It’s day 2 of SES Chicago, and the online marketing education is flowing full force. I saw an excellent presentation about building a killer B2B social media strategy with Adriel Sanchez (@Adriel_S) of SAP. With the sea of platforms, tactics, and schools of thought around B2B social media, it can be difficult to put together an actionable strategy that gets real results.
Follow the steps below to get your B2B social media strategy working for your business.
1. Forget Social Media, Think Content Marketing
Social media works best as a component of an overall content strategy. The key is to think like a publisher, not a marketer. This means avoiding the common pitfalls of being overly self-promotional or too sales oriented.
The key to a successful content strategy is to create a content creation plan. This will keep your output on track and structure your content around the themes and messages that are relevant and productive for your business. Aim to maintain a rolling content plan that spans for at least 2 months.
Your content schedule doesn’t have to be overly complex, but it should, at minimum, contain the following elements:
- Month
- Week
- Primary topic
- Secondary topic
- Comments / notes
2. Define Objectives
In order to get the most of out of social media, it’s important to have a clear understanding of what success looks like. If you don’t know where you are going, how can you possibly know if you’re on the right track?
Some factors to consider in defining what success looks like for your business:
- Reach – Who is your target audience? How large is it?
- Engage – What is your desired level of engagement?
- Take action – How likely are prospects to take action based on engagement with your brand?
- Share – Is the experience you’re offering to your customers exceptional enough for them to share with their communities?
3. Measurement
After defining success for your organization, the next step is to identify quantifiable metrics that allow you to establish a baseline as well as monitor your ongoing progress.
A few metrics to consider:
- Reach – Fans, followers, views, etc.
- Engage – Comments, replies, direct messages, etc.
- Take action – Form completions, website referrals, subscriptions, etc.
- Share – Re-tweets, mentions, “talking about this”, etc.
4. Infrastructure
Implementing and managing a successful B2B social media strategy can be lot of work, but taking advantage of available resources will lighten the load and set you up for success from the start.
Coordinate with your team members to determine who will handle the parts of your social media machine. Don’t make the mistake of limiting your search to the marketing department, as you will miss out on areas of knowledge that can prove instrumental to managing your social media presence. For example, sales staff should be engaging directly with customers and prospects, and engineers are often the best people to participate in and moderate technical discussions.
The other major piece of the B2B social media infrastructure component is a robust tool set. Take advantage of some of the useful tools available, such as:
- HootSuite
- Social Mention
- Many more…
5. Governance
To quote Adriel “Social media belongs to everyone, so get them involved, but make sure they know the rules.”
Your social media presence will be more effective when it is a culmination of the efforts of many, and most effective when everybody works towards a common goal. Get as many of your team members involved in your B2B social media strategy, but set down clear guidelines and rules early so that everybody is on the same page.
These should clearly define:
- Core objectives
- How content is be represented
- Rules for representing and discussing the brand
6. Listen, Learn and Adapt
Social media is constantly evolving, and your strategy should be fluid, adaptable, and constantly optimizing and improving.
Effective monitoring is paramount to success in this area, because you can’t adapt if you don’t know what’s going on. Keeping track of your brand presence, industry trends, hot topics, and current events takes effort, but is essential to keeping your brand presence relevant and effective.
Make regular reporting and analysis a cornerstone of your social media strategy, and use these insights to inform and improve your content plan, success metrics and objectives.
B2B social media can seem intimidating, but with proper planning and clear goals in mind, you can turn your company into a true B2B social media machine that will pay dividends both now and in the future.
TopRank Online Marketing will be live blogging all week at SES Chicago, so tune in to get the latest news, tips and commentary as it happens.
