Posted 01.08.2024 by Josh Krakauer
There’s never been more opportunity in B2B social media marketing than in 2024.
And that’s a problem.
Let me explain.
If you’re reading this, you’re responsible for your company’s social media strategy. Whether you’re the brains or one of many hands of the operation, you have ample opportunity in 2024.
At Sculpt, we design B2B social media strategies for growth-stage startups, established small businesses, and complex enterprise teams.
And guess what we’ve learned?
More problems stifle all brands.
If you lead marketing at a B2B, there’s never been more demand for ramping up social.
In 2022, social media spending increased to 14.5% of B2B marketing budgets.
This will increase by 7% in the next 5 years because 58% of mature organizations agreed that they have tracked sales that can be attributed to social media, while 73% of marketers believe social media empowers them to reach new customers more efficiently than other media.
In short, social media is set remains highly relevant for B2B marketers who need to produce tangible results.
It would help if you had a better strategy with more to do and not more time.
That’s what we’ll cover in this guide.
We will help you:
LinkedIn’s data shows that 75% of B2B decision-makers source information on social media before purchasing. Your brand lives closer to your customers than ever before.
But behind every B2B purchase, there is a human.
With consumers completing 90% of the purchase process before contacting you – and also, wolfing down 13 pieces of content in the process – your products should be at the frontline.
You can build interaction on socials through the site, videos, carousels, articles, posts from your executive, and brand…
Great. So, we start posting.
And then they convert, right?
Right?
Let’s be honest.
You need more than content. Your social media strategy must align with your business goals.
And if you’re not building those bonds with your customers, who is?
You guessed right. Yes, your competitors.
However, you can get your team up to speed in 2024 by sharing these 7 trends in B2B social media marketing 👇.
It’s not new, but it keeps growing.
B2B marketers are scaling up the impact of influencers — and influencer-driven content — within their overall efforts. And the proof is in the numbers, as spending on influencer marketing has increased annually by over 26% in the US from 2019 to 2023.
Why are brands spending more on influencers? Partly because of the impact social proof has on customers. In addition, investment in user-generated content (UGC) through customer reviews, testimonials, and case studies has increased significantly, aligned with this behavior.
According to our customers, it’s also the desire for “quality content” driving the trend. Who wouldn’t want creative, original content — told from a new POV and generated by talented creators — that may outperform your ads and posts?
B2B brands are looking at independent content creators to promote informational and educational content about their products in new formats and styles — from TikTok videos to X (aka Twitter) threads and Reddit comments.
The proof is in the pudding. In 2022, 86% of B2B brands considered their influencer marketing successful because it helped them increase their brand reputation and awareness.
As brands continue to focus on increasing their brand recognition in 2024, more B2B brands will leverage influencers, UGC, and creators to influence buyer decisions, reach new or targeted audiences, and improve brand advocacy.
We expect more brands to adjust their media budgets in this aspect.
AI itself isn’t new to B2B, but the chatter around it has increased in recent months. Led by ChatGPT and other generative AI platforms (looking at you, Google Gemini), companies are using AI for copywriting, competitor research, decision-making, and improving customer experience through personalized recommendations.
One of the biggest selling points for AI is that brands can use it to speed up their social media content creation. It’s true, large language models (LLMs) are especially useful to unlock the creative process and increase the number of content ideas for engagement and marketing purposes.
Ad creativity is being shaped by AI, too. AI models like Midjourney, DALL-E 2, and Canva AI can generate original and creative images for social media content without risking copyright issues (so far).
In 2024, more brands will use generative AI for their marketing R&D and content creation. And let’s be honest, you’ll be hearing about this a lot.
Both Millenials and Gen Z consumers are using social media to search for what matters to them. You’ve probably heard that 40% of Gen Z searchers turn to TikTok or Instagram to get more information on products, reviews, and who to learn from, before performing a traditional Google Search.
We’re also seeing an uptick in Google searches that append the word “Reddit” at the end, looking to obtain results from that platform alone, given the depth, variety, and quality of these.
And platforms like TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, and X are responding to this increased utilization by improving their product to drive better native search experiences.
To stay on top of the social media SEO, be sure to include the right keywords in your profile, title or heading, and posts. And for search-friendly platforms like TikTok, consider what type of content you can create that will land at the top of search results.
In 2024, B2B brands must include executives and employees in their social media programs.
