B2B Social Media Marketing Strategies That Work

Social media marketing is gaining more and more influence in this “over-communicated society”, as organizations all across the world start using it as an alternative to traditional marketing. But most of the time, a mix between the two works best. Social media marketing is a great new way to help you spread the word about your products and services.

However, being a new field, B2B social media marketing still hasn’t overcome some of the misconceptions that can stand in the way of success. The most common problems come from the fact that marketers find this new environment hard to measure and they think they won’t get to know the actual results or they tend to overuse it, trying to cover all social media platforms 24/7. Social media marketing is a great opportunity to get you a broader reach and to make you forget about those very targeted audiences. Of course, you have to always take into consideration who is your target and what other kinds of people might show interest in what your organization is doing.

Before you jump into social media, you must be totally aware of the realistic results this can drive for your business and take full advantage of any good piece of advice you can find. We took some tips and tricks from a CRMSoftware.TV video discussing B2B Social Marketing Strategies that Work, with marketing experts from HubSpot and Silverpop. They make a really good point when saying that the biggest challenge for B2B companies is getting to know how they can become more interesting and engaging and how they can fix the apathy problem, because let’s face it: it’s hard to be creative and productive at the same time, especially in this field.

So, what should a marketer do to get the best out of social media marketing?

• really know what are your objectives and figure out how you can convert business through social media

• keep in mind the fact that social media doesn’t fix bad marketing, especially not overnight

• figure out how can you amplify what you're doing with the help of the web and integrate the new strategies in a manner consistent with your original framework

• correlate the personality of your brand with the right kind of channels and determine which are the best places to reach to your customers

• look at ROI through social media and choose a method for dividing leads, visitors or customers by source. Don't forget that simply determining how many of your customers you have engaged with can come in handy for establishing whether what you’re doing online is working properly or not

• determine at which of the following levels your strategy proves most effective: creating awareness→ creating preferences→ generating leads and opportunities

• don't think of social media as a way to be out there and as a way to simply push out information; take the time to truly engage with people, ask them questions, respond to theirs and even create connections with other businesses

Cisco successfully implemented social media strategies while launching its new router. The campaign was based solely on social platforms and the main point of attraction was represented by a viral video, which provided customers the opportunity to test the new product. According to Cisco, the program has driven more than $80 million in revenue. Subsequently, other videos were made in order to prove the benefits of this new product. The main video was posted on YouTube and promoted through banner ads, blogs, and social networks.

Keeping things simple can be the right solution for B2B marketing. A simple way you can use social media is by creating an active online presence and engaging with your business customers by giving them the opportunity to ask direct questions to your company. That’s exactly what Avanade and HP chose to do for their businesses. The first one used Youtube videos to answer all of the questions submitted to the company on Twitter, while the second one created a blog and a site, along with Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. HP’s objective was to engage with small and medium businesses and become a trusted partner of them, by offering information and solutions to people’s problems, and this very interesting case study shows how they did it.

So, before implementing social media in your overall B2B marketing, try to determine the best ways you can do that, without neglecting  your company’s objectives, image and personality. Also, forget all those misconceptions that social media is no place to reach your business customers and start finding the right channels for you that can boost your message. After all, we all know by now know that “The medium is the message” and this statement certainly applies to this still emerging field.