Say goodbye to boring B2B content!
Social media has become an indispensable tool for businesses and brands to connect with their audiences and customers. We often see that B2B brands struggle with what content to post, how to build their strategy and execute it in a way that drives meaningful engagement. Don’t worry, we’ve put together a quick guide to help you brainstorm content ideas and establish a streamlined process to kickstart your social media channels.
Where to Start
First things first, every business needs to know who their audience is, whether it’s one kind of person or a number of personas. Creating audiences personas or avatars can help you to visualise who you’re targeting and pinpoint the key characteristics such as; gender, age, job title, aspirations, habits and hobbies. Utilising real data, you can pinpoint who your actual audience is versus who you think your audience is, which can allow you to better hone your messaging.
Steps to Identify Your Audience:
- Market Research: Analyse your current customers and competitors. Use tools like Google Analytics, SEMrush, Search Console and Microsoft Clarity to gather data, as well as in-app analytics on social media platform.
- Buyer/Customer Personas: Create detailed customer personas representing your ideal customers. Including demographics, job roles, challenges, goals, etc.
- Engagement Analysis: Monitor which types of content your audience engages with the most on your social media channels and on your website. If your blogs aren’t ever being read, maybe it’s time to pivot your strategy.
How to Create a Social Media Strategy
Define Your Goals
Determine what you want to achieve with your social media efforts. A few common goals include brand awareness, lead generation and customer engagement. Identify which metrics are going to be the most helpful towards achieving your overarching goals, as these are the metrics you will be tracking in order to define success.
Choose the Right Platforms
The first step is to choose the right platforms to spend your time and energy on. Identify which social media platforms your audience frequents the most, but don’t necessarily spend all of your time on this platform. Just because your audience is there, it doesn’t mean that it will be the place you need to be. If your goal is lead generation, Instagram likely won’t be the place for you. You need to align the platform that your audience is on with your goals ot have the greatest impact.
LinkedIn is often the go-to for B2B businesses and lead generation, but Twitter, Facebook, and even Instagram can be more useful for brand awareness and engagement. You may choose to have different goals on different platforms, focusing on lead generation on LinkedIn and brand awareness on Instagram. Just remember, social media will always primarily be a social interaction tool for most people, so a hard sell will likely not land well on any platform.
Additional tip: Try not to do too much, all at the same time. Consider how much time you have to dedicate to social media and where your efforts are best placed. Focusing on just one or two social media channels often makes the workload manageable and allows more time to execute your strategy properly.
Develop a Content Calendar
Plan your content in advance with a content calendar. Not only will developing a calendar help you ensure a consistent posting schedule, it will allow you to strategically plan around events, product launches, and campaigns. Using the strategy that you’ve previously developed, you can more easily come up with ideas and streamline your process for creating and executing quality content.
Create a Mix of Content
Balance your content with a mix of educational, promotional, and engaging posts. Use the 80/20 rule: 80% of your content should be valuable and educational and 20% can be promotional. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes, what do they find entertaining or useful? What questions do they have? What would make them laugh or what would they find attention grabbing?
Leverage Analytics & Be Responsive
Regularly analyse your social media performance using analytics tools and in-platform insights. Track metrics that are important to your goals. For example, if you’re trying to raise your brand awareness, metrics like impressions and engagement rate will be important to measure success.
Social media trends and algorithms change frequently. Stay flexible and be willing to adjust your strategy based on performance data and emerging trends.
Engage with Your Audience
Social media is a two-way street. Respond to comments, participate in conversations, and build relationships with your followers. Engagement can drive loyalty and trust with your consumers, people invest in people, so reminding your audience that there are people behind the brand is always a good idea.
Still struggling? Here are some ideas for content as a B2B brand:
Content Ideas for B2B Brands
Educational Content
How-To Guides
Create step-by-step guides that solve common problems faced by your audience. Presenting a useful resource for your audience will draw them to your brand, make your content shareable and may bring in leads if the guide displays a service you could remove from their to-do list.
Webinars & Workshops
Host live sessions or record webinars on industry trends, new technologies, or best practices. Similar to How-to guides, webinars and workshops give your audience a reason to seek you out, whilst showcasing your expertise.
Case Studies
Share success stories and highlight how your products or services have helped clients achieve their goals. Consider producing video testimonials from previous clients, giving a level of authenticity that doesn’t usually come from a written review.
Thought Leadership
Industry Insights
Share your perspective on industry trends, news, and future predictions. Give your audience valuable information that is impactful and perhaps completely new information for them. A level of responsiveness is required here as after a short amount of time, hard-hitting news will trickle down quickly.
Guest Posts & Interviews
Collaborate with industry experts and influencers to provide valuable insights to your audience. Associating yourself with those well-known within your industry but outside of your brand will bring higher engagement and establish your authority.
Opinion Pieces
Write articles that reflect your company’s stance on important industry issues. Not everyone has the time to watch videos and interviews, written thought pieces gives these people something of value and a way they can interact with your business.
Behind-the-Scenes
Company Culture
Showcase your company culture, team events, and employee stories to humanise your brand. In this digital age, content can be lost in all the noise. Providing real faces connected to your business can cut through it and show the real people behind the services you provide.
Project Sneak Peeks
Share behind-the-scenes looks at upcoming projects or product developments, showcasing your work, continuous improvement and innovation.
Day-in-the-Life
Feature a day in the life of your employees to give an inside look at your company’s operations. Making yourselves relatable reassures your audience that they will be working with real people that understand their unique needs.
Interactive Content
Polls & Surveys
Engage your audience with polls and surveys to gather feedback and insights. Not only does this kind of content increase engagement, it also gives you some incredibly valuable insights into your audience.
Contests & Giveaways
Run contests and giveaways to increase engagement and reward your followers. This can be a good way to introduce new people to your brand and gather fresh followers to get in front of.
