B2B Social Media Advertising: What Is It And Why Does It Matter?

The two primary business “types” are business to customer (B2C) and business to business (B2B). Just like how they sound, B2C businesses sell to non-commercial customers — this includes brick-and-mortar or online shops — while B2B businesses sell to, obviously, other businesses and organizations. Some businesses can do a bit of both.

Naturally, B2C is the darling of social media advertising since every single person on social media is a consumer. On the flipside, B2B marketing on social media can seem counterintuitive — or at least less important — since many or most people aren’t in a position of making decisions for a business. Subsequently, your B2B social media marketing is then aimed towards those individuals who are involved in decision making for their business, foundation, organization, or other professional group.

Even if you feel like your industry is boring (or at least, boring to the average person), ignoring social media as an advertising medium is unwise. So is neglecting to formulate a well-thought out strategy since, as we have established, B2B social media advertising is a bit trickier than the same thing for B2C businesses.

The path you take for social media advertising as a B2B-based business will depend on all sorts of characteristics. A good way to navigate this is by identifying answers to some foundational questions.

Questions To Answer

This is important to clarify what your campaign is trying to achieve.

Some questions we like to start with include:

• Who are we targeting?
• Where do they spend their time online?
• What are they looking for in search engines?
• On which social media networks are they the most active?
• What opportunity gaps are your competitors leaving open here? How can you fill these?

While you never want to skip this step, you especially do not want to skip this when you are a B2B business. This is because your audience is much narrower than even the most esoteric B2C business; not answering these and other questions means you won’t have the clarity necessary to reach your narrow audience as effectively as possible.

So… What are your goals?

Along with answering the above questions, determining your goals is super important. We suppose this is true of any digital marketing campaign… or any marketing campaign… but still, it feels important to not skip this part.

With this campaign, are you trying to increase brand awareness in general? Increased traffic to previously published content? Conversions?

Coupled with your goals are the KPIs — key performance indicators — by which you decide to measure the success of your campaign. Whichever KPIs you choose to emphasize will be informed by the goals you’re trying to achieve. For example, if you are trying to increase awareness, you might want to pay attention to engagement, impressions, and follower count.

Some other KPIs that might come in handy include:

• Reach
• Paid reach
• Conversions
• Traffic/clicks
• Likes (also, for Twitter and Facebook, RTs/shares)
• Cost-per-lead

This list is far from comprehensive, but it’s a good start to choose from and then expand from there.

Creating An Effective B2B Social Media Strategy

The basic qualities of a well-run social media campaign involve much of the same general things as a well-run B2C campaign.

For example, establishing and maintaining a voice that’s engaging and appropriate to your brand — and also being diligent that it doesn’t appear too obviously groomed or “trying too hard,” although this is more likely to occur with B2C brands as opposed to your B2B business.

You also want to be consistent across all your platforms; it’s wasteful (and potentially harmful) to have, for example, an Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn account but only be active on two of them. Because of the professional nature of LinkedIn, all B2B campaigns will probably want to be active there, but otherwise the platforms you choose to utilize could vary depending on your goals and the nature of your business.

Whichever networks you’re on, you want to be engaging in relevant conversations in your industry. Whether that is by joining in on those already happening or highlighting your and others’ expert content, participating in these naturally builds up your presence (and the benefits associated with that).

While social media marketing as a B2B brand is not necessarily as intuitive as for B2C brands, B2B marketing is still super important. You can’t ignore it; rather, it’s imperative to do the work to identify your audience, on which platforms they’re active, what needs they have and questions they’re asking, and create a plan from there.