How to Build a Better B2B Social Media Strategy: 2021 Guide

Social media is a game-changer for B2B marketers, and we’re going to prove it.

The question is: are you motivated by fear or desire?

Let’s start with desire: Imagine having a ninja-like ability to reach, understand, educate, attract, and influence your exact buyer—before they’re talking to you, while they’re researching you, and after they’ve purchased.

Thanks to social media, your brand lives closer to your customers than ever before.

Now for the scary part: If you’re not building those bonds with your customers, who is?

With longer sales cycles and less obvious roadmaps for success, determining which B2B social media strategy will lead to the best results is a different beast. In fact, according to a survey done by The Manifest, 24% of respondents said the biggest challenge their business faced with social media was not having a formal strategy.

As a reminder, set it and forget it is not a strategy.

To win in 2021, you need to play by different rules.

In the modern B2B social media world, brands are winning by:

• Leveraging their personal brand(s) to connect with customers
• Using different channels for different stages of the funnel
• Syncing first-party CRM data to attribute revenue from paid ads

And that’s exactly what we’re going to cover.

Here’s what you will learn in this article:

1. Goals: The different types of B2B Social Media goals to strive for in your strategy.
2. Channel Strategy: Which social media platforms to choose and how to generate results on them.
3. Budgets & ROI: How to measure your ROI (return of investment) from social media and set the right budget.
4. Hiring: What to look for in a B2B social media marketer (or how to outsource it to an agency).
5. Top B2B social media FAQ: More Q&A we couldn’t fit up top. 😎

This guide focuses on social media marketing, though we’ll also touch on social media’s role in customer care and recruitment.

So without further ado, let’s get into how to set ambitious but achievable goals for your B2B social media marketing program in 2021 (and beyond).

Define Your B2B Social Media Goals

“If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time.” – Zig Ziglar

(What would a B2B marketing post be without a Ziglar quote?)

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 😊

Your social media program impacts marketing metrics across the customer lifecycle. Break down the steps you track before, during, and after becoming a customer.

1. Awareness: More people know who you are.
2. Consideration: Generating marketing qualified leads through education and nurturing.
3. Conversions: Driving sign-ups and sales from new and existing customers.
4. Advocacy: Gaining reviews and referrals from customers.

Should you have one goal or many?

In reality, most brands have multiple social media goals. Having specific goals is what drives 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:

1) Brand Awareness

You can’t build a business if your customers don’t know who you are, what you do, and how you help. Agree?

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 social media strategy.

Brand awareness can be broken down into:

• Increasing awareness of new products
• Increasing knowledge of new products
• Increasing purchasing frequency
• Increasing attractiveness of products

Metrics Used to Measure Brand Awareness on Social Media:

• Direct Traffic: When users access your website by typing in your URL directly to their browser. Although direct traffic can indicate ‘dark social’ channels are at work too, it also means users had to recall your domain name in order to find you.
• Mentions: The number of times your brand or product has been mentioned directly on social channels. You can count tagged mentions, where your handle was referenced, and on some platforms like Twitter, mentions without tags.
• Brand Search Volume: The number of times that people have typed your brand name on search engines as a keyword. Brand keyword search volume and clicks are measured through Google Search Console and can show you if an active social media campaign is driving curious prospects to search for more information.
• Reach: The total number of people that were exposed to a social media post. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram all give the possibility to track your reach. Twitter will report impressions.

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 spends. We recommend crawling before you run.

2) Engagement

Algorithms on social media reward engagement and interactions, which as a result boosts the visibility of your content towards 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.

This has become a priority for B2B companies over the years, as 71% of B2B companies say that high engagement is the main goal of their content marketing efforts (2017).

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.

Metrics Used to Measure Social Media Engagement

• Conversation / Comment Rate: The (average) number of comments and responses on each post. With social feed algorithms rewarding posts with comments with organic reach, this is more important than ever. According to Avinash Kaushik, a high conversation rate signals that you are having meaningful conversations with your audience, and requires brands to add value to your followers.
• Applause Rate: The number of reactions or likes per post. While likes are often referred to as a vanity metric, they do give you some insight into the value of your content. Are you interesting or not?
• Amplification / Share Rate: The number of ‘shares’ per post. This metric is powerful because it tell us the content contained a message worth sharing, resulting in earned (aka viral) reach.
• Video Views & Duration: The number of plays of your video, and the level to which viewers stuck around. Was your video interesting or not? For instance, a high number of 2 or 10-second views with a minuscule 100% completion rate tells us we got their attention—but couldn’t keep it.
• Clicks Per Post: Measuring the number of times users have clicked on your link helps determine if your headline or article was effective.

