social media

Social media has grown to become a powerful tool for digital marketers everywhere. When used the right way, it can be a great way to build your brand’s image, nurture relationships with your target audience, and even generate leads. While it may seem like the obvious choice to utilize social media platforms for B2C companies, B2B companies can also benefit from these platforms, with 75% of B2B buyers and 84% of C-level executives using social media to help make purchase decisions.

Through the right channels and proper strategy, B2B companies can enrich lead generation strategies through social media. Here are a few tips on the best practices for maximizing social media lead generation for your B2B brand.

1. Promote gated content

One of the easiest methods to get leads through social media is through promoting your gated content on your profiles. Whatever this content might be—eBooks, comprehensive guides, or whitepapers—it’s worth sharing if you think your audience can find value in it.

The frequency of sharing your content will depend on the platform. For example, it’s recommended to promote on Twitter once a day and once a week for Facebook or LinkedIn.

2. Build up your network

Beyond promoting your products and services, social media can be a great way to nurture relationships with your existing clients. It also serves to build a positive and credible reputation that prospective clients will hear about. This can be done by following and connecting with industry leaders, engaging followers through replies, and participating in forums to offer expert opinions.

3. Target your customers accurately

55% of B2B clients use social media to scope out potential product or vendor information. Take advantage of this by making sure that you’re reaching your clients on the right platforms. Focus on your ideal buyer personas and see which platforms best fit their online behaviors. While LinkedIn can seem like an obvious choice for B2B clients, other platforms may have advantages that better suit your business model.

In addition to this, making use of targeted ads on social media can be more effective, with marketers reporting a 25% increase in conversions for paid social media.

4. Tailor your content to the platform

Social media platforms all have their own quirks. Posting the same copy in the same format across all your social pages can come off as repetitive and uninteresting. Understanding the differences between these social networking sites and how your target audience uses these platforms can make all the difference.

More casual platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are more suited for instant content engagement and multimedia posts. Meanwhile, LinkedIn is good for more technical and professional content.

5. Be consistent

Social media may need different approaches, but your brand should still be consistent across all platforms. Take the time to decide on your company’s social media image and how to best convey it across the various platforms.

Consider this: Your social pages may be the first time potential clients encounter your brand, so it’s important that you make a good impression. By aiming for brand consistency, you are assured that every touch point will eventually lead to conversion.

Aside from posting and sharing content, updating your profiles and making full use of your selected platform’s features can go a long way in promoting your business.

6. Set up a social media contest

Contests or giveaways are a surefire way to get new leads, especially if your contests require participants to sign up or engage with your social pages. However, choosing the prizes for these contests should be done with care.

Giving away the latest gadgets or vacation trips can attract a lot of attention and participants, but they may only be interested in the giveaway and not your brand. To best maximize your leads that will most likely convert to sales, your targeting strategy and prizes must suit the needs of your ideal buyers. Giving away a free trial of your product or a service related to your industry may attract fewer participants, but these leads are of better quality and have a higher chance of converting to paying customers, should they like your product or service.

7. Conduct social media listening and monitoring

It’s important to consider your business’ long-term strategy for digital marketing. Paying attention to the data from your social pages, as well as the data in the industry can help improve your marketing performance.

Social media management tools have monitoring features that help you keep track of the metrics of your various social pages. This makes it easier to find which aspects to focus on, what practices you can do better, and what strategies are more effective. Meanwhile, making use of social media listening tools allow you to find potentially related topics and issues that your business can address through your posts and content.

Turn Your Likes to Leads

There’s no denying that social media is where your potential leads are. A good understanding of who your target audiences are can push you in the right direction in choosing which platforms to use, what kind of content to share, and how to best engage them to generate leads and possibly convert to sales. Keep up with the crowd and stay ahead of the competition by elevating your B2B marketing strategies today!

Social media continues to prove its importance in digital marketing campaigns. The channel isn’t all about content promotion and engagement anymore—it has grown to be a hub for lead generation, remarketing, and customer support portals for brands. In fact, 88% of all companies are already using social media for their marketing. If you haven’t done so yet, then you’re way behind.

If you know your way around the different platforms, you’d know that with the right strategies, it’s possible to generate organic traffic for your website or drive customer engagement from social media. However, using paid campaigns can give your pages a big boost in visibility as well.

As a digital marketer, you have to be proficient in choosing which of the two methods to deploy to reach the metrics you’re gunning for. To help you decide, you should learn more about organic and paid social media strategies below.

Organic vs. Paid Social Media Strategy

An organic social media strategy encapsulates any social media marketing effort that is free—no ad spend nor fees are required to boost a post. This means that the audience you reach will be existing followers or people who have opted in to subscribe to your brand’s content. Traction will be dependent on the actions of those who see your post, such as sharing or tagging people in the comments section.

A paid social media strategy, as the name suggests, covers any action on a post that uses money for boosting. These posts usually have a “Sponsored” tag. Using this strategy can broaden your target market and get your desired audience to see your posts, and maybe even perform a desired action such as clicks or sign-ups.

How Do They Differ?

A distinct difference in these strategies is that one requires ad spend while the other does not. Choosing one over the other will naturally have an impact on the results of your campaign. Below are some common social media marketing efforts and which of the two strategies can better help each action.

1. Community management

Community management refers to the continuous online engagement your brand has with your customers. This can happen through the comments sections of social media posts, online discussion threads, and exclusive groups (ex. Facebook, LinkedIn) of your industry or those created by your company.

Responding to those comments and creating brand relationships are better done through organic efforts than paid. For one, customers are aware of the sponsored tags on posts. Cultivating conversations on organic posts come off more natural for customers.

2. Brand building

If you’re a new company, it’s quite tricky to circulate your brand’s name in the digital world. With the barrage of information that users see on their feeds every day, it’s easy for users to miss your post.

This is where paid tactics come into play. With the proper audience targeting customization and budget size, it will be easy for you to reach potential customers who may have an interest in your brand. Doing this via organic methods may result in slower ROI, especially since social media algorithms now prioritize accounts or pages with boosted posts over those without.

3. Retargeting

Retargeting is a critical digital marketing strategy—it can increase branded search by 1046%. But for you to retarget audiences effectively, you must deploy paid social media tactics. You’ll be able to customize your post to be displayed to people who have visited your page recently, or those who like similar interests.

4. Content Marketing

Content marketing has broad coverage, but in essence, it’s defined as posts that present value to the reader. Both organic and paid strategies can contribute to this—preferably in that order.

With an established audience, you can create posts that incite engagement and keep the conversation going as natural as possible. For article links that you want to share, you can use paid tactics so that more people can see that your page offers relevant and useful content. This can also attract new followers and improve the performance of your organic posts in the future.

5. Lookalike Audiences

Targeting lookalike audiences is a paid feature on social media advertising platforms, like Facebook. It helps you reach other users on the social network who closely resemble the profiles of your existing followers. This is a great lead generation and brand awareness tactic that can help boost your brand name in the platform’s extensive user base.

6. Interest-based Targeting

Last but not least, there’s interest-based targeting. Similar to lookalike audiences, you can use paid campaigns to target audiences based on self-identified interests. For instance, if you are selling bags and shoes, then you can choose to target users who have expressed an interest in fashion. This will result in more clicks for promoted ads through the platform.

A Balancing Act

Organic isn’t dead—it helps promote brand authenticity and trust. However, paid efforts produce ROI higher and faster.

The truth is, you need both organic and paid social media strategies to reach your marketing goals. As the examples above illustrated, some social media actions perform better using organic methods, and some with paid. The key is to strike a balance between the two and identify which actions need which strategy.