Attracting and retaining an audience is a challenging task, especially in B2B business: A Step-by-Step Guide for B2B Companies its target audience consists of professionals and companies that make decisions based on careful analysis, rather than emotions, as in B2C.
Alena Biryukova, head of the Progrev Kompleto local marketing email list unit, explained how a smart social media strategy can help you establish interactions with clients, share valuable content, and build a strong brand. A Step-by-Step Guide for B2B Companies .
Why B2B businesses need to promote themselves on social media
SMM promotion is necessary to increase company recognition, as well as to establish trusting relationships with clients and partners.
This is a key channel for:
- interaction with the target audience;
- posting expert content;
- demonstration of achievements.
Social networks help not only to attract new customers, but also to retain existing ones, creating an active community around the brand.
To stay afloat in the conditions of rapidly omnichannel marketing – examples of successful application growing competition and digitalization of business, it is necessary, among other things, to develop a competent SMM strategy.
Stages of strategy development
We identify 12 main steps:
- Goals, objectives and KPIs. Formulate them to evaluate the success of the strategy in the future.
- Target Audience Research: Study your target audience to understand their needs, interests, and behavior on social media.
- Competitor analysis. Look at their social networks to identify strengths and weaknesses, as well as successful approaches to SMM.
- Conclusions and recommendations: Form the basis of your strategy based on the data collected.
- Promotion channels: Determine which platforms will be used for promotion to ensure an omnichannel approach.
- Rubricator. Come up with topics and content types to diversify your posts.
- Community Management: Develop a community management strategy to actively engage with your audience and keep them interested in your brand.
- Account packaging. Make an attractive design: add a description, links, menu, products, albums and contact information.
- Visual concept. Determine the visual style taiwan data of the content so that it is recognizable, distinct from competitors, and consistent with the company’s image.
- Additional mechanics: Implement interactive elements such as quizzes and chatbots to increase engagement and interest in products.
- Gantt. Create a task execution chart for proper planning and control of strategy implementation.
- Reporting: Regularly analyze results and create reports to evaluate the effectiveness of the strategy and make necessary adjustments.
In this article, we will analyze the steps that will allow you to collect an information base. In the next one , we will tell you how to build a successful SMM strategy based on it.
1. Define goals, objectives and KPIs
Unlike B2C, where the priority goals of the strategy are increasing sales, as well as a loyal and engaged community, in B2B it is:
- Increase brand awareness;
- Formation of a positive brand reputation;
- Attracting new employees and retaining existing ones.
And also working with the target audience.
Depending on the goals, there are 2 ways for a manufacturer to manage social networks:
- Business strategy – this includes working with the brand’s image and reputation. The main focus is on the product, the process of its creation and the guarantees that the organization provides.
- HR is a career community. The task is to attract new employees and interact with the team. Through content, you can talk about employees, their leisure, career, working conditions, and also show why it is great to work in your company.
Once you have defined your goals, it is time to discuss possible tasks. These could be:
- attracting target audience to a community or channel;
- indirect increase in sales through social networks;
- increasing engagement and reach through game mechanics (quizzes, surveys, chatbots, sweepstakes, etc.);
- building a well-established mechanism for working with reputation (monitoring comments and promptly responding to them, handling objections, responding to messages).
It is necessary to set tasks, as they help to define the vector of work and expected results in order to achieve the established goals.
Then you need to understand what metrics to use to evaluate the success of the future strategy, for example:
- Engagement;
- Coverages;
- Number of requests to the community – here it is important to divide into targeted and non-targeted requests;
- Transitions to the site;
- Time spent on site;
- Number of quiz participants;
- Viewing depth;
- Number of applications;
- Increase in subscribers;
- Number of lead magnet downloads.