What social media can do for your business

Social media can be a useful tool to a B2B focussed business, but it is often misused and treated as a chore – something to do because everyone else does it. Social media is a good cog in the marketing machine, with several benefits to achieving the overall strategy. It is best to integrate it as part of an overarching thought process, rather than viewing it as a silo.

The core marketing strategy is based around clear aims and objectives, with each pound spent getting the business closer to achieving it’s aims. It is then the responsibility of the marketing team to understand how social media can fit into it and the benefit that it can provide. With a clear goal, everything can fall into place seamlessly – the appropriate channels, the content type, subject, and frequency. If your target audience is almost exclusively using Instagram and LinkedIn, then put your resources there and be confident to scale back other platforms. Just because a competitor is doing something, does not mean that you need to follow suit.

There are several avenues to pursue when deciding the purpose of your social media:
Brand awareness
Lead generation
Community development
Product advocacy

These are only a selection of possibilities, but more often than not, social media is used as a product promotion tool geared towards existing customers who are already aware of the brand. It provides an avenue for sales teams to be able to push product into the market as an arm of their process. It can be far more powerful than that.

Viewing the buying process more holistically is a good method to decide where social media can provide the highest benefit – whether it is creating awareness in new markets, amongst new customers, or is there higher benefit in creating true advocacy where loyal customers are rewarded and encouraged to promote the virtues of your portfolio for you? For example, if you are trying to enter a new market then posting about your products will be ineffective because the people that you are targeting do not know your company. Alternatively, if you are aiming for advocacy then providing company history and service levels will be confusing because your target audience has purchased from you for years.

Each area requires subtle differences in content and a clear commitment to pursue it. A social channel that is blown off course regularly is hard to engage with or follow with any degree of interest. Having a following that you want is better than just a large follower count for the sake of it.

There are additional benefits that come for curating a community; it allows you to understand your customers far better, so that you can deliver more products and services that they want and need. Using a data led approach is seen as a holy grail, in practicality it can start here. Having an engaged social media following can provide far quicker and greater insight, on a more regular basis, than many other alternatives. This insight can be fed into sales, development, and customer service teams to improve the quality of the products and services provided. It can provide a sustainable advantage, of high value, and one that cannot be built easily by competitors. The insights that you can get will be tailor made for your organisation, with the information that you want to receive. It can provide huge weight of supporting data to the decision-making process.

Start by assessing what you want social media to do for you, and where your time is best spent. This combination of answers will be a strong guide on what you need to publish, and how success can be measured. Trying to be all things to all people, getting involved in all areas of the buying process is impractical for many companies as they do not have the time, budget, or resource to execute it effectively. This is before we consider the sheer quantity of posts required to do it, with the detrimental impact on the followers of being bombarded with information.