Using your brand page as the only outlet for company communication isn’t going to cut it. People want to hear from people.
Some companies’ B2B social media strategies already feature employee advocacy programs, which formalize the process, tools, and incentives for employees to promote their organization’s content on social media. And these efforts work, generating 5x more web traffic and a 25% increase in leads.
Having CEOs and other executives active on social media gives current and prospective customers, employees, future employees, and investors a chance to engage in conversation and give feedback directly to decision-makers.
This humanizes your brand and makes the audience feel more connected. It also encourages transparency and builds credibility.
Getting all hands on deck for an exec and employee advocacy program can be incredibly challenging, but the prospect of having actionable content that reflects your core brand values and resonates with your audience is just too good to pass on.
Although many marketers are still tentative about their TikTok approach, we’ll continue to see more experimentation in 2024. While we don’t expect it to replace the biggest search engine anytime soon, short-form video platforms have been a boon for B2B marketers in the last few years. Whether through brand storytelling, case studies, or thought leadership, short-form videos have significantly impacted many B2B businesses positively.
For example, Sprout Social learned that short-form video is the most engaging type (66%) of in-feed social content.
And TikTok supports these types of videos, they’re the life and blood of the platform.
With its emphasis on new formats and its unique approach to social media, TikTok offers B2B brands a way to revitalize their social media strategy and reach new customers. It’s the perfect place to connect and engage with your audience using creative, relatable content.
Plus, you can repurpose that same content on other channels for additional reach. Considering a TikTok-first approach to social can result in a differentiated, engaging presence that competitors will envy (and likely, try to copy).
Although Instagram tops the average daily users, TikTok leads the way in time spent on the platform. TikTok users spent an average of 95 minutes daily in 2023. With each video lasting only 21 to 34 seconds on average, the platform leaves plenty of opportunity for B2B brands to create and share impactful videos to users’ feeds.
Since the pandemic, more B2B content marketers have recognized the importance of investing in building online B2B communities.
A HubSpot study found that 64% of marketers decided to invest in social media communities in 2022. And by the end of that year, 88% of C-level execs saw a positive impact.
In what way?
Whether through Reddit, Discord, or ad-hoc communities powered by apps like Discourse, B2B brands can use online communities to drive their social media marketing efforts.
Time to get scrappy!
Marketers are under pressure to strike a balance between tactics that will directly increase sales or build their brand image while keeping costs low.
This means they are likely to explore lower-cost organic marketing opportunities and reduce paid or expensive campaign budgets.
We recommend prioritizing investments in advocacy, exec social, UGC, AI-assisted copy, internal thought leadership programs, and targeted influencer marketing to drive a bigger impact for a lower spend, helping offset budget cuts. Improving and automating the processes involved can also have a positive impact down the road.
An effective B2B social media strategy leverages growth, and reach, and sustains trust with your customers.
Our comprehensive framework will guide you through the checklist you need to create and execute an effective B2B social media strategy:
This section focuses on B2B social media marketing, but we’ll also touch on social media’s role in customer care and recruitment.
Let’s get into how to set ambitious but achievable goals for your B2B social media marketing program in 2024 (and beyond) without further ado.
Use our Social Media Swipe File Template to build a gallery of good ideas and social media examples. To get you started, we’ve filled it with some of our favorite examples of great social posts — both paid and organic.
Before laying down your social media strategy, take time to define — what are you trying to achieve.
Pro tip: All business goals relate to making and saving money. Don’t complicate it! 😊
Choose 1 business goal per campaign and 1 KPI per channel.
How?
Create a goal and see how social media can fit into that.
For instance, you should choose one platform for your:
Your social media program impacts marketing metrics across the customer lifecycle. Break down the steps you track before, during, and after becoming a customer.
Should you have one goal or many?
In reality, most brands have multiple social media goals. Having specific, measurable goals for each channel is what drives the purpose behind your social media campaigns.
Here’s a rundown on the common types of B2B social media goals and how they can be measured:
You can’t build a business if your customers don’t know who you are, what you do, and how you help. Agree? That’s what brand awareness is all about, in a nutshell.
Done effectively, brand awareness creates excitement around your people and products, which will help you grow a loyal community and funnel in new leads. It’s an essential, if not obvious, part of your B2B social media marketing strategy.
