When it comes to finding B2B customers, social media has become an absolutely essential tool. In fact, not using social media to target new B2B customers could be detrimental to your marketing efforts - that's how effective the use of social media has become. But how exactly can you use social media in order to target B2B customers? There are many B2B social media marketing strategies, but the following five are some of the most effective B2B social media marketing strategies that you can use in addition to your B2B inbound marketing and SEO strategies:
1. Paid advertising
Many social media networks now offer paid advertising options. These can be very helpful for reaching your target audience. Why? Well, simply posting to your social media business page doesn't ensure that your followers will see your content. With paid advertising, such as Facebook Ads and LinkedIn Sponsored Updates, you can choose who you want to target (by choosing demographics, uploading an email list and more), thereby ensuring that they will see your ad. It's effective as well, as evidenced by the fact that social media paid advertising accounts for 48 percent of all B2B paid advertising usage.
2. Join social media groups
Many social media networks, including LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook, have groups that you can join. Groups are formed based around a particular topic or subject, so find the groups that are relevant to your brand and join them. Once you belong to the group, you can engage with other members by commenting on their posts and contributing something of value. This is an excellent way to find new B2B leads.
3. Keep an eye on the competition
You should be keeping track of what your competitors are doing on social media no matter what as it can give you valuable insight into what social media marketing tactics work and don't work. However, it's also a great way to find new B2B customers - just look to see who is following your competitors. You can then target them by sending them individual messages or via paid advertising.
4. Find social media influencers
Finding the influencers within your industry is an excellent way to reach a large audience that will be relevant to your brand. Tools such as Klout will rank influencers based on followers, comments, likes, mentions, retweets and more over all social media channels. You can also find influencers by seeing who other companies within your industry are following (including your competitors). Once you find them, engage with them by sharing their posts and commenting on them.
5. Post good content
It's pretty telling that around 92 percent of all B2B marketers use social media content as a main strategy. If you concentrate on posting high quality content that is relevant to your audience, your followers will be more likely to share and comment on your content, which in turn provides more exposure to potential B2B customers within your followers' individual networks.
