I often speak to smaller B2B (business to business) companies that can’t see how social media marketing might work for them. It’s true a business insurance firm or car parts supplier might not have the widespread appeal of a clothing or fitness brand, but 44 million people in the UK used social media in 2017. You can bet that at least a small percentage of those people are interested in your industry.

The key to reaching that niche audience is to serve a wide range of relevant content to engage and benefit them, rather than simply advertising your service.

In his post, 4 Content Marketing Things That Turn Off Your Audience, Neil Patel declares that making it about you, not your audience is the No. 1 turnoff.

“As a brand, it can be tempting to focus on topics that you’re interested in but which aren’t necessarily of interest to your audience. For example, you may be intrigued with industry trends and decide to create blog posts, white papers, infographics, etc., about them. But if they don’t resonate with your audience, you’re going to see little to no effectiveness. In some cases, it can even drive a wedge between you and your audience.”

So how do you do that?:

• Find out who your customers are, which means research.
• Don’t assume you know what your customers are doing and what they want.
• Look at your data, and if in doubt, survey them.

Devising Social Media Personas

Once you have learned who your audience are, write a profile for a range of people (around 10 is a good start) including stats like age, job title/position, social media platforms and devices used, and anything else you want to build out their persona. These are fictional people based on real data. You might already have examples of your real customers, but social media personas should go slightly further. Rather than just looking at potential customers, your social media audience might well also include relations/colleagues/future employees of your potential customers. The reach is much further than just an advert for a product in an industry magazine.

Then find examples of their painpoints – how can you help them with their specific issues? What else interests them around your industry? How can you help them do their job? Once you’ve written a bunch of these, you’ll quickly see that they all have different needs for information from you, and you’ll know which social channels they’ll be using, which you can use to form themes for your content planning and concentrate your activity.

Representing your Brand

Decide your brand tone of voice and ensure everyone who represents your business uses it. Informed, professional and helpful doesn’t need to be dry and boring: people will always prefer to use the services of an approachable firm. Reflect your brand and don’t be afraid to have a personality.

Set Goals for social media marketing

Align your goals with overall business targets. Yes, follower numbers demonstrate brand awareness, but once you’ve grown an audience you should concentrate on engagement, lead generation and actual conversion. This article by Social Media Examiner gives 4 key goals that are a good place to start when measuring the effect of Social on your business.

Plan Your Content

Planning your content in monthly themes can help you with your scheduling, for example a professional driving school might have themes like Safety, Speed, Vehicle maintenance, Higher level driving tests, Cold weather driving etc. Then you can consider the more granular types of posts that come under these categories e.g. reporting on new legislation, theory test questions, traffic reports, information about different courses you provide, common mistakes, facts, videos etc

Think about any question that any user might ask your business and how you can help them, from emotional ones (do I feel safe learning from you? do you have a lot of experience?) to professional ones (how much does this course cost? how long does it take to train as an ambulance driver?). Not every post has to be directly about your business, in fact it shouldn’t, but every post does have to be relevant to your subject matter.

By working on these themes, and post types, you can plan a calendar. Once you actually come to write the posts, the more you’ve done at the planning stage, the easier it will be.

Images and Video on Social Media

Visual content marketing is deeply important, particularly on social media. Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than those without images, and 4X as many consumers would prefer to watch a video about a product than to read about it (source).

Use a graphic designer or video maker to generate images once you’ve decided your themes. Hire a photographer to take regular, relevant photography. You could use stock images but even they cost, and the point of social media is to represent your brand honestly. Content marketing that reflects your professional brand is not free.

TRAFFIC

Make sure you’re actually driving traffic where you want it, back to your website. Pretty much every post should have a call to action to give people the opportunity to click back to your site and see more. Make sure analytics are set up so that you can see what traffic is coming from the social channels.

Community Management and Account Growth

On Twitter particularly, seek out local groups that are relevant to you, and search for conversations around key words relevant to you, you can limit location too, so if people are talking about your service you can like, retweet or comment where relevant, respond to messages and generate new conversations. Choose some keywords you can monitor and favourite every comment in a  50 mile radius of the business that mentions them, even start a conversation, this is social media after all. Follow EVERYONE relevant.

And Finally – Be Sociable

Be sociable when you’re on social media, respond to as many people as possible, always be courteous and helpful and people will come back, or refer others to you. Have a personality and they will remember you, a business is allowed to have a personality, and actually, the more human, the better when it comes to social media. You don’t want to end up like these guys. 

For more on the actual *how* to run the social media for your company, check out my step by step blog post 5 STEPS TO STARTING – AND CONTINUING – SOCIAL MEDIA FOR BUSINESSES