Relevance of Social Media in B2B Marketing

Today social media channels have established themselves as an important marketing platform for B2B companies, enabling B2B marketers to reach out to their niche target segments and gain their trust. The best part about social media is the flexibility it provides marketers to customize their marketing strategies and plans as per the needs of the communities being reached out to.

It is an efficient medium to promote company product and services in the B2B marketing scenario. And, due to the significant increase in the budgets being allocated by B2B companies for social media marketing in recent times, this medium is actively used as a useful B2B marketing channel.

Here are some important pointers for social media B2B marketing.

• Join social media sites and be an active participant by following groups and actively sharing useful content to read. Other ways of engaging target audience would include activities such as polling, voting, releasing research reports, etc.
• Developing quality content and sharing it with the target segment is the best way to show authenticity.  Sharing of content like best practises, guides, etc., can get people to talk and discuss about it. SEO optimize content so that it caters to readers who use search engines often.
• Since mobile technology enables users to connect to social media networks from anywhere, marketers need to provide content sharing options such as SMS and email, which will enable prospects to access their content anywhere, anytime.
• Social media marketing needs to be tracked on a regular basis to make sure that the active participants are nurtured at the right time. Metrics vary depending on the site chosen and the content shared in it. Some of the metrics include number of posts, number of responses, number of inbound links and conversion rates.

A social media campaign is incomplete if content is not shared on multimedia sites. People consume information they like in different formats, and social media allows marketers to present their information in the form of videos, podcasts etc. adding new ways of reaching out to a company’s target audience in a format that is popular with them.

Companies can share video content for multiple user viewerships through sites such as YouTube. These sites are user friendly and help to track views expressed on the video content. Also, video content can be embedded into corporate blogs, websites, shared on social networking sites to increase blog traffic and virality for the video.

Marketing automation can be used to automate the lead generation and lead nurturing process.
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