All posts tagged B2B
It’s never a bad time to look at how you attract people to your social media profiles and build your social media following.
There are two sides to the audience building argument.
One side will tell you to focus on quality, build your following slowly based on quality of connections and a real affinity.
The other side will tell you to focus on quantity, building your following quickly with paid social media campaigns, buying likes and followers and creating sensational content to ‘go viral’.
You will know what works for your organisation…
You will need to gauge what feels right, how much time and money you want to spend on achieving the ‘numbers’ – how many page likes you have on Facebook page, followers on Twitter or your Linked In company page. You may prefer to focus on building your audience slowly and look at the ‘quality’ metrics: engagement – comments, retweets, shares – instead.
But you should know that these options exist, i.e. through paid advertising or ‘likes’ campaigns, if only to analyse others’ social media following more dispassionately.
Remember, though, that anyone promising you instant success is trying to sell you something…
It is still possible to build your audience on social media through content marketing and organic growth, by regularly posting a variety of content that is relevant and appealing to your target audience (or customers). Bear in mind that what you post on social media will depend on what type of business you run. There are many different types of content for business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) companies, and most of it will be familiar to you.
Content marketing uses many different formats to deliver quality content.
What you’ll find, even when you are selling to another business person (as opposed to a consumer) is that it’s ‘B2B’ for the first five minutes only. It soon becomes you speaking to another person, another human being, and seeing them as an individual. Everyone in business knows that this is what relationships are based on, and you’ll be on first name terms within the hour.
On the B2C side, with consumer marketing, the people who follow brands on social media want to be rewarded in some way. They want offers, deals and coupons or to know when the ‘flash sale’ is going to be. There’s very little brand loyalty these days, so think about different types of content which could be appropriate for your audience.
This quote is about Twitter, but I like it because it’s relevant to any social media platform:
“…humanize it.” Talk like a human, treat your readers like a human and empathise -this is how you get people’s attention and start to build trust with them. Be real!
All the major social media platforms have launched advertising tools in the last few years. These are not to be underestimated, either in terms of their targeting capabilities or the potential reach they offer you, regardless of geography. If you are familiar with the principles of display advertising (picture or video adverts) and pay-per-click (PPC) you will understand the advertising tools immediately.
The Inbound Marketing Funnel
For those who are new to paying to reach new ‘customers’, both operate on an auction model.
With paid ads, the most exposure (impressions or reach) goes to the highest bidder for that target audience. It’s a fair system, in as far as you know either how much (the maximum) you are prepared to bid for either a click (through to your website or product page) or impressions, the number of people the ad will be presented to (sold per mille/’000).
When you are buying ad campaigns on each platform, you’ll be asked to choose your goals, based on the stage in the inbound funnel (see at right) / customer journey you want to reach your customer at.
Basically, you will be looking for Awareness, Consideration or Conversion.
Paid ads can help you reach target customers beyond your networks, sector, industry, location or language.
Some ads will present your picture ad, others may have a few lines of copy and Call to Action. The success rate on all social platforms is low: typically the click-through-rate (CTR) will be lower that 0.5% or the people you are targeting. You then have to follow up in some way to convert them.
Targeting can be based on the common characteristics of you target customer (or buyer personas) or you can create ‘look-alike’ target audiences based on the custom tools within the platform. For more information about the paid ad tools on each platform, please see our blogs about each platform.
The first option is to respond to a direct approach, normally on social media, offering to sell you followers. These are normally sold per thousand. Buy followers at your peril. They won’t engage with your content (posts) and may distort your page analytics (metrics) significantly.
Accessing a pre-existing ‘community’ that has been pre-built by an agency can produce an impressive number of page (and post) likes. Some will have millions of members who are, evidently, very obedient and do as they are asked. This is a tactic if you need to demonstrate interest in your brand or products, perhaps to an investor, but it is not cheap. Or particularly sustainable.
Am I against ‘paid’ social media? No. I think the targeting and advertising tools have the potential to put you in front of people you’d never reach otherwise. I think the best combination is paid + organic, still delivering as much quality content as you can to your social media following.
But I would avoid buying followers, in the same way that I’d avoid buying contact data. It is poor quality and unlikely to convert.
1. Identify your target market – you may already have some information, but the more you know about who you’re trying to target, the better the social media platforms will support you. They have targeting tools built within them based upon the data they gather from users, and in the paid versions these are really sophisticated.
2. Know what they’re looking for – once you start to interact with them you’ll know what questions they ask and also what kinds of things they interact with. Taking time to understand what your target customers care about helps you talk about topics they are interested in.
3. Attract and engage them – by being interesting, engaging and relevant, you’ll start to attract people to your profiles and pages. Use the language they understand and use themselves and your posts will be relevant to them.