Brand awareness can be broken down into:
There are also more advanced brand awareness measurements, like unaided recall and brand lift (favorability, preference, intent). These require third-party verification and high ad spending, so we recommend crawling before you run.
Social media algorithms reward engagement and interactions, which as a result, boost the visibility of your content to a larger audience. Solid engagement is one of the keys to a successful digital marketing strategy.
In content marketing terms, engagement is often associated with the consideration and interest-building stage of the funnel.
Engagement does not precisely translate into business growth. It does, however, signal if your content resonates with your audience. That’s why measuring engagement is key.
Demand and lead generation is arguably the most important aspect of a successful digital marketing program. It defines the first stage of intent in a prospect’s path to becoming a customer.
There’s a good chance your B2B marketing team is measured internally on demand and lead generation metrics, so social media needs to be held accountable.
B2B social media adds value to other departments in an organization. After all, social is a customer-facing channel. Breaking out those goals, budgets, and resources separate from marketing/sales is best practice.
Commonly those include:
Hiring: Acquiring new candidates and employees better/faster. KPIs come from the Talent Acquisition or HR team and measure social media’s role in the application pipeline.
Experience/Service: Solving customer problems on social media better/faster. KPIs are set by the Customer Success or Customer Service team and measure social media’s role in closing tickets and retaining customers.
Your buying audience is anyone in the buying group. But unlike paid social, your organic social base is broad, including employees and brand advocates.
If you get this right, you could reduce the churns in your ad spending.
Follow these simple steps:
Step 1: Define ideal customer profiles/personas (ICPs). Who are the roles and companies you want to reach and engage?
Step 2: While you can’t control if they follow you, you can select the channels based on that audience, and the content you post, based on that audience.
You can have different target audiences to keep in mind for your paid social campaign. But create specific messages that are suitable for every audience category.
You don’t have the luxury of choosing your audience, because THEY find you. So you have to remember that your content should attract the ideal audience.
So define the audience(s) you want to reach and teach, but know that you can’t control who ends up seeing it without paid spending.
Audiences that follow you include:
However, audience clarity is about being intentional. Since you can’t pick one audience group to follow you, you need better audience clarity for an effective B2B social media campaign.
Now that you’ve defined your goals for your campaign, it’s time to choose a platform that best corresponds to your objectives and audience.
Choose one core channel to master first.
Although you can’t easily influence your followers, you can understand them.
Also, use all of the available features, and study the masters.
However, with all the social media channels out there, how do we decide which ones are right for our business?
Here we have underlined the top 4 social media platforms for B2B, and how they can be used to drive results:
Being a professional networking platform, it’s no surprise to anyone that LinkedIn is the most popular social media channel among B2B marketers.
In 2024 we’ll likely see LinkedIn surpass 1 billion users, and they’re not just on the platform looking for new jobs. They’re reading articles, checking status updates, and most importantly, looking to network with potential collaborators. This presents a huge opportunity for B2B businesses.
Let’s take a look at the benefits of using LinkedIn as a B2B social network:
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Who knew the most effective content format would be…PDFs?
A smart marketer once advised us, that when a platform releases new features, use them. LinkedIn provides marketers with the ability to upload documents, videos, and photos.
So why settle for posting links and calling it a day? 🤔
Mix up your content with document uploads, images, and videos, and watch your engagement climb.
Example: Arm is the world’s leading provider of silicon IP. They leverage LinkedIn to break news, celebrate employees, tell customer stories, and show the real-world impact of their products.
Polling is a great way to generate engagement, do market research, and get client feedback. A few things to keep in mind while you’re celebrating, aka making lots of great polls:
For more information on the do’s and don’ts of LinkedIn polls, you can read their FAQ page.
For inspiration on how to write great polls, watch how the pros do it and take notes.
Employee advocacy is when the employees of a company promote their organization on social media. It’s like having in-house brand ambassadors who raise awareness, grow, and boost your brand on social media.
Starting an employee advocacy program on LinkedIn helps you merge two of the most impactful forms of marketing: the reach of social media and the power of referrals.
Also, you can leverage the personal LinkedIn profiles of your executive teams through an executive social media program. They can function as brand ambassadors, and build trust, credibility, and thought leadership.
Tips for Executive Social Media Program
Tips for Employee Advocacy Program
LinkedIn company pages are a must for B2B marketers looking to promote their business on social media.
In 2018, LinkedIn made important changes to company pages by adding new features such as the ability to share documents (slides and PDFs), built-in content suggestions, and employee advocacy tools.
