How B2B marketers can benefit from social media?

How B2B marketers can benefit from social media and is it really worth it?

Many of you might already feel you know the answer to the second part of the title. Many businesses believe that Social media doesn’t have anything to offer them. These people may, however, be dismissing social media slightly too quickly.

Yes, it’s true. Social media might not directly add to your client count (though that isn’t necessarily a given). At the same time, it might just serve to might serve as that nudge that potential clients need to take the plunge.

How does it do that? Read on.

Brand Awareness

The first thing to note is that clients can’t decide to opt for you over the competition if they don’t know you exist. And social media can certainly help you in that regard. It’s a great way to reach out and spread awareness of your brand and services.

What’s more, with the recent advancements in targeting ads on the social media platforms, it doesn’t matter how specific your audience is – you’ll still be able to reach them if you know how to target them.

Location specific

In fact, it’s incredible how far down you can drill nowadays. Did you know that you can target a specific business in a specific location now? That’s right. As long as people have their place of employment listed on their social media, then with Facebook ad manager you can target them.

This is a great strategy to use when you’re about to approach them for a sale. After all, through the psychological principle of the mere exposure effect, the more familiar people are with your brand, the more they like it.

What’s more, as you’ve got an incredibly tiny audience, the costs will be similarly minuscule, making this a viable strategy for all of your more serious sales calls.

Social media is vital for SEO

Google cares about how much your content gets shared across the social media platforms. For that reason, if you want your pages to rank well and organic searches to find you, you’ve got to pursue a social media strategy as well.

After all, if you’ve got no audience, then you’ll get no shares.

Social proofing

Another important aspect of any business is demonstrating worth. And a fantastic way to do that is by showing how many other people think you have value. Now, you could pursue the testimonial route. But why stop there? Why not demonstrate worth by showing off how many followers you’ve got?

Of course, you can only get followers if you’re active on social media (they don’t just spontaneously start liking your page) and so you need a social media strategy.

Social media isn’t just about selling

If you think social media is just about generating leads and selling your product, you’ve got too blinkered a view of what it can do for you. Social media can also serve as a way for you to find new staff.

It can do this in two ways:

• It can actually get you in touch with high-quality people that could fill the positions you’ve got. For example, you can scan through LinkedIn profiles or use the vacancy boards that many social media platforms have.
• It can serve as a demonstration that your company is fun, interesting and with it. An active social media profile with interesting content will let people that care about that kind of thing know that you’re not just about selling a product.

It is a great promotional platform

If you’ve got a new product and you want people to know about it, you can certainly do worse than using social media. This is particularly true if you manage to present it in a fun and interesting way, as then it will get shared around and will potentially end up in front of the eyes of clients you didn’t even know existed.

The bigger your following, the more effective social media will be in this regard. For that reason, make sure that your content is interesting and inspiring. Sometimes you might want to even consider hiring professionals to help you out with custom research papers. 

It will help define you

Do you know why people share certain content? Sure, in part it’s to share interesting information with their friends and loved ones. That is far from the only strategy, however. Many people share content with the purpose of defining themselves.

And it works.

So why not use it in the same way? By finding content that is both interesting to your followers and fits in with the image of your company (or what you’d like that image to be) you can both boost your social media platform and help define your brand.

It will generate leads

And finally, it will generate leads. It might not do so immediately. You’ve got to build up your social media first. But once you’ve managed to spread your wings and gotten a decent following, it will put your brand in front of people that are actually interested in buying your product.

Of course, at this point, all the other points I’ve mentioned will also kick in. You’ll be able to use your social proofing and the way you’ve branded yourself to do a great deal of the work for you. In that way, it won’t just generate leads, it will start pulling them part of the way down the sales funnel.

And that means less work for you.

Last words

Yes, social media is not a short-term fix. It will take a time to figure out how to use it correctly and how to market both your brand and your product to your audience. The thing is, once you’ve got a following and once you’re doing well, it becomes an incredibly powerful and useful tool that is largely free to use.

For that reason, even in B2B it’s a good strategy to devote at least a little time to your social media, so that builds up over time and becomes ever more useful and powerful as a tool. At this point, you can shift your marketing strategy to include it more and more.

Soon, you’ll find that it’s a vital element in getting your word out there in front of other businesses and you’ll wonder how you ever managed to market without it.