Advanced: All of these metrics can be broken down and compared by the social media channel, month, content format or theme for deeper analysis.

3) Lead Generation & Conversions

Demand & 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.

Metrics Used To Measure Social Media Lead Generation Efforts

• Cost Per Lead (CPL): Calculate how much it approximately costs you to acquire one lead. This metric can be aggregated for all social networks, but works best as a comparison metric across paid campaigns and channels. If your CPL is higher than your benchmark, then you need to reconsider channels and approaches.
• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL): It’s great to have loads of leads, but if none of them match your lead qualification criteria, then all of your efforts will have been in vain. Measuring your MQLs will ensure that you are targeting the right audience. Companies have their own definition for MQL vs. SQL. In general, an MQL has not signaled intent and readiness to purchase.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV or LTV): Predicting the net profit a prospect will generate over a period of time and assigning that value to each new customer is integral to measuring social media ROI.
• Close Rate Per Channel: A careful examination of which channel generates the best leads for your brand is a good way to determine which platforms are worth pursuing and which aren’t.
• Average Close Rate: Keep track of the quality of your leads to help you determine if you’re attracting leads with high conversion potential.

Setting social media goals not linked to sales?

B2B social media adds value to other departments in an organization. After all, social is a customer-facing channel. It is best practice to break out those goals, budgets, and resources separate from marketing/sales.

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.

For even more tactics to succeed, visit our post on social media lead generation.

Choose A Social Media Platform

Now that you’ve defined your goals for your campaign, it’s time to choose a platform that best corresponds to your objectives. 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 success, and how each can be used to drive results:

1) LinkedIn for B2B

Being a professional networking platform, it’s no surprise to anyone that LinkedIn is the most popular social media channel among B2B marketers. Not only do 93% of B2B marketers agree that it’s the most productive platform when it comes to generating leads, but about 64% of all visits to company websites also come from LinkedIn.

There are over 600 million members on LinkedIn, 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:

• Builds & Strengthens Personal Relationships: LinkedIn gives the opportunity for professionals to share their content and opinion on pertinent topics. This helps put yourself out there and is a great way to baby-step a relationship with prospects. There’s an added bonus to empowering team members on LinkedIn: Content shared by employees has 2x higher engagement than content shared by the company.
• Launching Products & Breaking News: More than 90% of B2B say they prefer LinkedIn over any other platform for their product marketing. LinkedIn feeds tend to promote ‘big news’ and important updates, hence why your new job promotion or article mention gets an extra lift in reach.
• Generating Leads: According to Hubspot, LinkedIn is 277% more effective when it comes to generating leads than any other social media platform. One reason why is because marketing, sales, and HR professionals can be themselves—literally. As opposed to running ads from the corporate account, which LinkedIn is plenty good for, professionals can post content, nurture relationships, and DM other LinkedIn users 1-to-1 to generate opportunities. According to LinkedIn, salespeople who regularly share content are 45% more likely to exceed quota.

How To Drive Results On LinkedIn

Publish Updates with Native Formats like Documents 

Who knew the most effective content format would be…PDFs?

A smart marketer once advised us, 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 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.

Drive Engagement with LinkedIn Polls

Polling is a great way to generate engagement, do market research, and get client feedback. And now you can do it on LinkedIn.

That’s right — LinkedIn has finally given us a native poll feature. 🎉

A few things to keep in mind while you’re celebrating, aka making lots of great polls:

• You can choose how long the poll runs, up to two weeks.
• Like Twitter polls, LinkedIn polls are limited to four options.
• Poll questions are limited to 140 characters and answers/options to 30 characters.

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.

Start & Join Groups Related To Your Industry

Facebook Groups have grown so fast you might have forgotten that LinkedIn has the same feature. Not for long. Don’t be surprised if group posts start showing up more prominently in 2021 within your notifications and feeds.