This expanded the possibilities of connecting with your target audience.
Here are some recommended steps to follow when optimizing your company page on LinkedIn:
For more ways to boost your LinkedIn audience and engagement, visit our post on how to grow your company page.
If you’re looking to boost your credibility in the eyes of your audience and build a good reputation, then publishing on LinkedIn is the way to go.
LinkedIn has a native publishing platform that allows business leaders to attract attention to their brand and build thought leadership.
Best of all, published posts are indexed on your profile and get excellent distribution in the feed.
The benefits of LinkedIn articles:
Best practices for LinkedIn articles
If you’re curious about learning more about how the LinkedIn algorithm works, you can refer to the following article: “People you know, talking about things you care about.”
To conclude, a few important figures to take into account from the Algorithm Report 2024, regarding the visibility of content in the LinkedIn feed:
Facebook has had quite a transformation (cue: Meta). The Facebook of 2024 looks entirely different from that of 2015. User preferences are shifting, their products are splitting up, available ad inventory is declining, and all the while, ad sales are growing. That begs the question…
Is B2B Marketing on Facebook dead? No.
Is Facebook changing? Yes.
With the right strategy, B2B businesses can still reap massive results from the platform. Before you start to panic, check out these facts:
At the end of the day, most social media users still have a Facebook profile. Which makes it a powerful platform for reaching your prospects. For most brands, it’s an advertising channel only, but an important one to maintain a presence on for that reason.
With broad paid reach, you can reach users who’ve shown interest in your products (or products similar to yours), even if they haven’t visited your website or app. When you target a broad audience, people in this audience automatically see products from your catalog that are likely relevant to them.
If you’re advertising there, you should also respond to comments, create new posts, and manage direct messages.
Facebook offers the ability for its users to join groups based on their passions, interests, or industry. Over 1.8 billion people are using Facebook Groups to discuss their passions, chat with friends or colleagues, and plan events. In the past 12 months, you likely received an invitation to join a group yourself.
B2B marketers can easily find Facebook Groups related to their industry or niche. In these communities, they’ll be able to find professionals in their industry providing support for one another and discussing topics that are of interest to them.
Just like with LinkedIn, your goal should be to provide value to the community. The way to do this is to either post timely information about what’s happening in your industry or respond to questions someone asks that you can answer.
For example, let’s say someone posts in the group:
Hey everyone, I’m trying to drive traffic with Instagram ads but nothing seems to be working… What should I do?
This is where you can respond with:
@OriginalPoster — I’ve struggled with traffic and conversion rates from Instagram, too. What I’ve learned is that the right tactic depends on what type of audience you’re targeting (B2B/B2C, Lifestyle) and the offer you’re presenting. A few things you can do are (Tip 1), (Tip 2),(Tip 3), and (Tip 4).
If you’d like more ideas, I wrote a list of 30 things you can try on my blog – come check it out at [link] if you’re interested or DM if you have questions.
Video marketing is big business on social media. 52% of marketers use video to build trust with customers., and 88% of video marketers are satisfied with the ROI they get from their efforts. Facebook gives the ability to B2B brands to use video in different ways:
HubSpot regularly posts instructional videos about marketing on its Facebook page. In this example, HubSpot uses a case study to explain how users can use its CRM platform.
Forget traffic, this one is all about the relationships.
With 400+ million monthly active users and 500+ million tweets being sent out daily, X has become a place to “see what’s going on” worldwide. It’s no wonder that 87% of B2B marketers use X as a content marketing tool.
(Unfortunately, only a smaller percentage gets it right).
The beauty of X is the connection it creates between brands and their audience in real time.
Here’s how using X for B2B marketing can benefit you:
Brands are a collection of unconscious associations in your consumer’s mind. One of the most powerful associations you can build is the personality of your presence on X.
Struggling to define your brand’s voice?
An example of a B2B company with a noteworthy X account? Square. Their content is focused on the small business owners they serve and the overall tone is informative, casual, and encouraging.
X is a great place to go viral. The good news is that you don’t even have to be the one going viral to get a piece of the pie. Hop into the conversation on an already trending topic or respond to a tweet that’s getting tons of replies.
The funniest or most helpful responses and comebacks tend to get high numbers of likes, retweets, and replies, too. You can also respond with relevant memes. So invest some time into crafting a winning comment. If it helps, shift your mindset to consider the comment as the content.
