November 30, 2023
You may have planning hats on for early 2024 – but before you put that plan in action to wind away the weeks before Christmas, read these 5 tips for your next B2B social campaign! Consider them as B2B social solutions.
You may have caught our latest Serious Social Live episode a few weeks back – well we’re taking some of those tips and putting them here as a reminder!
Cost-per-click isn’t everything
With B2B social – and paid campaigns in particular – it’s common to get bogged down in the ROI. Leaning on cost-per-click tends to be the most common way of justifying how a campaign performed (at least to SLT), but in reality, there are so many figures to dig down into that CPC can easily be rendered insignificant, or significant – depending on what you’re looking to feed back.
While a campaign’s aim may have been to garner clicks, to a landing page for example, think about other stats you can take down as a win. What about overall engagements? If you used videos or animations, what was the video completion rate? How many new followers did you accrue during the paid campaign?
Always caveat reporting – senior leadership will always value return, but you can spin it how you like. Not every campaign performs how you expect it to and positives can be found in unlikely places.
Corporate-safe content needs to be left behind
Branding always gets in the way when it comes to B2B social media. How you use a logo, where you place a banner, what colours you are allowed to use. These all feel like things that stop you from doing your best creative work or delivering the most impactful campaigns. Taking a risk is the only way to prove that bravery wins on social.
Your B2B marketing team may have spent a few hundred or even thousands putting together that corporate video – but how does it really make a difference to your audience? What do the first few seconds really say and why would they stay on listening?
Sometimes you’ve got to accept that the bad video or pics from that corporate campaign are going up on social – but be prepared to share why it didn’t perform. Be blunt and be honest and recommend how they can be done better. In many cases, shattering a longer video into shorter, more bite-size clips can be much more engaging.
Don’t post x3 times a week as ‘standard’
Many times, you’ll be asked ‘so what’s the best number of posts to do a week?’, when the question really should be: what do I have to say in this coming week?
Organic growth is tough – social is pay to play, and growing from organic presence alone as a brand isn’t just about filling the feed. To help this along, find the meaningful nuggets and bits of info that help to turn your brand’s feed into something informative and meaningful. Pictures of staff at events is fine now and then but it’s very much internal engagement focussed, and many external people won’t see the purpose.
Always consider the value-add – what’s the most precious bit of info your company holds that your customer base really wants to know about? Drip feed it in different ways – audiograms, snappy videos, blog-shares – there are many opportunities to provide valuable insights that will lead to likes and follows.
Consider what you have that’s valuable to a user, not what’s valuable to your brand.
Go vertical
Social is a mobile-first marketing tool – so think about that for your next campaign. Go vertical with your visuals, or 16:9 or even square. Typical landscape formats need to be left behind eventually. Make it easy for the scrollers to see everything in a uniform and neat way.
That also means going bigger – text-heavy visuals are disengaging. Don’t give users so much to do. Keep the wordage short and BIG. Digestible in seconds.
Your people are your future
Finally, consider your workforce as your go-to for video content. Find people comfortable on camera or being recorded with audio – make podcasts, post video clips – simple fire-side chats or coffee catch-up style videos are making waves in the B2B world.
Discuss what’s troubling your industry today. You don’t need the solutions, just show that you understand. Building trust is as much about good content as it is about being personable and relatable.
Users don’t want to see your corporate responsibilities folded into a 5 minute film of stock-footage. They want to see your people talking about their problems.
We’ve done a whole host of blogs on B2B social media best practices – from 101 advice to the latest news on platform developments.
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Or, if you just fancy a chat about social, contact us here.