There are more than 2 million groups on LinkedIn for every possible industry and niche, from e-commerce dropshippers to nutrition experts. A great way to generate leads is to join active groups and regularly provide value by answering questions from other members.

Consider joining Groups with the following three features: they are relevant to your industry or niche, highly active already (daily posts), and medium in size (not too big that you will get lost, and not too small that you can’t reach anyone).

Should you start a LinkedIn Group?
Don’t see a LinkedIn group your customers would find valuable? Consider starting one. The return-on-investment from the audience and industry recognition can be huge. Just be aware of the weekly posts, ongoing moderation, and personal invitations needed to make it successful over the course of one year (minimum).

Optimize Your Company Page

LinkedIn company pages are musts 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:

• Write a convincing overview of your company, that clearly describes the activities of your business
• Add captivating banner images to your page that showcases your product or team in action
• Add a call-to-action button that drives visitors to your homepage, careers page, or product landing page

For more ways to boost your LinkedIn audience and engagement, visit our post on how to grow your company page.

Publish and Repost Content With LinkedIn Articles

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 its own publishing platform that gives business leaders the opportunity to attract attention for their brand and build thought leadership.

Best of all, published posts are indexed on your profile, and get great distribution in the feed.

The Benefits Of LinkedIn Articles

• Reach Your Audience (And Theirs): When you publish a new post, your connections may receive a notification and email from LinkedIn, helping your content avoid getting lost in the busy feed. When your first connections comment on the article, the article is likely to reach their first connections, too.
• Build Credibility: Publishing quality content on LinkedIn consistently establishes you as an industry expert and raises awareness for your brand. When your product, sales, marketing, executive or [insert department] team publishes posts, you can re-share it on the company page. Oh hey, free content. 🙂

Best Practices For LinkedIn Articles

• Incorporate Rich Media: GIFs, images, videos, and Slideshares. They all display nicely on the clean LinkedIn publishing interface. Break up text and keep people on your articles longer by embedding visuals throughout.
• Publish as Consistently As Possible: Consistency is key when it comes to publishing articles. Aim to post at least once per week, month, or quarter—whichever is most realistic to start.
• Syndicate and Repurpose Content as a Teaser: While we don’t recommend completely regurgitating an article you wrote elsewhere for its SEO implications, syndication is an important strategy with LinkedIn articles. Consider writing a new headline, sharing enough body content to add value on its own, then pointing people to the full piece off LinkedIn for the rest.
• Promote Your Posts On Other Social Channels: Promoting your LinkedIn articles on other platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and email will drive more traffic to your post.

In 2019, LinkedIn released new information about its algorithm. Explained in brief: “People you know, talking about things you care about.”

See a snapshot of their best practices below:

2) Facebook for B2B

Facebook has had quite the transformation. The Facebook of 2021 looks entirely different than 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?

Is Facebook changing? Yes. But with the right strategy, B2B businesses can still reap massive results from the platform. Before you start to panic, check out these facts:

• There’s still 2.45 billion people that log in to Facebook every month. Their usage base last year has increased by 8%. You can be sure that all of these people aren’t going anywhere.
• Facebook is still the second most popular platform for B2B (after LinkedIn), as 54% of B2B marketers say that Facebook is their most important platform in 2018 (an increase from 43% in 2017).
• Business decision makers spend 74% more time on Facebook than the average user. They’re also 40% more likely to have more than 200 friends

How To Drive B2B Results On Facebook

Join relevant Facebook Groups (as a person)

Facebook offers the ability to its users to join groups based on their passions, interests or industry. 1.4 billion people are using Facebook groups to discuss their passions, chat with friends or colleagues and plan events. It’s very likely that in the past 12 months you 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 do 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 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 is (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.

Create Engaging Video Content

Video marketing is big business on social media. 54% of consumers want to see more video content from a business they support, 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:

• Facebook Video Ads: When it comes to word of mouth marketing, video outperforms text and images by 1200%. Facebook lets you run videos as a standalone objective to get more views, or as an ad format for any objective (traffic, conversions, reach). We recommend testing videos as a creative format against a still image or graphic, or a video featuring a person against one with a product and text.
• Facebook Live: B2B brands on Facebook can leverage live video to engage with their followers in real time. Facebook Live drives 6X more engagement than non-live videos, and is perfect when it comes to webinars, Q&As and live product demos. If your goal is to generate leads, it’s best to wrap things up with a strong offer for those watching all the way through.
• Facebook Watch Series: In 2017 Facebook launched Watch, and the product is fairly sticky. B2B marketers can optimize for Facebook Watch by delivering video content (for example: weekly interviews with big names in your industry) in the form of a series.

