Reaching businesses through social media is an essential aspect of marketing that requires strategic thinking and planning. Here are the seven steps to consider when creating a B2B social media marketing strategy:
1. Set Goals
Assuming your company and marketing goals are established and documented, set realistic, incremental goals for social media that align with them.
For example, a growing web design agency may have a goal of gaining two new leads per month via their organic social media efforts. If the agency primarily publishes on LinkedIn and earns a new lead for every 2,000 impressions, they need to build a social media strategy to achieve 4,000 unique impressions per month.
2. Build Your Team and Assign Tasks
While every business's social media campaigns will be different, they all include research, content creation, project management and analytics. Very rarely will one person handle every part of a successful campaign and social media managers will need to delegate tasks.
Finding the strengths and weaknesses of every team member is essential when dividing up important responsibilities. In an ideal scenario, each team member will be an expert in their respected field, but that's not always a reality, especially for growing companies. As a result, the social media manager may have to assign team members into roles they don't have experience in, but with the right tools, solid guidelines, training and great communications among team members, you can achieve impressive results.
3. Manage Social Media Marketing Strategy Resources
Allocating resources and budgets is another crucial aspect of developing a successful social media strategy. Giving team members the right automation and productivity tools to produce and distribute engaging content and monitor analytics isn't optional in 2022.
A few of our favorite social media tools are:
- Canva
- TweetDeck
- and, of course, Please Share!
4. Create a Social Media Calendar
Planning posts ahead of time provides numerous advantages to posting on the fly. First, the entire team can review the content flow for the foreseeable future and make changes as needed. With a calendar in place, you can make sure that promoting new content or celebrating yearly holidays doesn’t fall through the cracks.
Another advantage is to ensure that you have the optimum mix of content for your audiences, including thought leadership, offers for different product lines, events, holidays/special occasions and content from influencers and partners.
Social Media Examiner has a complete yet simple-to-use calendar template ready for you to download and start using.
5. Encourage Employees to Post and Drive Engagement
When getting the word out about your social media posts, don’t forget about company employees. Please Share allows marketers to publish company updates within Slack and employees can post, like, share, retweet and comment in seconds, without ever leaving Slack.
Employee advocacy is essential for a B2B social media strategy. Audiences have higher trust in messages posted or endorsed by employees. In fact, company messages are re-shared up to 24 times more when distributed by employees, rather than the company itself. On average, employees also collectively have social networks ten times that of a single corporate brand.
6. Use Analytics to Measure Progress and Adapt
Social media measurement allows marketers to make data-driven decisions for everything from types of content, targeted demographics, performance versus competitors and performance versus goals.
Here are some metrics to keep in mind:
- Impressions, to ensure that your social media content is reaching your audience
- Engagement, measured by tracking followers, likes, comments, shares, retweets and replies, to see if your content is perceived as relevant and valuable
- Clicks, to see how your social media marketing strategy is contributing to traffic and conversions
7. Keep Up with Social Media Marketing Strategy Trends
Social media marketing is a relatively new discipline and it is still evolving rapidly. Stay on top of new trends and best practices by
- Following publications and experts like Social Media Examiner, Neil Patel, Neal Schaffer and Michael Brenner
- Signing up for webinars and courses at HubSpot, MarketingProfs. Encourage your team to sign up as well.
- Monitoring the social media practices of your competitors and other B2B companies and repurposing their ideas to fit your goals and strategies.
- Going to conferences and meetups to attend social media marketing sessions and network with your peers to exchange ideas. Talk to social media solution vendors at their booths. Because the best way to become more knowledgeable is to teach a subject, consider speaking at a session.
Final Thoughts on Creating a Social Media Marketing Strategy
Building an effective B2B social media strategy is a continuous process that isn't accomplished overnight. Setting goals, working with a capable team, allocating resources, and utilizing the best tools available allow marketers to put themselves in the best position to achieve optimal outcomes.
Please Share is a vital resource for B2B social media marketing. See how you can boost engagement and conversions by trying it for 14 days, free of charge.