January 13, 2017
As we all know by now, integrating social media engagement into your B2B marketing plan is a smart way to reach your clients and prospects. That isn’t rocket science, and certainly nothing new for 2017.
But it is something that is easily forgotten or lost from our initial focus, and of course there is no harm in reminding ourselves that any form of social media engagement can be a more than useful part of your marketing strategy, as it can (if used correctly of course) create and maintain brand awareness. You just need to K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid) it!
You do of course have to invest time into your social media efforts. But how much time you ask? Well, according to a recent report, 66% of marketers surveyed saw their own lead generation benefit dramatically when using social media after investing as little as 6 hours a week.
That’s no time at all!
And if you follow these three simple methods that are widely regarded as best practice to help businesses launch and organise their social media activities, it’s even less time!
- The monitoring stage, used during the research stage of developing a social media strategy. By looking for industry trends on social media, you can see what your prospects are interested in and what your competitors are up to and use this information in building your own plan, and best practices at this stage include determining your inbound marketing goals, monitoring for the right terms, segmenting your audience and personalising responses.
- The publishing stage, is the writing stage, where you develop and post content across your social media platforms, and best practices at this stage include optimising your social media profile, creating a social media style guide, customising your content, sharing relevant industry content and publishing on a consistent basis.
- The reporting stage, helps you assess your efforts and make changes to your strategy where necessary, and best practices include establishing benchmarks, calculating ROI and checking your results often.
It’s true that social media is valuable to your B2B business, but it is also true that it does take a little time, effort, research and writing to keep social media fresh, to build a social media audience and to sustain engagement.
By using best practices, any size B2B company can start and maintain a social media program to support their integrated marketing plan, distribute content and drive visitors to their website.
So, what to do now?
If you feel jumping into social media would take up too much of your valuable company time, then consulting with B2B marketing experts can help determine and define the best practices that will prove most effective and efficient for you.
And remember…
It’s important for B2B companies to include a social media strategy in their integrated marketing communications plan, and using simple, clearly defined B2B social media best practices is a good way to start, maintain and refine your efforts.
Then, you’ll not only be K.I.S.S.ing your social media marketing, you’ll be loving it!
I hope you have found this blog to have been useful, and If you have any comments please let us know via @iftweeter or leave a comment below