HubSpot regularly posts instructional videos about marketing on its Facebook page. In the example below, users can learn how to create a good email title.

3) Twitter for B2B

Forget traffic, this one is all about the relationships.

With 300+ million monthly active users and 500+ million tweets being sent out every day, Twitter has become a place to “see what’s going on” around the world. It’s no wonder that 87% of B2B marketers use Twitter as a content marketing tool.

(Unfortunately, a smaller percentage actually get it right.)

The beauty of Twitter is the connection it creates between brands and their audience in real time.

Here’s how using Twitter for B2B marketing can benefit you:

• Relationships with the right humans: This goes back to everything we’ve been saying about humanizing and personalizing your brand.One-on-one interactions help drive engagement but, more importantly, they also help build meaningful connections with users. Cement your brand in your customers’ minds as responsive, helpful, and engaging. You know, human. You’ll be amazed at the caliber of people who pay attention to relationships here.
• Social listening = customer intelligence: The best marketers don’t guess; they listen. Twitter is a great place to do just that. And don’t just listen to what your audience is saying in response to your tweets. It’s very useful to know what your audience is saying about you, but not to you. So search mentions of your brand, products, and general industry topics to gauge audience sentiment and content opportunities.
• A second net to solve problems (faster): Customers who need help with a product or are experiencing issues turn to Twitter for immediate assistance. Customers value the immediacy of your response here, and lots of third-party tools now integrate with Twitter DM. #Efficiency
• Important announcements that spread quickly: Twitter is a great way to break news about updates and changes, and respond personally when customers have questions.
• SEO benefits: Recent and engaging tweets can appear in relevant Google search results, which can lead to more followers and traffic to your website.

How To Drive Results On Twitter

1. Develop a distinct brand voice and personality

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 Twitter.

Struggling to define your brand’s voice?

1. Write to your target audience: You’ll find it easier to write consistent, cohesive copy if you have the same person in mind every time you compose a tweet.
2. Set the tone: What’s your company’s vibe? Ask yourself: How do you want to make people feel? In general, are you more likely to be funny, serious, ~edgy~? Keeping that in mind…
3. Bring your brand to life with relevant words and visuals. Translate the brand attributes into the colors, imagery, ad messaging, and response copy you use across social.

An example of a B2B company with a noteworthy Twitter account? Square. Their content is focused on the small business owners they serve and the overall tone is informative, casual, and encouraging.

2. Play to trends

Twitter 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 tend to get high numbers of likes, retweets, and replies, too. So invest some time into crafting a winning comment. If it helps, shift your mindset to consider the comment as the content.

3. Share videos

According to Twitter, 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 that pillar content we talked about earlier to economize the process.

4. Tweet at the right times

Twitter is all about immediacy.

In fact, 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 Twitter 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.

R/GA does a great job of reacting to trending topics quickly and with their signature biting wit.

OK I admit, I want to eat the moldy burger. You win, advertising!

— R/GA (@RGA) February 20, 2020

Just landed. No one punched the seats. Great flight.

— R/GA (@RGA) February 18, 2020

4) Instagram for B2B

Instagram’s visual-based platform is great for B2B businesses to promote their brand. Don’t believe us?

• 200+ Million Instagrammers visit at least one Business Profile daily.
• Consumers Are Buying What They See On Instagram: Instagram is a powerful tool when it comes to promoting your product. 60% of people say they discover new products on Instagram.
• It Influences Consumers’ Buying Habits: Instagram is changing the online shopping process. 80% of users say Instagram helps influence their purchasing decisions.

How to Drive Results on Instagram

1. Set up an Instagram Business account

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.

If you want to advertise natively and get data on your audience, you need a Business profile. To make the switch, all you have to do is to click on the settings icon on your profile page, and tap on the Switch To Business Profile link.

2. Create and curate content tailored for Instagram

To excel in Instagram, you have to understand what works there and what audiences want. In general the formula of entertaining and informative works well here.

Keep in mind in 2021, it’s best practice to use square photos and videos (1080 x 1080).

