B2B social media marketing strategy tips!

In this article, I highlight some of his findings and social media strategies to help marketers share their experiences through the B2B marketing “funnel” and find the right audiences through various channels.

Brands have long used social media platforms to publish content to engage, communicate and build relationships with consumers.

But as the customer journey becomes more complex and social selling becomes a growing trend in today’s world, social media marketing is becoming an even more powerful way to attract paying customers.

I’ve been doing social media marketing for over two years at CleverTap, a mobile app analytics company. This has given me the opportunity to do some in-depth experiments with social media marketing and learn what works and what doesn’t.

Below is a snapshot of the number of leads (potential customers) generated by social media for CleverTap over the past two years (across lifecycle stages).

I’ll cover the three main stages of the marketing “funnel” and dive into the strategies for each stage.

01 Top of the Funnel: Brand Awareness

Post a message and watch your ad impressions and link clicks grow. Isn’t this every social media marketer’s dream?

But in this crowded online world, that’s not going to happen. You may have spent months planning, producing, and executing your content before it’s finally released, but in the digital world, users can quickly scan it in microseconds.

So, how can we get the desired impressions, clicks and conversions?

The top of the funnel stage means you need to develop a specific aspect of individual leads (not necessarily potential customers) and make them aware of your business. The focus needs to be on building your audience, not getting them to sign up for a demo or share their details.

As an experienced B2B social media marketer, I recommend combining communication channels and content formats to achieve this.

1. Embrace the video era

To attract attention, you always have to rely on moving images.

Almost all popular social media channels prioritize videos in their feeds. On Twitter, videos are six times more likely to be retweeted than photos. Additionally, native videos perform better on social networking sites compared to YouTube links.

Therefore, create engaging videos that convey educational information and avoid hard advertising.

Results from the first week of 3 Facebook video campaigns

Organic data of pictures and videos posted on LinkedIn (within 12 hours)

2. Choose channels and stay active

According to LinkedIn, companies that post 20 times a month can reach 60% of users.

You can use various scheduling tools to post tweets at different times. As a weekly routine, answer users’ questions on question-and-answer SNS platforms such as Quora.

If you want to increase brand awareness, don’t shy away from paid campaigns on Twitter. Twitter can be a great way to reach people in new regions, and even expand beyond your brand network – in fact, I’ve found that Twitter drives the most traffic to my website.

The darkest blue part is the traffic from Twitter

3. Target your audience

Your audience consumes different content on different channels. Understand their preferences and cater to their tastes!

For us, Pinterest and Slideshare were unexpected wins, from which we gained more and more views, shares, and visits.

4. Don’t just talk about the product

When building your brand presence on social media, focus on awards your company has been nominated for or won, highlight the accomplishments of your founders/employees, key company accomplishments, etc.

People are always interested in the behind-the-scenes stories, which is how a brand becomes the talk of the town (on social media and beyond).

We can see a spike in followers on our social media following posts:

Reach and impressions are extremely important in the first stage of the funnel; therefore, don’t be too quick to get disappointed with metrics like link clicks and pageviews. Instead, focus on improving user reach, optimizing CPM, and increasing video views by 50-100%.

02 Middle of the Funnel: Research

Your business won an award, hired an industry star, launched a product that went viral — so you hyped it up on social. However, you don’t see many people coming to visit.

Another challenge that social media can help you overcome is to move beyond the surface level of attention-grabbing and start engaging your audience on a deeper level.

In the middle of the funnel, you’re looking for marketing qualified leads (MQLs): people who have visited your pages, downloaded your content, etc., and therefore have a high propensity to become your paying customers.

I’ve hit my quarterly social media MQL goals for the past two years, so below I’d like to share some high-level strategies that have helped me build a solid lead list.

1. Use LinkedIn and Facebook’s Lead Messaging Tools

This method does not require users to click on additional content, maintaining a smooth user experience because information collection is completed on the same platform.

This approach can be applied to all gated content assets, such as technical white papers and webinars, and integrated with automation tools (such as Zapier) to update MQL information into customer relationship management systems (CRM) in real time.