According to X, 82% of users watch video content on the platform and would like to watch more video content from brands and celebrities. So why not maximize video content to drive more engagement to your brand?
Use snackable video snippets from the pillar content we discussed earlier to economize the process.
X is all about immediacy.
A tweet’s half-life is only about 18 minutes. It reaches 75% of its maximum reach within 3 hours and then starts to decline rapidly. This means if you’re looking to reach the most amount of potential leads and maximize engagement, the timing of when you tweet is crucial.
Use a combination of Google and X analytics and good, old-fashioned trial-and-error to track traffic and engagement.
Test, rinse, repeat…
And then remember that getting the timing right sometimes has nothing to do with the clock. Sometimes it’s about responding to cultural phenomena or viral Internet news in real-time. Your clever observation about the Oscars isn’t funny if you tweet it out at 2 pm the Wednesday after.
After nearly two years of WFH I don't think I can't present anymore without a family member heckling me
— R/GA (@RGA) December 8, 2021
Let’s try one more read, but this time as if the script were good.
Let's try one more read, but this time as if the script were good
— R/GA (@RGA) December 7, 2021
Instagram’s visual-based platform is great for B2B businesses to promote their brand. Don’t believe us?
You do have a Business Profile, right?
Instagram introduced business profiles in 2016, giving businesses access to a variety of tools and functionality, including analytics on your posts and stories, third-party integrations, and call-to-action buttons.
You need an Instagram Business profile if you want to advertise natively and get data on your audience. To make the switch, you have to click on the settings icon on your profile page and tap on the “Switch To Business Profile” link.
To excel in Instagram, you must understand what works there and what audiences want. In general, the formula of entertaining and informative works well here.
Keep in mind in 2024, it’s best practice to use square photos and videos (1080 x 1080).
Not only is featuring testimonials from clients a great way to establish trust with your audience and leverage social proof, combined with appealing visuals they can make for a great piece of content.
Make your customers the heroes by highlighting their big wins.
My favorite definition of organizational culture is a concise answer to “the way we do things around here.” Prospective customers and employees alike want to know more about your company’s people and place.
From day-in-the-life takeovers to office snapshots, human-focused stories tend to perform well.
Hootsuite uses the hashtag #hootsuitelife on Instagram to give followers a glimpse into their company life.
(Dog-friendly offices? Enough said. 👇)
Posting to your feed is all well and good, but it’s not the only — or even the best — way to get noticed on the Gram.
There are two other native features that we recommend using for expanded organic reach, the first of which is Stories.
With Instagram Stories, users can upload videos and photos that disappear after 24 hours. Stories will show up at the top of your audience’s feed. You can also save stories to a highlight reel on your page.
Stories are a great place for more casual, less polished content. This opens up the opportunity for B2B companies to humanize their brand and have more personal interactions with their customers.
CoSchedule has an entire highlight reel called “Culture,” which is dedicated to fun behind-the-scenes content.
The algorithm attempts to serve users content that they already enjoy, so followers who already interact frequently will be more likely to see your Stories at the front of their queue. The same is true of the reverse: the more they interact with your stories, the more likely they are to come across your feed content while scrolling.
Another new-ish native Instagram feature that we recommend getting comfortable with is Reels.
Using Reels could mean better organic reach for your content. It’s a not-so-unspoken secret that Instagram boosts content created with new features (like Reels) during rollout to help drive widespread adoption.
And Reels doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. Don’t believe us? Just take a look at the new Reels tab on your Instagram home screen.
So, it’s worth your time to develop a strategy for the short-form video format.
It’s best practice to cross-share your Reels to your main feed for maximum visibility. Bonus — one piece of content, two channels of distribution. Work smart, not hard.
View this post on Instagram
Hint: Speaking of working smart, not hard, you can and should reshare TikTok content (if you have any) to your Reels feed.
TikTok is the fastest-growing social media platform. Beyond excitement, TikTok is a great channel to keep your audience engaged. Its algorithm makes it suitable for organic reach and virality.
It’s a great platform to teach your audience how to access and use your product.
TikTok is all about building genuine connections through content. Your content shouldn’t be complex.
Keep it simple and original.
For example, Microsoft 365 shares relatable #LifeHack to help companies and their teams improve productivity. Their content provides useful tips that improve the work experience.
