July 15, 2024
They say that every 5 seconds, a CXO of a B2B brand somewhere in the world is asking the marketing team if they can make a company’s organic social post ‘go viral’. You can almost feel the dread – the heart-sinking feeling. “I’ll see what I can do” basically means, “no” – by the way.
OMG we need a profile
The increasing rate of content produced by B2B brands creates a fear in the market – senior stakeholders are often urged on to produce something ‘good’ on social because competitor A did this and competitor B did that. An idea of their own is scarce; could it be that it is the anxiety of being left behind that drives senior stakeholders to insist on social activity with no real formula? Rarely is it a lightbulb moment. In fact, if we look back 5-10 years ago, brands populated social in the B2B field because they felt they needed to be there, but couldn’t explain why – 5 years before that, no one understood why it was even needed.
And that kind of makes sense. If you’re going to do social – organic or paid – do it right. You may be unsure about how best to commence such activities; there’s nothing wrong with that – but without formulating a sound strategy behind your actions, performance is likely to fall short.
Step-by-step
Organic content performance will largely be driven first by internal engagement, then followers of those individuals. It’s not easy and it’s not rapid. The post itself, in organic format, reaches about 10% of your organic audience anyway! For big brands, it’s more straight forward, but for those outside of the FTSE 100 it can be hard to understand why things don’t grow so fast.
The truth, of course, is that nothing that ever comes free is really free. You’re paying staff to use to the platform – they’re using other platforms to produce content ready to use on social platforms. So if you accept money is being spent 90% of the way only for the post to return about 10% of the value, then you see the problem. It’s actually costing you a lot more than you realise to do that standard wallpaper post of “We’re proud to be a sponsor at tonight’s blah awards…”
On LinkedIn for example, chances are around 10% of your audience will see an organic post. But with a little bit of budget, you can grow this to 50% or higher in good time. Let us reiterate that – it doesn’t cost the world. And the rewards have a chance of being worth it.
You can even sponsor organic posts with a few hundred quid here and there to broaden the reach.
It’s the adage of ‘if it’s too good to be true, then it probably is’ and social for B2B kind of is that for most brands. It’s pay-to-play if you really want it to work; but the good news is – you don’t need to break the bank. A sound strategy can make it so much less expensive and provide a much more viable ROI (sorry, dirty word in marketing) for those senior stakeholders.
*ahem* that’s where we kind of come in…so, if you’re interested in getting a paid campaign off the ground in the coming months – give us a shout. We’d be happy to help. We can also create a decent organic strategy for you!