4. Build trust and earn leads – doing so will encourage people to visit your website, subscribe to your mailing list and download the lead magnet you’ve created in exchange for an email address. They WILL ring you or send you a direct message, because it happens all the time.
5. Measure and improve. Think about what you’re going to measure, because big numbers don’t always mean anything. The quality of interactions is what matters for a social media following who will ultimately buy from you, or recommend you to others.
Social media is great for weak links, so don’t feel too disheartened when things don’t go your own way immediately and don’t expect too much of people. After all, you’re not face-to-face, so you can’t rely on non-verbal cues or the opportunity to have a proper conversation to build rapport.
At the bottom of the inbound funnel, once somebody has become a customer, it’s a great way to keep in touch with them.
Turn them into an advocate and they will make sure your posts, comments and shares ‘move’.
Why not check out the other blogs in the series:
If you like video, check out our recording of this fascinating topic and learn from these amazing thoughtleaders.
Our new online programme Content Marketing Conquered is designed with you in mind. Based on our successful workshop programme and latest strategies, we guide you to the top in 6 easy steps.
Photo by Fleur Treurniet on Unsplash
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The modern consumer is egocentric, and truly only cares about themself.
They care about what they are trying to achieve and what matters most to them.
So naturally, they skim (ruthlessly) over content in their social media feeds that aren’t of interest to them.
Unless you get the right message you will not get their attention.
This means that your content and posts need to be tailored to them. Just them.
They need to be interesting, engaging and relevant. To them.
If it’s about you, your customers really aren’t that interested. Unless it’s about them.
Zig Ziglar famously said:
“people don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care”
Particularly, how much you care about them.
If you can reach out to people with your content and demonstrate that you have something that will change their lives, then you will get their attention.
You need to post and share content that’s relevant to their lives, so how do you find out what that is? Enter, ‘social listening’.
I highly recommend watching and listening (observing) your customers on social media, whether you’re just starting out or moving to the next level. Be passive and see what people are talking about, sharing and interacting with. If you don’t you can often get it wrong.
When you are ready to move beyond the broader categories that people fall into (segments) and start thinking about what is influencing their decision making, you may want to develop your buyer personas. Our recent blog on buyer personas explored the different ingredients that go to make up a buyer persona, but if you take the time and really drill down into who they are and what makes them tick, creating content for them will come as naturally as speaking with an old friend.
Who is your customer and what do they want? Perhaps they’re trying to overcome a challenge or tackle an issue that they’re dealing with. Or it could be something positive, such as an aspiration or desire.
If you appeal to their current mindset, rather than giving a lot of information about your products, services and staff, you will get their attention more easily. Concentrate on solutions to their challenges, ways to reach their ambitions and try to anticipate their questions. If you can give them the answers, you will be helping them to come to a decision. And demonstrating your expertise and trustworthiness.
When you start talking about someone’s problems, their fears, hopes and aspirations, in a way that shows respect, empathy and understanding, you get their attention.
“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.”
Henry Ford (quoted in Dale Carnegie)
This is your opportunity to show the human side of your brand – social media is a great place for us to demonstrate our ‘personality’ – and make a personal connection.
What’s really interesting, is that even B2B purchase decisions will be influenced by how the customer feels. It is not just a rational decision, so think about how they feel right at the moment. Can you appeal to their emotions?
We’re still selling something. Good sales people know that you’ve won the sale when the answer to all your questions is: YES. You’ve exhausted their objections, allayed their fears, gained their trust and confidence, then finally, their business.
It’s whatever you say, that makes them want to say ‘ yes’.
Why not check out the other blogs in the series:
If you like video, check out our recording of this fascinating topic and learn from these amazing thoughtleaders.
Our new online programme Content Marketing Conquered is designed with you in mind. Based on our successful workshop programme and latest strategies, we guide you to the top in 6 easy steps.
Photo by Adam Jang on Unsplash
read more
For your customers, time may be a movable feast. Showing up at the ‘right time’ is therefore the ultimate challenge. So how do you know the right time for your customers on social media?
There are always 24 hours in every day, 7 days in a week…
But the bottom line is, for your customer, time may feel like it’s in short supply. This will be more noticeable at different times of day, days of the week or whether they’re just about to take some time off and want to clear out their inbox.
Your goal is to post social media that reaches them
at the right time or day of the week, for them.
A quick look at your social media analytics will tell you when your followers are actively on that platform.
Facebook Analytics Posts even gives you a visual of when your connections were on Facebook each day. So as long as you are active on Facebook, or scheduling important messages for those key times, you will show up at the right time for them.
Sometimes your LinkedIn update might have just popped up at the wrong moment and they didn’t have time to respond to it. This doesn’t mean that people don’t care, or are not interested, you’ve just caught them when they’ve got other things going on that are more urgent for them.
