Not All Industries Thrive On Social Media Marketing – But Here’s How to Make the Best Of It
While social media marketing is an invaluable tool for many businesses, it's not always the best way for B2B business to market their services, especially if your business is one whose products aren’t really “sexy” in this image-orientated world, or are very technical niche products. There is, of course, a crossover between your professional customers and their personal social media activity, but they might not be open to consuming work related content when they're using social media for leisure. Additionally, some businesses, such as those mentioned above, can find it hard to make themselves heard among the noise when their products are very much needed, but would generally be seen as boring by the average person.
By no means are we saying you should ditch all your social media accounts and activity.In these times, you would expect to see a presence on social media and while you might not pick up a lot of leads or website traffic through your social media activities, it does keep your name out there.If you're not finding that social media marketing works for you, then perhaps re-evaluate how you send your time in creating content for it. Consider acting more like a curator, finding interesting and relevant content and sharing it with your commentary.This makes your potential customers interested in what you have to say and can help position you as an industry influencer – someone who your customers can look up to and trust.
Social media platforms allow for posts to be scheduled in advance, so you can get a week's worth of content ready to go in less than an hour and then leave it to publish at the right time. You still have to monitor your social media platforms every day to check for comments and conversations on your posts, and to respond to direct messages. You'll see that business pages on Facebook have a sidebar where their responsiveness to messages is shown – the more responsive you are, the better customers will think of you as it shows dedication. People like to be heard.
Whitepapers and podcasts are both great ways for B2B businesses to market themselves.They allow you to give information about you and your business, demonstrate how you have solved problems for customers and even provide an opportunity to collaborate with others in your industry to reach a wider audience. Reading a whitepaper, or listening to a work-related podcast during office hours is an acceptable way of furthering your knowledge, so you can be sure that your audience will consume this content when they're in the business frame of mind. The people who read or listen to your content are also quite likely to share it with colleagues, who broaden your reach and help introduce you and your business to a new potential customer with a personal recommendation from the initial sharer.
You can use your social media presence to distribute the content you create as well as for curating content from elsewhere, and by doing this you can build a valuable profile and presence online with comparatively little effort. LinkedIn is a good channel to use for distributing work related content, as it's a business focused social network.In some industries LinkedIn is more widely used than other social media platforms, and it's worth noting the demographic splits between the major platforms – you might find cultivating a Facebook presence is less effective than Twitter for your industry, so keep your social media activity under review and focus on the channels that work for you.
