Is It Really Necessary To Participate In Social Media Marketing?

While B2B companies primarily aim to sell products to other businesses, B2B marketing heavily relies on establishing and nurturing human relationships. Social media has played a significant role in fostering these connections, and its importance has further increased in recent times.

Due to the absence of in-person events, B2B marketers sought alternative means to engage with prospects and partners, and they discovered that social media platforms offered the most effective solution.

By Utilizing Social Media, B2B Leaders Can Achieve The Following:

1. Enhance Brand Awareness: Across various platforms, companies can share their stories, explain the reasons behind their services, and keep audiences updated with customer and employee experiences. Leveraging the voice of employees can expand brand reach as they tap into their personal networks and connections, creating opportunities not only on social media but also in real-life scenarios such as creating flyers, sending direct mail, and networking at events.

2. Generate Leads: Engaging in meaningful conversations, and sharing videos, news, data, and interesting trends within their target industry helps build credibility with potential customers and can result in acquiring leads.

3. Nurture Leads: Social selling enables sales professionals to develop relationships with leads by leveraging thought leadership pieces, social proof, and other content to help potential customers solve problems. This approach builds trust and credibility for the sales team.

4. Implement Social Listening: By listening to customers and monitoring conversations about their company, B2B leaders can gather candid feedback and gain insights into how their brand is perceived. This allows them to identify areas for improvement and reinforce aspects that resonate positively with people.

5. Connect Social Posts to Opportunities: With the right enterprise solution, leaders can drive customer posts to their CRM (Customer Relationship Management system) to gain a deeper understanding of customers.

6. Measure Marketing Efforts: Social media platforms and management tools enable tracking of key performance metrics (KPIs), including assigning a monetary value to organic social media engagement. Earned media value (EMV) provides an estimate of the cost if similar engagement and reach were achieved through paid advertising.

7. Build Brand Authenticity: Engaging with potential customers, partners, and employees on social media creates opportunities to establish trust. When others promote a brand or its products/services, it significantly impacts brand authenticity. Studies show that people are more likely to trust recommendations from friends and family over official brand channels.

8. Drive Thought Leadership: Social media platforms provide insights into the problems and interests of people. Brands can leverage this information to drive thought leadership by offering solutions, such as creating how-to guides, webinars, and other content that helps people. Establishing a brand as a trusted source of guidance builds credibility.

9. Grow Your Audience: With billions of people using social media, it offers a window into a vast addressable market online. By providing thought leadership content that addresses the market’s problems, brands can build an audience that believes in their products and services.

10. Build a Community: Through planning and engagement, brands can cultivate an active community around their brand development on social media. Employees and customers can be leveraged to generate immediate engagement, such as likes and shares, expanding the reach to new audiences.

11. Generate Unique Content at Scale: Social media communities can serve as a valuable sources of original and thoughtful content. User-generated content (UGC) and employee-generated content (EGC) can provide authentic perspectives, ensuring a consistent flow of fresh content.

12. Stay Top of Mind With Key People: Utilizing social media to spread thought leadership content helps capture the attention of decision-makers and other stakeholders. Webinars, ebooks, one-pagers, podcasts, and other content types can be leveraged to solve problems and establish brand recognition.

To effectively connect and engage with future customers, it is crucial to be present on social media platforms, as that is where the majority of people spend their time.

Data On Social Media Marketing Effectiveness Provides Valuable Insights:

1. 89% of marketers consider social media “very important” to their overall marketing strategy, with an additional 30% stating it is “somewhat important” (Buffer).

2. YouTube accumulates over 1 billion hours of watch time each day.

3. 82% of B2B marketers report using LinkedIn for networking and making professional connections. They also utilize other platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest.

4. In 2017, 80% of social media B2B leads came from LinkedIn (LinkedIn).

5. Approximately 53% of the global population is active on social media (We Are Social).

6. Every second, 13 new users join social media for the first time (Hootsuite).

7. 70% of adults trust online recommendations from friends and family, while only 15% trust a company’s official social media posts (PostBeyond).

8. 91% of B2B buyers actively use social media (IDC).

9. 79% of job applicants use social media to search for employment openings, with 86% relying on social media during the first decade of their careers (Glassdoor).

10. 93% of Twitter users are open to brands joining conversations, especially when they provide assistance (Twitter).

11. 90% of Instagram users follow a business or official brand account (Instagram).

12. LinkedIn boasts nearly 800 million members across 200 countries, with North America accounting for approximately 25% of that population.

13. Facebook reaches 59% of the global social media population, making it the only platform used by over half of all social media users worldwide.

During the pandemic, social media became even more critical for B2B marketers and those looking for brand development. In a 2020 LinkedIn survey of 1,200 marketers, 75% of B2B marketers experienced budget cuts, leading them to focus on tactical marketing elements and short-term investments that demonstrate clear returns. Networking digitally allowed teams to establish new connections, spread company news through online word-of-mouth, and promote virtual events.

Overall

Your digital strategy should fit the unique requirements of your business and target audience. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, so it’s important to discover what works best for your company and monitor the impact of each action on your overall success.

As a creative agency, we offer website design, app design, brand development, and content services. Schedule a call to see how we can help you with our unique integrated marketing strategy and content services.