If you look at the analytics for your social media accounts and also look back through your feeds to see the time of day or day of the week you get the most engagement, you will start to build a picture of your followers. It really is different for each person/business, but as a rule of thumb, if you’re B2C (business to consumer) you should try scheduling posts to go out early morning, in the evening and at weekends, as these are good times to reach your audience.
If you’re B2B (business to business) early mornings, lunch time, and early evening are good times to reach your followers, as these are common times for people to dip into social around working hours. Weekends can work surprisingly well too and LinkedIn is a busy place even on a Sunday evening.
Remember, not every workplace tolerates social media activity on site or in working hours. Even B2B posts may not reach your audience until they ‘clock off’ and head home.
Sadly, you may find that your lovingly crafted social media posts are competing with lots of other things happening in their lives. They may be dealing with their kids/pets/partners or have the laptop and the TV on at the same time, whilst having a quick dip into Snapchat or Facebook.
Multi-screening customers mean you have a third or a quarter of their attention at best, which is a lot of competition for your social media. Don’t just post once. Share the same posts at regular intervals throughout the day or week to ensure that they don’t your followers don’t miss them and potentially, miss out.
Location is important: where are people consuming your content?
The chances are that if they’re reading it on a mobile phone, they’re on the move (or having a quick ‘social snack’). They may be travelling or waiting for someone, checking out your restaurant or pub on Tripadvisor en route, or looking to see if an item is in stock en route to your shop.
Whatever they’re looking for, they will want to do it quickly and make a decision now. How well does your social media support these kinds of searches? Photos, maps, videos, quotes, testimonials, product reviews, links – social media platforms support just about any kind of content you need to help your customer find and choose you.
Smartphone screens are still quite small so make graphics and text overlay REALLY BIG so it can be read easily on a small screen. With imperfect eyesight!
There’s another dimension to time as well, which is thinking about the right time in that customer’s journey. Using the Inbound Funnel below as a guide, then typically if they’re at the early stages they’re just beginning to perceive a need or want. Content and posts that will intrigue and attract them and get them to visit your website are important.
Later on in your customer’s journey, as they progress, they’ll need deeper content, such as a video to show how to do something or how something is used.
An ebook, guide, whitepaper, email series, etc that offers them more information will garner their email address.
Later still, they may welcome a webinar or Facebook Live, which gives you an opportunity to expand on the topic and answer their questions.
The further they go along that journey, the more they need. Your posts in social media need to help customers to make the best choices and decisions for them, which is a key strength of content marketing.
The best way to plan is to use some simple tools.
Everybody uses a spreadsheet, and you don’t need anything more complicated than that, because it needs to be flexible and easy to update.
There are also a number of scheduling tools, and Hootsuite and Buffer are particularly good when you’re just getting started. As you develop you may want something more sophisticated, but only if you are doing a serious amount of social media on a variety of topics.
Scheduling platforms have different price points and strengths. As you progress, MeetEdgar is mid-priced and very good at scheduled, yet randomised posting but it doesn’t give detailed analytics. Sprout Social is slightly more expensive but gives you a lot of analytics, particularly around #hashtags.
Choose what’s most appropriate for your business stage, size and goals.
Why not check out the other blogs in the series:
If you like video, check out our recording of this fascinating topic and learn from these amazing thoughtleaders.
Our new online programme Content Marketing Conquered is designed with you in mind. Based on our successful workshop programme and latest strategies, we guide you to the top in 6 easy steps.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
read more
How do you decide which social media platform to use? Why not let your customers lead the way. If you want to know the ‘right place’ on social media, here are three questions to ask yourselves:
Pick 5 – 10 customers at random and see where they have social media profiles.
2. What do they do on each platform?
Post? Share? Comment? Follow? Like?
3. Are you a welcome guest… or a gatecrasher?
Not all brands have universal appeal and sometimes you’re just in the wrong place.
Know when you’re invited and when you’re barging in.
One of our Digital Marketing Institute Diploma (at nesma) students told us a great story. He is the IT manager for a big campus university in the heart of England. They were having difficulty engaging students attention on Facebook, yet were persevering with their plans to keep students up to date on the platform. One of their quarterly student surveys flagged up a key piece of feedback:
Yes, students were on Facebook and Twitter. But Facebook was where they went to hang out with their friends, organise their social lives and laugh at celebs. They didn’t want the university butting in on their ‘party time’.
They were perfectly happy to hear from them on Twitter, though.
Needless to say, said university doesn’t waste time and energy on Facebook updates to students any more: Twitter now works a dream.
With a little effort, you can become one your customers trusted sources in time. Respect their preferences and you’ll be the welcome guest.
Don’t turn up empty-handed. Instead show up regularly with useful, relevant, timely (and where appropriate, entertaining) content.
