B2B Myth of the Week: Social Media Content Should Be All-Business
by MGB2B
Myth: Social Media Content for B2B Brands Needs to be All-Business
Fact: Social Media is the Perfect Channel to Show Brand Personality
Social media content for B2B brands must revolve around statistics, numbers, and charts. Right? Wrong. While buyers do need practical information, it’s also necessary to humanize your brand. To do so, make sure some of your content resonates with your buyer’s emotions. After all, at the end of the day, it’s a human making purchase decisions. Need help getting started? Here’s three jumping off points to get your creative content up and running:
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Tell Stories
Storytelling is a simple way for buyers to relate to the brand. This, in turn, strengthens the relationship between brands and buyers. By sharing stories on social media, your company has a chance to develop a personality that strikes a chord with your audience. According to a study at Stanford University, information shared through stories is remembered 22 times more than facts alone. So what kind of stories can you tell? Try a testimonial from a satisfied client. Polish up your brand creation story. Or consider a story that demonstrates how your product or service can solve a problem.
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Use Humor.
People often assume that social media content for B2B brands is limited to stiff and serious posts. Including humorous content is a great way to get people interested in what your brand is doing. Let’s face it, most people don’t expect B2B brands to be funny. Use that to your advantage. Incorporating humor can be an extremely successful way of getting attention from potential buyers. There are plenty of ways to mix a little humor into your content calendar. Get creative with photos and videos that your brand is sharing. Is there something people find confusing about your brand? Poke fun at yourself (like MailChimp does). Or maybe there’s a common challenge in your industry you can make light of. A little levity can go a long way in ingratiating your brand to your audience.
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Show the Brand’s Personality.
Developing a personality that is associated with your brand has way more impact than just facts and numbers. Audiences remember personalities over stats. This one’s tricky – it’s easy for B2Bs to fall into the same-old personality traits: committed, quality-oriented, eco-friendly, etc. But who is your brand really? And how does that resonate with your audience? Make yourself memorable. Think about what ultimately motivates your brand, and develop your character from there. Is your brand personality wise? An explorer? A trusted advisor? Do you aim to challenge or inspire? Whatever you feel your brand is, infuse those characteristics into your content (not to mention your ad copy and visuals) and stand out from the pack.
Even though it seems like social media content for B2B brands is limited, it’s just the opposite. It’s an opportunity to showcase just what makes your brand tick. While facts and stats provide the proof, your brand personality will resonate far longer.
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B2B Monday Myth: More Is More on Social Media
by Emily Swet
The Myth: More Is More in Your B2B Social Media Strategy
The Truth: Scale Back on Quantity, Scale Up on Quality
Social media is growing up. At this point, the hustle to fill space is over. Audiences have set the pace of what they want to see, and when. It’s true that, as marketers, our goal is to move that needle – albeit with a deft hand. There is value in restraint: unbridled social calendars can have a detrimental impact on your goals. Take a moment to audit your current B2B social media strategy, and see if anything sounds familiar.
- What Are You Posting? Take a closer look at your content. Is there value to it? Or are you merely posting to meet your daily quotas? Think critically on this. While you do need to stay active throughout the week, posting your FAQs page just for the sake of having a post isn’t the path to engagement. Content that isn’t valuable to your audience won’t be valuable to your sales funnel either.
- Abandon the Spray & Pray Method. How many times and across how many platforms are you posting? There’s a good chance a large portion of your followers is the same across the social landscape. If you are blowing up their feed throughout the day, especially with invaluable posts (see above), you risk the chance of pushing them to hit the unfollow button.
- Who Actually Are Your Followers? For B2B businesses, this is especially important – it’s not about how many people are following you, it’s about whether they matter to you. Buying followers or hooking in demographics that aren’t in your customer base is a waste of time and budget. A focus on smaller, yet appropriate audiences will yield more valuable engagement for your brand (read: more shares, more click-throughs). If you haven’t already, creating customer personas will help you find your focus.
Since so much can be done on social media for free, it seems like a smorgasbord for strapped B2B marketing departments. Find your strength in reserve: refine your B2B social media strategy to the most helpful or interesting content, and you’ll see both your content longevity and customer engagement increase.
Continue ReadingThe 3 Most Important Factors of Any Social Media Campaign
by MGB2B
Social media is no longer something only younger generations participate in. Now more than ever, it’s important that your manufacturing company utilizes it to reach a wider audience. In doing so, you’ll get your products and services in front of people who might not have initially seen it. Building a social campaign can be a complicated process, but when done correctly, the payoff is sizable. The most important thing to remember is that campaigns are “living” pieces of your company. They need to be monitored throughout their lifetime to ensure they are running smoothly. And if not? Here are a few things to keep in mind…
Organic vs. Paid
You’ve surely heard the terms “organic” and “paid” when it comes to social traffic. Organic traffic is the traffic you get on your social account without having to pay. So, if someone finds your profile, likes a photo, shares a post, or leaves a comment, without any prompting, that’s organic traffic. Paid traffic, on the other hand, happens when you pay to have your posts boosted, ensuring they get in front of your desired audience. The likes, shares, comments, and follows that result directly from these paid campaigns are paid traffic.
So you’ve built your campaign, now what?
To ensure your campaign performs to the best of its ability, there are a few things to focus on:
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Your Audience
Who you are trying to reach with your message? There are a lot of great metrics tools out there that can help you determine the audience you are already reaching, which you can eventually build off of. Twitter, for example, has an entire section in their user interface that breaks down your audience. From your audience’s interests, to their buying style, wireless carrier, and demographics, you have an incredibly detailed picture. If your campaign not performing as well as you had hoped, analyze this picture. You have time to reconfigure and adjust your audience throughout the lifetime of your campaign, as long as your monitoring it.
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Your Message
This facet is closely tied to your audience, and varies from each one. Consider speaking to a 28 year old engineer differs versus a 50 year old executive. The interests, abilities, and knowledge of these two people vary greatly. Your message should be tailored to each. Since social media has the ability to speak directly to your audience as individuals (and they’ve come to expect it), make sure you do just that.
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Your Platform
Social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn all have a purpose, and they’re not necessarily the same. Instagram is strictly for photos or easily-digestible videos. Facebook is a melee of articles, photos, thought-pieces, and more. Hopefully, before you’ve created a campaign, you’ve chosen which platform works best for you, your message, and your audience. It’s easy to default to Facebook but if you notice your campaign taking a hit, take a step back. Review the pros and cons of each social site (and believe me, they all have pros and cons.) If the platform you’ve chosen doesn’t check most or all of your boxes, halt your campaign. Move the budget over to a platform better-suited for your needs. It’ll make a big difference in your ROI.
As with anything, there are more than just three factors that could affect your social media campaign performance – these are just the tip of the iceberg. If you want to get in front of the right people, with the right message, at the right time, you have to do your homework.
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