Do you work at an IaaS, SaaS, or Fintech company that’s trying to grow? If so, you’ll almost certainly need an active presence on social media.
In this post, you’ll learn about five social media marketing strategies that help you attract, engage, and delight your prospects, customers, and other key stakeholders.
Who is your primary audience, and why should they pay attention to you? For B2B tech companies I advise, we always start by researching and building buyer personas for their most important stakeholders. Before you start posting and interacting on social media, be sure you thoroughly understand your ideal clients' goals, plans, challenges, and favorite watering holes. In a B2B context, it's critical to analyze buyer motivations and behaviors.
Never approach social media marketing in a vacuum or echo chamber. Know who your core buyer personas are and what they care about. And get up to speed on the modern buyer's journey. Learn the differences between what your personas care about during the awareness, consideration, and decision stages of the buyer's journey. All too often, newbie social media marketers and salespeople think that most of their audience is already at the decision stage, when in reality, just about everyone starts in the awareness stage. Your goal should be to begin the relationship in the awareness stage and be available with your audience throughout their entire buyer's journey.
If you work with small business owners that aren't professional marketers, you'll almost certainly need to educate clients on what building a brand means on social media. Small business owners often think of their brand in terms of the logo, fonts, color chart, and brand guide. As a result, they'll often entrust social media strategy to the wrong kind of expert. Instead, make sure your clients -- or internal clients -- understand that your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. The content you share on social media and your interactions can make an enormous, positive impact on how your brand is perceived. But be patient. Don't try to propose marriage and elope on the first date.
Unless you truly have bottomless resources, you'll need to narrow down your publishing and interactions to channels where your ideal clients already hang out. For the B2B tech companies I advise, LinkedIn tops the list with YouTube as a close second. Do Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest matter? It depends, but if you're resource-constrained, build your beachhead in the channels where you can get the most impact the fastest.
LinkedIn organic research on personal profiles can be compelling. However, LinkedIn Ads needs to be in your playbook if your company can only sell to clients in certain countries or a certain size or specific industries. Along the same lines, if you've identified a few hundred target accounts that you think are a perfect fit for your product or service (ABM or account based marketing), LinkedIn Ads is a very cost-effective, hyper-specific way to get your content offers in front of the exact stakeholders in the exact companies that matter most.
Are you part of an infrastructure, software, or fintech company that's trying to grow? If so, what have you found most effective on social media? Let me know in the comments section below.