Sharing User Generated Content (USG) is good for business on TikTok. It’s a fancy way to build an emotional connection.
Shopify does this excellently. It encourages small business owners to share their experiences to get featured.
TikTok is a great platform to share product guides with your customers. It helps you share edutainment content. You can share product demos, feature releases, and product functionalities.
For example, Adobe uses the platform to answer users’ feedback.
A 2023 survey by Sprout Social shows that 57% of consumers follow a brand to learn about new products while 47% follow to stay up to date on company news. However, 45% of consumers will unfollow a brand for sharing irrelevant content.
So each post should have one purpose, and one “job to do” for your audience.
Pro tip: Choose 1 purpose and emotion per post.
When examining B2B advertising, social media was used by 83% of marketers and ranked second (29%) in success behind search engine marketing (33%).
You get results when you deliver quality content.
To achieve this, focus on creating better content through these steps:
Quality content is Emotional, Useful, Relevant, and Timely.
The truth about brand social media? (Organic) Reach is not a given. To ensure you’re reaching the valuable audience you seek, you need methods of amplifying those posts with the content you invested in.
There are 3 ways of amplifying your content on social media:
Paid amplification lets you control your social performance because it’s highly targeted and reliable.
So you pay for reach, sponsor content and get complete control over reach.
B2B Influencer spending is on the rise. You can find experts that reach your target audience and sponsor them to create content for or with you.
So partner on content with influential people to achieve your social media KPI.
Your employees and customers are the best people to tap into for sharing your content. So invest in tools and processes to help them share your news, updates, and articles.
It’s an innovative way to grow your brand’s reach and engagement while making your brand more relatable.
Our recommendation: Choose one1 method of amplification, then make it a machine. This will reduce the churn and stress involved in the process.
There are a lot of misc tasks to manage your social media.
Moreover, there are 5 functions in social media marketing alone.
Each of these COULD be its role, though often it’s not.
But, you need to define WHO does WHAT and WHEN to be successful. Your team needs to choose one person to make the calls.
First: Pick an ‘Owner’ – Who has the final say?
They are the tie-breakers and rule-setters for questions like:
Second: Assign roles for each of the 5 functions and fill gaps with contractors/agencies
Third: Set a reporting rhythm – Quarterly, monthly, weekly
Fourth: Tools come last
If you remember nothing else…
Social media marketing has real business implications. But, it could amount to a waste of time and resources if you don’t play by the rules.
We share seven misconceptions B2B makes in their social media strategy in this session.
Let’s get started.
Avoid the mistake of using organic social media as a traffic channel.
Resist the temptation.
You want people spending time on your site. Social platforms want people on theirs.
Think of this as a win-win situation.
Optimize for dwell time.
Make your audience stay using the 3-R formula; Remix, Remake, Recycle. 🤷♀️
Social media drives a small % of your total traffic. And a smaller % comes from your posts.
Why would I click your post?
Because it’s about me. Because it’s about someone I know. Because it’s about something I know.
Making your content with or about other people increases its share value 💡
Organic social works for people who already care and are interested in you. But paid social helps you reach new audiences.
A study by LinkedIn shows that organic audiences are 61% more likely to convert with paid media.
Don’t be caught, because reach is rapidly declining. Resonance speaks to everyone.
Recall is impossible to measure.
Don’t get caught.
People don’t necessarily need to engage with content to notice it, be interested in it, or be persuaded by it.
Engagement doesn’t equal persuasion. Instead, build a deeper connection with the brand and product.
For example, when you optimize for video watch time you can measure their attention, and retarget them by interest peaks.
People are 3x more likely to trust company info shared by an employee than a CEO.
Content shared by employees has 2x higher CTR than when it’s shared by a company. Employee networks have 10x more connections than a company has followers.
So use the voices of the company. Build through your executive team’s authority and authorship. Employee and customer advocacy are good additions.
According to LinkedIn:
FYI on dark social: In B2B, your employees and execs are a vital part of the social strategy.
The scary part? Their impact may not easily appear in attribution reports (aka dark social).
Consistency comes at a cost. Learning, timeliness, creativity.
So be sure to monitor your audience’s most active time and your best-performing posts.
Learn, be timely, and get creative.
So, establish trust with your audience by connecting and resonating with your customers through useful and inspirational content.
To build connection, engagement has to be two-way.
So don’t just listen. Get involved.
