Social media has revolutionized the way to communicate with customers and prospects. With decision makers using social media platforms such as LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest, social media marketing has become an essential tool for companies to connect and build relationships.

Social media strategy planning starts with defining goals. Investing the necessary time to define social goals is the first step to reaching them. The goals guide the social media marketing strategy and how much time, money and effort are required to achieve each of them.

Research your target audience and select your social media marketing efforts at the platforms that fit the goals. Different platforms attract different audiences. Making assumptions is bad news for marketers. Both leaders and practitioners can disprove assumptions from the valuable insights social data provides. With the right tool, marketers can quickly research their audience. No formal market research or data science chops necessary.

First, some stats and demographics to illustrate the potential opportunities from social media for B2B marketing:

  • LinkedIn is the top platform for B2B lead generation. Close to 80% of LinkedIn members drive business decisions.
  • LinkedIn is the hub for in-depth, industry-specific and targeted content.
  • YouTube is one of the most popular search engines in the world with users across 80 languages and 100+ countries.
  • Women make up more than 60% of Pinterest’s global audience. Gen Z and Millennials use the platform the most.

Finding the optimal audience and communicating effectively with them can work on social media, but again how to do so connects back to the defined goals. Here are some common objectives companies pursue on social media.

Increase Awareness:

Building awareness means getting the company’s name out there. Try to avoid solely publishing promotional messages and strike a good balance with authentic content that emphasizes the unique voice and story the company stands behind.

Authentic, non-promotional content is ranked as the top choice. The other reasons appear in descending order from most popular to least popular: transparency about business practices and values, information about how products are made, or sourced, educational content related to the brand’s industry and user-generated content or customer testimonials.

Generate Leads and Sales:

Whether online, in-store or directly through your social profiles, followers don’t make purchases by accident. For example, are you alerting customers about new products and promos? Are you integrating your product catalog into your social profiles? Are you running exclusive deals for followers? Social media gives you an avenue to generate revenue.

Grow the Audience:

Bringing new followers into the fold means finding ways to introduce your brand to folks who haven’t heard of you before. Growing your audience also means discovering conversations around your business and industry that matter the most. Digging through your social channels is nearly impossible without monitoring or listening for specific keywords, phrases or hashtags. Having a pulse on these conversations helps you expand your core audience (and reach adjacent audiences) much faster.

Improve Customer Support:

The Index shows over half of consumers believe the most memorable thing a brand can do on social media is respond to customers.

Although 76% of consumers value quick responses, providing quality customer care isn’t just responding rapidly. Consumer expectations have evolved. Some 70% of consumers expect brands to provide a holistic experience with personalized responses that fit their unique customer service needs.

This means companies need to experiment with messaging and content when approaching customer care. For example, does your team have a protocol for handling @-mentions and comments? Do you have templated responses to FAQs? Does your brand promote user-generated content and hashtags? Your customers can be your best cheerleaders, but only if you give them a reason to grab the megaphone.

What any company needs to know about their audience to influence your social media marketing strategy is already available. White Hat Lab can help you choose where to look.

Contact White Hat Lab

White Hat Lab is looking for a few good companies to work with on paid search advertising… companies that want to get more out of their website and online marketing. Interested? Contact White Hat Lab now to start getting results.