3. Share client success stories

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 customer the hero by highlighting their big wins.

4. Take a peek into your corporate culture

My favorite definition of organizational culture is that it’s a succinct 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.

Hoosuite uses the hashtag #hootsuitelife on Instagram to give followers a glimpse into their company life.

(Dog-friendly offices? Enough said. 👇)

 

View this post on Instagram

 

2018—what an exciting year! We are all rested up and looking forward to everything that’s to come in the new year. What are your new year resolutions? 🎉 #hootsuitelife #2019 📸: @evarobin

A post shared by Hootsuite (@hootsuite) on Dec 31, 2018 at 10:32am PST

5. Leverage Native Features

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 audiences feed. You can also choose to 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 account 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, newer 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 roll out to help drive wide-spread 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.

 

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A post shared by HubSpot (@hubspot)

Hint: Speaking of working smart, not hard, you can and should reshare TikTok content (if you have any) to your Reels feed. 

Setting B2B Social Media Budgets & Measuring B2B Social Media ROI

How much should I budget for B2B social media marketing?

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 a B2B social media marketing budget:

1. Percent of Annual Sales Formula

To determine their ceiling for marketing spend, most companies start with a percentage of their expected revenue. To follow this formula, start by taking a ~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 their revenue on marketing budgets. Meanwhile, Gartner’s 2019 CMO survey notes 67% of B2B firms expected their budgets to rise in 2020.

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 2021 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.

2. B2B Social Media Expense Breakdown

Consider how your marketing budget will break down between the core social media expense categories:

1. In-house team members: Part and full-time employees dedicated to social media channels. For instance, one social media manager + half of a graphic designer’s time (shared resource) = 1.5 FTE salaries.
2. Outsourced work: Agency and freelance team members dedicated to social media activities like content creation, community management, and paid media.
3. Paid media expenses: Total ad spend from social media channels like LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
4. Tools and Technology: Software dedicated to managing and measuring social media marketing. This tech completes functions like scheduling, monitoring and listening, ad buying, and reporting & analytics.

Gartner’s 2019 survey found the average marketing resource allocation to be:

• 22% on agency fees
• 26% on marketing technology
• 26% on media
• 25% on labor

3. Programs & Campaigns

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.

4. Social Media Recruitment & Other Activities

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 divvy up that spend allowance. There are several areas to look at:

• Content creation: Determine what kinds of graphics, images, or videos you plan to use in your campaign. Eager to showcase your awesome office space with the amazing view? High quality photos are a cost-effective way to do that. Looking to highlight a fun company culture? It might be worth the extra expense of video production to capture that. Think about which medium would best serve the needs of your campaign and budget accordingly.
• Paid promotion: Unless you already have a large, engaged organic following, you’re more likely to reach your target audience—in this case, talented, qualified applicants—with paid social. Decide how much of your recruitment budget you can designate to ad spend.
• Outsourcing: You can also choose to delegate the recruitment process to a third party. If so, you’ll need to budget for the total cost of outsourcing your campaign efforts to a social media management agency.

Additional B2B Social Media Budget Resources

Plannuh’s budget template is a helpful planning tool for piecing complex budgets together.

What are the best ways to measure ROI from social media marketing?

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 and powerful CRM software, 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.

• ROI – short-term: Those leads are now known prospects moving through your sales funnel. In 3 months, if 10% of those 50 leads convert into closed deals with a customer lifetime value of $10,000, you stand to generate ~$50,000 from the campaign. ROI = $50,000 – 10,000 / (10,000) = 400% projected ROI.
• ROI – long-term: After 6 months, or 12 months, how many additional campaign leads have converted? What was the expected value of those deals? That’s when things get interesting. 🙂
• Indirect ROI: What is the ‘value’ of a page visit? How does the CPM for this channel compare to another channel? What other social or conversion actions can you attribute to the campaign (like saves, engagement, or downloads)?

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.

Hiring A B2B Specialist To Manage Your Social Media Marketing

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.

Should I Hire a Social Media Agency Or Social Media Manager?

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.

1) Hiring A Social Media Agency

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: You don’t need to outsource all of your social media marketing program.