2. Humanized operation

Conversational marketing has achieved unprecedented results in today's complex social media environment.

Have real conversations with real people. This is one-to-one marketing that is clearly visible and can spark interest in others. Keep your communication focused and authentic.

3. Don’t underestimate organic traffic

While paid campaigns can certainly help increase brand awareness and target potential audiences, organic content can make people more aware of your brand. Try to use the platform’s features creatively to impress and engage your audience.

We created the following Twitter post to appeal to marketers – just creativity and hard work, no paid promotion.

4. Consider knowledge sharing platforms in your strategy

There is a wealth of insights and experiences shared by talented people on Q&A sites such as Quora or active LinkedIn groups, which should not be underestimated! If you can find your niche, it will be easy to find the right audience.

We’ve benefited greatly from promoting the best answers on Quora and targeting based on interests/topics.

There are many metrics that can distract you from the lead generation process, and they are often meaningless. Therefore, the focus should be on some campaign metrics such as CTR (click-through rate), CPL (measurement based on the cost generated by inbound marketing) and the number of leads.

It’s also important to stay on top of industry benchmarks so you can track closed deals and optimize your marketing campaigns on a monthly and quarterly basis.

Comparison of lead-generating ads in the first and second quarters of 2019

03 Bottom of the Funnel: Purchase

Social media is the most popular method for achieving top-of-funnel goals (awareness), and it can also help convert leads into prospects and even customers.

But the credit doesn’t just go to social media itself – it has to be done strategically after you’ve laid the right foundation. If you don’t work hard enough to build your brand on social platforms, you won’t earn enough trust from leads to convince them to move from a simple click or download to purchasing your software.

With that in mind, here are some effective ways to achieve bottom-of-funnel goals (purchases) and drive conversions on social:

1. Retrieve visitors through demo

By viewing these ads, leads have become aware of your business and its offers. There are two main methods of retargeting:

1. Set up conversion buttons on your web pages to recapture users who visited pricing pages, demo pages, and other bottom-of-funnel purchase links.
2. Retrieve potential leads who have participated in your previous campaigns.

2. Focus on your audience

You may not always need to target the end users of your product. For example, you might run ads and posts that target executives, who are decision makers rather than end users. Tailor your message to them to get them interested and direct them to the right person on their team to learn about your offer.

On platforms like LinkedIn, managers and executives often recommend tools and delegate tasks to team members, which can result in a high volume of demo requests and conversions.

3. Marketing from the account

Micro-targeting to the right companies, job titles, or even individual professionals can help build rapport with leads before a sales development representative (SDR) takes action.

Plus, it adds context and topics to your conversations. After some hard work on LinkedIn, we have been connected with several big brands and brought us to their attention.

4. Cultivate lead users while users are using the platform

When engaging leads on social channels, it’s best to send them a PM or direct message rather than an email.

If leads and email marketers give up before reaching the first interest-inspiring touchpoint in your content, the effectiveness of your messaging will be reduced.

And because emails shared by leads on social media tend to be more personal, nurturing emails are more likely to end up in spam folders.

5. Leverage your greatest social marketing asset: your team members!

Every employee can be a marketer for their organization. Encourage employees to share and repost brand content on a personal level. When employees talk about the brand on different communities and Q&A platforms, it not only starts a personalized conversation mode, but also ensures better conversion rates.

6. Adjust your target audience

While Quora’s broad audience targeting is great for brand awareness, at the bottom of the funnel, contextual targeting (especially question context) is more effective and can help you reach the right people who are also searching for your solution.

LinkedIn allows you to locate your competitors’ customers and prospects, while platforms like Quora can help prospects choose your brand over many other options.

At the bottom of the funnel, the right metrics are critical to measuring your success. You need to understand the revenue contribution of each channel, and metrics such as conversion rate and average revenue per user (ARPU) from marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads and from prospect to customer are very important.

Social media marketers are grappling with an ever-changing landscape, and as a community of marketers who believe that experimentation speaks volumes, I’d love to see you share strategies that work in the comments below!

By Pooja Sriram

Source: Upskill