you have a microsite, a potential customer has a place to go and see all your current activities. Here you can have your feeds from Facebook and Twitter, a Google News RSS feeds for some press releases and company news, RSS feed from the blogs and any YouTube videos. You can also use this portal as your home page as your call-to-action area or for social media for your offline activities.
Promotions
Try running a big promotion on your Facebook and have the prize as gadgets or tickets to a local concert. Some local events will encourage the entries from the people in your area. You can join up with a media partner such as local newspaper or radio station, to save costs on promotion and publicity costs. Then, tell other people to like your page and have them write on your media partner’s wall. This will benefit both the organization.
Keep in mind that integrating social media is a lot more than just adding it to the basic business-to-business marketing programs. The social media must be in the middle of every aspect of the business including customer service, marketing research and product development. It is important to know the audience and think of how you can extend the conversations from offline to offline.