There’s no one budget formula for social media marketing. Naturally, large marketing organizations have more buckets to consider than teams of one.
Here are a few things you should keep in mind to set up a B2B social media marketing budget:
To determine their ceiling for marketing spend, most companies start with a percentage of their expected revenue. To follow this formula, start by taking ~5-30% of your desired gross revenue goal and set it aside for marketing.
According to the 2019 CMO Survey, the average B2B firm allocates just under ~9% of its revenue on marketing budgets. Meanwhile, B2B reviews note over 50% of B2B marketing managers reported a higher 2023 marketing budget than the previous year.
Now, how much should you budget for social?
Take 10-25% of your total marketing budget and allocate it to social media marketing.
For example, if you forecasted sales of $10,000,000 in 2024 and assigned 10% to marketing you would have a budget pool of $1,000,000 for marketing/advertising expenses. That would leave $100,000 – $250,000 for social media, or ~$8,000 – $20,000/mo.
Consider how your marketing budget will break down between the core social media expense categories:
Social media marketing budgets are often easier to understand on a project or initiative basis.
In that case, group related activities together and assign a budget as needed. For instance, an event activation.
Within short and long-term campaigns you can allocate the budget further into individual channels and programs.
Some strategists recommend a 60/40 split of campaign budgets with 60% towards brand-building activities like community management, content creation and publishing, and paid amplification. Then 40% to sales activation activities like influencer marketing, retargeting ads, and direct-response ads.
Using social media to attract talent? Consider a top-down approach with a percentage of your total recruitment budget allocated towards social media programs. From there, decide how to divide up that spending allowance. There are several areas to look at:
Let’s get something straight: True ‘ROI’ is a measurement of dollars gained or lost.
You may consider marketing-specific measurements as a gain, but you’ll have a hard time selling it to the C-suite.
That’s why ROI is easiest to measure in the form of an individual channel or campaign (versus the totality of your efforts).
Thanks to tracking pixels, success can be attributed to leads that originated on social media, or conversions assisted by social media. Analytics software can be used to analyze which social media channels your visitors came from, what they did once they landed on your webpage, and the actions they took after completing a form.
Let’s say you invested $10,000 total on a paid media campaign leveraging LinkedIn and Facebook ads for a new product launch.
You reached 100,000 professionals, drove 2,000 people to your landing pages, and collected 50 emails (MQLs).
So what was the ROI?
There are several possible answers.
Measuring the total reach, the size of the engaged (retargeting) audience built, or the attributed brand lift will only give you a proxy for success, but still extremely valuable to measure and report.
Use our Social Media Campaign Brief Template to distill your big ideas into a simple, actionable format. Copy/paste the Google Doc to get started. → Click here to grab it.
Running a B2B brand is hard enough, let alone mastering social media.
This is where hiring a B2B social media specialist comes in, to lessen your workload, focus on other aspects of your business you want to manage, and create powerful strategies that generate results.
This isn’t a role you can just pass off to the intern. A qualified social media manager or agency can provide immediate value and launch campaigns that will drive B2B marketing results.
But how do we find the perfect candidate? Competent social media specialists are hard to come by. On top of that, they need to correspond perfectly to a brand’s current needs, budgets, and goals.
One dilemma that many B2B teams experience is the balance between internal and external resources. While both options have their benefits, one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to managing social for your brand.
To help you in your choice, we’ve highlighted both possible options, their pros and cons, and what to look for when hiring either of these.
If you know exactly what success looks like and you’re trying to conserve internal resources, then hiring a social media agency is the way to go. Having the budget to hire a quality social media management firm that gets your brand voice and goals is well worth it, considering the time it will buy you.
Keep in mind that you don’t need to outsource all of your social media marketing programs.
Pros of Outsourcing Social Media Marketing:
Potential Cons of Outsourcing Social Media Marketing:
What To Look For In A B2B Social Media Agency:
Here at Sculpt, we focus on building social media marketing programs that help B2B businesses grow their audience and revenue. That means prioritizing the right channels and mapping content opportunities across your buyer’s journey.
We connect 1-to-4 times per month on your performance and progress to make sure you exceed your goals. You can schedule a strategy call right from our chatbot if you’d like to learn more. 😊
An alternative to hiring an agency is to hire a social media manager directly in your company. The main advantage of having an in-house social media manager is that he or she will have closer access to the rest of your organization.
