Marketing through Social Media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram is the perfect way to connect with a B2B audience, but it can be challenging to make your business stand out from the crowd. So what can you do to combat the scroll?
From making sure you are only using the platforms that attract the audience you need, to posting frequently enough to let your customers know you are there, it can be a delicate balance to achieve with a limited budget and stretched resources.
To help you gain more traction on social, we’ve compiled three of our best tips to stop those fingers scrolling and start them clicking straight to your website.
1. Choose quality over quantity
When it comes to social media content, our number one piece of advice is to opt for quality over quantity. Each social network’s algorithm has undergone massive changes in the last few years, and the algorithms are all heading in the same direction - where the highest quality content consistently rises to the top of the newsfeeds. The advice to opt for quality over quantity also applies to selecting the right social platforms for your business, which we’ll cover later.
On the other side of the quality over quantity battle, it’s important to consider that it’s not just about the number of likes you’re getting or the number of followers you have. If you have one valuable interaction on an infographic about your product or service that turns into a promising lead, this is worth more than the 300 likes on an irrelevant cat meme your competitor posted!
Creating ‘meaningful interactions’ with your target market is a great philosophy to work with when it comes to crafting compelling social content. If you’re providing something that your followers can’t get somewhere else, you’ll be much more likely to build an active and highly engaged social community.
2. Use video to encourage engagement
Did you know that 85% of people say they’d like to see more video from brands in 2018? The rise and rise of B2B video content is no surprise to those in the know, as videos have been proven to generate significantly more engagement than other forms of social content. In fact, the increase on engagement is over 140% on videos compared to any other post type. If that alone doesn’t convince you to start creating videos, we don’t know what will!
Using native video is the perfect way to embrace the trend, but make sure you’re creating content that engages your target audience at each point in your sales funnel, rather than going straight in for the kill by sending out conversion-based messages to a cold audience.
Another top tip is to humanise your videos as much as possible. Most B2B videos will benefit from using people to tell the brand stories you have created and convey your key messages in the most relatable manner. Take a look at this blog post for more ideas on the best types of video content to produce.
3. Make sure you’re posting the right content, in the right place, at the right time
It’s important to know where and when your market is spending their time online so that you can use the right social media platform to target them in the ‘moments that matter’.
While it can be tempting to want to ‘be everywhere’, it’s important that you focus your efforts on the social platforms that your target market frequent. Here at DMA Partners, we’ve chosen to focus on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.
While LinkedIn is the obvious platform of choice for B2B marketers, it’s essential to have a solid social content strategy in place to ensure success on this platform. Try a few posts a week initially, with the aim of keeping your network up to date with business news, industry trends and sharing value with your target audience. Once you’ve established a good flow, you can bring in more thought leadership content and start experimenting with an employee advocacy programme to boost the reach of your content.
While some argue that Instagram is a playground strictly for B2C brands, we’ve witnessed plenty of B2B businesses making waves on Instagram (including Hootsuite, Hubspot and Adobe). As Instagram is image-based, you need to carefully consider the use case your brand would have for this platform and also whether you have the resources to create enough visual content to build an audience there.
Interestingly, Twitter is the platform where we’ve achieved the best results for our own agency. Using hashtags to join in with conversations our target market are already having has helped us to raise brand awareness and continue to stay top of mind. Sharing a mix of created and curated content pieces keeps our feed fresh and engaging, leading to a follow-worthy account.
The key takeaway here is that not every platform and content style will be right for your business, so it’s important to focus your efforts on the channels and content themes that make the most sense.
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How well are you communicating your brand on social media? Get in touch with our Managing Partner, Philip Martin, at philip.marin@dma-partners.com to discuss how we can help you add an extra spark to your social brand identity.