Pros of Outsourcing Social Media Marketing:

• Quality and consistency of social data reporting and analytics — thanks to efficiencies across clients.
• There will be less trial and error: an agency will bring experience and lessons from working with many clients to the table, which in return will accelerate your social media results.
• Social media agencies have access to advanced tools that can have an important effect when it comes to growing your audience.
• You will be working with a variety of social media experts, from analysts to creatives, who individually will be able to bring their unique skills to each platform.

Potential Cons of Outsourcing Social Media Marketing:

• Hiring a social media agency can be expensive for early-stage entrepreneurs and businesses who have smaller budgets for testing and limited time for communication.
• Since agencies set scopes of work for everything they do, they may not handle all of the ancillary and administrative tasks an in-house social media manager would do.
• They have their own process. Most social media agencies will begin by auditing your past performance and analyzing your audience. This phase could last 1 week to 1 month.

What To Look For In A B2B Social Media Agency

• B2B Proof / Results: When searching for a social media partner, ask them for B2B case studies and/or links to social media campaigns they are managing right now for B2B clients. While most large clients have strict confidential agreements, the existence of the engagement itself is usually fair game.
• Client references: In some instances, they will supply names and contact info of clients that will answer your questions. You can also scan Facebook, Clutch.co, G2, or Google to see what previous clients have shared. Keep in mind, agency reviews will primarily showcase the super positive or negative experiences. (Just being honest here.)
• Consume their content: Can you get a sense of their personality and people from their social? Is their blog content genuinely useful? Conduct a surface level audit to judge their first impression.
• Audience & industry experience: An agency that has worked in your niche or marketed to your audience may be able to generate results faster.
• Pricing structure: Do you want to pick from a pre-set menu or customize your approach from scratch?
• Communication cadence: Communication plays an essential role in any healthy partnership. Consider your communication preferences and the options they provide. Will they send you weekly status updates? Review monthly reports? Will they setup a shared Slack channel?

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 chat bot if you’d like to learn more. 😊

2) Hiring an In-House Social Media Manager

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

• A social media manager may have a better sense of your brand’s actual customers.
• While an agency works for multiple clients, an in-house social media manager will make your brand the sole focus of her work.
• You’ll have full control over the tasks of your social media manager and how they complete them—including non-social assignments.

Cons of Hiring a Social Media Manager

• It’s rare to find social media managers that are well-versed on each social media channel.
• It’s even more rare to find an individual social media manager that is skilled across all 5 social media roles—paid ads, analytics, content (writing and visual), community management, and strategic planning. Depending on the size and needs of your company, these roles might need to be distributed across an entire social media team.
• With social managers, you’re going to have to pay for overhead costs such as insurance, bonuses, and benefits.

What To Look For In A B2B Social Media Manager

• They Understand Your Brand: It doesn’t matter if a social media manager has thrilling, innovative ideas for your Instagram or LinkedIn account – if they’re not in line with your brand voice, they simply won’t be a good fit for your business.
• They’re Committed To Collaboration: Whether your social media manager comes to your office every day or works remotely from home, a social media manager isn’t isolated from the rest of your team and is a pro at collaboration. They’ll need to be proactive at sourcing ideas and input from team members across the organization.
• Copywriting chops: What do stakeholder reporting, content marketing, paid ads, and community management all have in common? Copywriting is the glue that ties them together. Writing is a fundamental skill for successful digital marketing programs. When looking for a potential social media manager to join your team, ask them to write sample copy in a variety of formats—ad, customer service responses, about us bios, Instagram stories, and short and long-form captions.
• Visual content skills: Your social media manager is going to play a key role in producing images, GIFs, and videos throughout the month. That means your SMM needs to be a pro at sketching coherent mockups for designers, or excellent in editing environments. Ask your candidate for a portfolio of visual content they’ve designed or co-created for other brands in the past.
• Forward-looking mindset: Social Media is changing every day, which is why a social media manager needs to be thirsty for new information about user behavior and platform updates. Ask your potential candidate what sources they use to stay ahead, and what they’re looking forward to testing next.
• Customer empathy and service: 72% of people expect a response to their social media complaint within 1 hour. Considering that a customer that experiences good service with a business is 3x more likely to recommend the brand to their peers, hiring a social media manager that takes customer service seriously is paramount. Lay out sample scenarios and see how they’d respond.

Are you still here? Thanks for sticking with us all the way 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. 👍