That can mean more responsive content and better connectivity with key people and updates.
Pros of Hiring a Social Media Manager:
Cons of Hiring a Social Media Manager:
Let’s get real. One social media manager can’t do all five social media roles without tactical support. And ideally, your agency isn’t operating in a silo.
The best scenario would be to leverage the flexibility of an external resource and the customer connectivity of the internal team.
In practice, that means the agency is lifting the in-house social media manager with audience research, content strategy frameworks, process improvements, and timely opportunities. Or if the in-house team is comfortable with the strategy, the agency is creating batches of scheduled content and paid support for growth goals.
It doesn’t have to be one or the other.
Let’s break down the basics.
B2B social media marketing refers to the marketing of products, services, and career opportunities to the employees of other companies on social media. B2B companies can come in a variety of forms: professional service providers like marketing agencies, medical equipment sales, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) to name a few.
B2C (business-to-consumer) social media marketing deals with the process of promoting products and services to consumers. Often we’re describing social for businesses like food service, bricks-and-mortar / online retail, and consumer packaged goods. More frequently today we’re talking about DTC e-commerce, subscription services, and mobile apps.
Fundamentally, social media has the same utility between the two business models—connecting brands with customers. However, we’ve found a couple of noticeable differences between B2C and B2B social media marketing.
Where does the relationship begin?
With B2C marketing, the relationship with a brand often starts with purchase. You might see an ad on Snapchat or a deal in a Facebook Group and become a customer. It might take months of targeted social media advertising to reach purchase consideration, but the value begins when we receive a discount or start using the product. After purchase, the brand’s social media channels might become a place for new deals, lifestyle inspiration, and product information to encourage repeat purchases.
With B2B marketing we’re selling high-ticket goods, so our goal is to foster long-term relationships with employees and decision-makers of customer companies by positioning our brands as approachable experts. The value journey on social media often progresses in sequential stages — from awareness and consideration, to purchase and ascension — with the top-of-the-funnel possibly taking months or years.
In B2B organizations, your human resources are one of the most effective marketing tools for brand advocacy. When distributing information like articles, announcements, or offers, programs often start with employees sharing to their networks before expanding out to new audiences.
In modern B2B marketing organizations, personal brand building is encouraged, not stifled. An employee with a large, professional social network can be used as an asset to reach new customers.
Many B2B firms believe that social media won’t work for them because they’re in a “boring” niche and it’s better to focus exclusively on client referrals, offline sales channels like tradeshows, or online channels like Google ads to generate clients. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.
For example, CBRE is a global real estate firm that dominates when it comes to brand awareness on social media. What could be a boring corporate feed on Instagram is instead a showcase of some of the world’s most beautiful architecture.
Whether you’re targeting a B2C or B2B audience, at the end of the day, You are still communicating with individuals. All humans, regardless of the niche, want and need to fulfill. Social media tactics known for B2C such as giveaway contests that offer an incentive for action, or developing content optimized for commenting (to instill a feeling of belonging), can also be used by B2B businesses to increase their reach.
From our experience, social media strategies used for B2C can be even more lucrative for B2B. Take inspiration from brands with similar values, even if their business model is different.
According to IDG, 84% of C-level and VP-level buyers are influenced by social media interactions in their buying decisions. In total, they found that 75% of B2B buyers consulted information on social media before purchasing a product or service. By not having a presence on social media, you are missing out on opportunities to network with important clients.
As a low-cost experiment, develop a research project of your own. Assemble a list of 50 of your customers and 50 of your prospects. Create a separate column for their social media profiles on as many channels as you consider relevant. After taking stock, note if they’re following your brand or employees back. What did you learn?
LinkedIn is often cited as the channel for B2B social media, but that’s somewhat misleading. While it’s true that 78% of B2B marketers agree that LinkedIn is the best platform for achieving their specific objectives, that doesn’t mean you should put all of your eggs into one basket and not leverage other platforms.
Above, we discuss how to optimize for success using the other top 3 channels for B2B: Facebook, X (Twitter), and Instagram. Of course, you don’t have to be a juggernaut on every platform (and probably won’t be). But it’s worth testing out each channel and finding which is best suited to your brand’s niche and needs.
Are you still here? Thanks for sticking with us to the end! 😅
Still have a burning question about B2B social media that we didn’t answer? Leave it in the comments below and we’ll add it to the post. 👍
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