Here is an overview of the ‘main’ social media platforms that most businesses would be looking at in the early stages:
Linked In
The most commonly used ‘business to business’ social media platform. You can have a personal profile, rather like an online CV, and a company profile page, like a mini website.
Linked In has been going since 2003, is well trusted and established, with over 500 million users worldwide. It is great for connecting with business contacts, colleagues and networking connections and has groups and forums galore.
The paid accounts have added functionality and allow you to connect with people outside your immediate circles, so it can be a great business development tool too. The search function supports Boolean Logic, so you can literally find ‘an needle in a haystack’.
Posts on Linked In are nearly three times more trusted than on other social media platforms.
The new style Linked In company pages enable you to have something akin to a mini-website, great for promoting your brand and for search engine optimisation for your website – Linked In performs extremely well in online search.
There is also a paid advertising feature as well as sponsored InMail. So if you’re target customers are “white collar” workers, from junior management level up, you are likely to find them here.
With over 2 billion accounts worldwide, Facebook has achieved critical mass with users and brands alike. Even if you are not active here, you will want to have a presence, but manage your expectations!
Increasingly Facebook acts as the ‘plumbing’ for a host of other online platforms and tools, including other social media platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram. You will be given the option to log in via Facebook.
You can have a personal profile or a range of ‘professional’ profiles, depending on your status and requirements and it is still the most effective way to reconnect with old friends online.
It is particularly effective in the retail or ‘business to consumer’ sector, with very sophisticated and cost-effective targeting tools for paid promotions to existing connections and new target groups.
Is your brand “conversational”? If people naturally talk about what you do, Facebook may be your invitation to the party.
For ‘business to business’ it can work well for some service providers, as well as bloggers, coaches and trainers. However, Facebook only presents your status updates to connections (Likes), and only a small % will now see them unless you pay to boost them to reach all your page followers. As well as personal and business pages, you can set up groups and many communities live within Facebook.
Twitter is part news feed, part social media platform with over 300 million users worldwide. It is especially popular with journalists, bloggers and media folks for breaking and sharing news stories and opinions. The character limit favours brevity and clarity, but you can attach images and short videos to tweets. The advertising tools allow you to promote your twitter account to encourage followers or your tweets, to increase engagement.
Whatever your industry, profession, interest or niche, #hashtag search will help you find and connect with your kind of people.
Twitter is informal, so it is a great place to interact, share and promote your ideas and news in real time with few barriers and minimal cost. It is as common for ‘business 2 business’ as ‘business 2 consumer’ brands to be active on twitter and many are opting to use Twitter to support their customer service function.
YouTube
YouTube is the original online video sharing social media platform and since its launch in 2003 has become, reputedly, the second most widely used search engine after Google, (by whom it was purchased in 2006). It hosts a mind-boggling quantity and variety of video (and film) on any topic you can imagine.
It is extremely popular and closely linked to Google (who own it), so can help to drive traffic to your website if you have useful and/or relevant footage on YouTube. You can have your own branded channel – an entry page branded to represent your company – and populate it with your own and curated videos.
YouTube is busy, but don’t expect more than Likes and Shares. It takes a lot to get comments from your viewers so don’t expect interaction.
YouTube can be a great place to host ‘how to’ and trust building content for those at the early stages in your sales pipeline.
Bought by Facebook in 2012, Instagram is one of the newest platforms but has a growing user base – currently 700 million and rising. It has been a runaway success, benefiting hugely from Facebook’s support and many new developments, including ‘InstaStories’ are designed to compete with newcomers, like SnapChat.
It works really well for tangible or visual brands (and celebrities) and for certain types of business it’s a clear choice, based on sector, target audience and location.
On Instagram, people take and share photos and short videos, typically on a smartphone, which they then upload directly to Instagram with a bit of text. And a lot of #hashtags!
It’s harder for brands to publish into Instagram, as it doesn’t tolerate most social media scheduling software, like Hootsuite, Buffer, MeetEdgar, etc, but this may make it popular with a certain kind of user – it rewards spontaneity.
If you are happy to be led by your customers, you will save so much time, effort and disappointment spent hanging out with the wrong crowd.
You may need to step outside your comfort zone and start using social media platforms that are new to you. If you’re uncertain, take some time to ‘listen’ – observe your customers and the people they are happy to interact with and see what works for them.
The acid test: can you be true to yourself and still be welcomed in to the conversation?
If you can, then you’re in the Right Place, will build connections effortlessly and will gradually learn about the next of the Three Rs of Social Media Success.
Why not check out the other blogs in the series:
If you like video, check out our recording of this fascinating topic and learn from these amazing thoughtleaders.
Our new online programme Content Marketing Conquered is designed with you in mind. Based on our successful workshop programme and latest strategies, we guide you to the top in 6 easy steps.
Photo by Caleb Jones on Unsplash
read more
