Social media is a digital environment which contains a vast amount of opportunities for social media marketers and is one of the prime tools used today within all types of industries. When it comes to the B2B space, social media plans may seem much more daunting than they do within the B2C space. Questions tend to come up such as: Where do businesses connect? What information should be shared? Which strategies should be utilized to put conceptual ideas into actionable plans? While all this can be overwhelming, ColinKurtis has pulled together a list of themes crucial to building social engagement for your food, beverage and nutrition brand.
Define Overall Purpose & Goals
It is important to solidify the message you want to send with the content you are sharing to your audience. This definition will provide a clear direction for ideas and concepts going forward. It also acts as a thesis statement for the rest of your company’s social media plan, and will allow your audience to have a distinct snapshot of your business in their minds.
Setting goals is another key starting point for a social media strategy in any business space. Defining what is sought to be achieved with the message you’re sending provides further motivation and direction during planning sessions.
Goals can include:
- To build community & create brand awareness
- To drive engagement
- To generate leads
Decide Where to Put the Plan Into Action
Researching and understanding the social media channels that are available to you is the next step that should be taken when building a social strategy. Now that a message and goals are defined for your plan, you can start deducing what you need to share and how often you need to be sharing it. Think about which environments are good for visual media and which are good for written media. Think about the ways in which media can be shared on these platforms, and analyze the rate at which certain types of media are being pushed on them.
After considering these scenarios, you will probably have a good idea of what channel(s) will be best for your company. LinkedIn is commonly a part of the selected B2B marketing channels due to the presence of businesses on the platform. According to LinkedIn, 82% of B2B marketers achieve their highest potential with LinkedIn compared to other social channels.
More on LinkedIn’s Benefits…
LinkedIn has been and continues to be an integral part of the B2B social media marketing space with around 59 million companies having a page on LinkedIn. Their environment of short-form content — which is similar to social channels that heavily capture B2C audiences — allows for a attention-grabbing, personality-defining approach to marketing in the B2B space. In regards to longer-form content — such as newsletters and other related press releases — LinkedIn provides a forum to share this information to your direct communities, drive traffic to your websites and reach related audiences that may not have known about you before.
Identify Your Audience
Depending on what your company intends to share, LinkedIn may not be the right place for you. Consider where your audiences are most likely to engage and browse. If that would be a more visual-focused application, Facebook or Instagram could be the better way to go.
Staying up to date on client and industry trends is key to ensuring your social media presence is focused in the right digital areas. Devote time to R&D in this area to achieve the highest-possible results in the most efficient manner.
Get Creative with Content & Keep Going
Now that you have a social media marketing plan fully laid out, it is time to get creative! This is the point in the process where the initial message and goals will come in handy. To stay true to your brand personality, branch ideas off of these first steps. How does your product or service relate to that message? How do the people who work at the company portray the message?
All things regarding the company, whether it be processes or purpose related, can be a key factor in content planning. Use a calendar and stay consistent with these plans for strong results as well as an engaged, loyal audience; pages that post on a frequent and consistent schedule see 5.6x the followers on LinkedIn and around 7x the rate of growth.
Need help with engaging your audience with a new social strategy? ColinKurtis is here to help! Contact Mitch Robinson at Mitch@colinkurtis.com or call 815-965-6657 EXT. 1 to learn how we can help engage your clientele in a successful social media strategy. Curious about our previous social media work? Take a look here.
Blog post from:
Matt Hensler
Chief Marketing Officer
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