3 tips to get started with your B2B Social Marketing strategy in 2016

This year is the one you should stop thinking of social as an additional parallel strategy and fully consider it part of your integrated B2B marketing mix.

We all know that for B2B marketing social it’s a challenge, but even for B2C marketeers generating leads or sales is one of the top challenges, and most of social media managers today struggle to demonstrate their real social [content] performance to management.

Here are some good reasons why social is a must in your current mix.

1. Social Data. Social is the space where people interact today. Along with apps, these two sources are the key to understand the profile of your buyers and whether it’s LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook, B2B marketeers need to unify these with their buyer’s professional profiles in order to extend the key personas (buyers) profile view.
2. Social Listening / Monitoring. Social is the place where sharing and connecting activities happen publicly or in small groups. A social listening tool will help you monitor mentions across social and web in order to identify trends, follow specific keywords or accounts and being able to have real time reactions.
3.  Content Curation & Content Amplification. If you are a serious marketeer, you must be rocking at content for ovbious reasons. There are many ways to curate content, but one of the easiest and most effective ones (monitoring what trends and gets traction out there) is through social.Similarly occurs with content amplification. We are all experiencing how Facebook along with LinkedIn and Pinterest is taking over content consumption and content sharing, so these channels are key to amplify and make your content noticeable (both paid and organic).
4. Online conversions. One of the key secrets to succesful CRO (conversion rate optimisation) is to provide an optimal user experience. The old days of having advert campaigns driving traffic to isolated landing pages (not connected to your content / web environment) are over. Today mobile is not just ‘first’ but it’s where conversions happen.Social channels are providing tools to host your conversion within the channel and to those mobile users (for some companies more than others in terms of % of your overal user’s platform mix) is critical to keep the conversion within their environment to maintain drop-off rate minized.

Now that we can clearly see some of the top reasons why social is a must have, I’d like to share with you the first 3 things you should consider start doing in 2016 if you don’t have a solid social strategy in place yet.

1. Get a social listening tool. Start listening (real time) mentions, comments and trends around your key personas in relation to your key solutiosn / products. This will also help you to curate content you can re-share or comment. This effort might open you to the world of social selling if you are not into it already (from your corporate account).
2. Create some content, and use a social media management tool to amplify and publish it in an organised and strcutured manner. Leverage it to fully integrate social efforts into your marketing mix and measure the performance of top content across channels.
3. Use native conversion tools in your top channels. Start using Twitter lead gen cards, Facebook lead ads or LinkedIn sales tools. These will increase your social lead generation results of your key campaigns (using social as an extension to your most used channels e.g. email, webinars, affiliate)

I hope this article provides some tips on how to get started with your social strategy this year.

What other tactis / initiatives are you doing as key pillars of your social strategy?