Having a strong B2B social media plan is only becoming more important as marketing and martech trends evolve. With most of today’s B2B customers using online channels, reviews, self-explainers and social media to find out more about a product’s capabilities, it is not crucial for B2B marketers to not only maintain a strong social media presence, but to also drive marketing ROI with a more targeted and personalized approach.

For marketers and business leaders, especially new martech entrants or tech startups that do not boast of a strong social media approach, here are a few top benefits of ensuring you have a good social media plan:

It’s where your customers are

B2B customer experiences have been undergoing a sea change. Today’s B2B customers not only expect a seamless and consistent marketing messaging and brand interaction across multiple channels (website, app, social media, email, etc), they are also more present and active across multiple online channels themselves, because they use online channels to share their own feedback, check peer reviews on products, ask doubts, compare products and services with competitors, etc.

Brands that have value-add social media updates and posts relevant to their target audience’s interest will not only help capture their attention, it will portray a healthier brand image and online presence.

Most of your B2B competitors are already on social media

B2B brands today use social media to tap into specific customer segments and drive certain kinds of customer engagements. If your competitor boasts of a strong social media presence and runs regular interactive activities like polls, quizzes, etc – they are using channels the customer is already active in to create a better relationship.

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Social media boosts lead generation and sales pipelines

With effective planning and tying your social media strategy to tangible and clearly measurable goals and outcomes, certain social media channels (like LinkedIn, which is a hot favorite for most B2B marketing and sales people) can be used to drive strong lead generation campaigns that hit the right audience base.

Social media insights can tell you a lot about prospects and customers

Social media insights can help you breakdown your customer’s and prospect’s behavior (are they more active on sites like LinkedIn or do they seem more approachable and interactive on Twitter, for instance). Social media analytics and data can also help social media marketers and marketing leaders understand what kind of content is being consumed by the audience, what kind of content they seem to like more. These insights can also help advanced marketers create robust marketing plans that can tie these insights into overall marketing plans and ROI by using other channels like email to re-market or nurture their most active social media members.

There are endless benefits of maintaining a strong social media presence. For B2B marketers, using data and strong social media strategies to guide eventual marketing ROI and tie efforts to overall company goals can help generate ROI from social media marketing.

What does it take to create a data-backed, ROI-impact social media marketing strategy?

Here are a few basic best practices that can help:

Know where your customers and prospects are

Spray and pray is never a good marketing approach, today’s customers and prospects expect more from the brands who reach out to them than a generalized approach. In B2B and tech marketing, LinkedIn is often considered a high priority marketing, sales and even social media channel. Leading tech marketers and sales leaders use LinkedIn as a channel to support targeting approaches and segmented messaging based on their prospects profile.

Before embarking on a social media plan, understand which channels you want to use to actually start relevant conversations and set them against the channels you just want to maintain a social media presence on

This will help a social media team know how to work on personalized and relevant campaigns for each channel, based on the channel objective.

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Align social media goals with core marketing and business objectives

Far too many marketers already use social media to just keep their online presence active. But how much of the content or posts that are being pushed out in this attempt are relevant to what actual buyers want to consume? And does it impact them?

Maintaining a social media presence is important but tying social media execution plans and efforts to end goals actually help create better execution plans and social media messaging as well.

Aligning social media efforts to marketing ROI on the basis of pre-defined parameters helps social media teams assess their own results and impact to the whole business.

Know what to measure

How are you going to measure your actual social media ROI? Vanity metrics like the number of followers gained across Twitter in a month for instance can’t help understand actual business impact of social media.

What advanced marketing teams and marketing leaders need to do is identify what they need to measure based on the core marketing and business goals.

For instance, you can choose to implement a different social media approach to support your account-based marketing campaign, this demands that you measure a different set of parameters to understand how impactful your social media plan was to your account-based marketing campaign.

Different social media accounts for different purposes

Some of the leading technology brands like Salesforce or even Adobe use this to drive more social media engagement and traffic, Salesforce runs more than 10 official Twitter accounts, some brands with multiple services and products like Google, Microsoft use LinkedIn’s showcase pages to run multiple pages meant for different purposes or communities.

This helps drive impactful social media conversations and posts based on specific purposes and helps brands maintain a central theme.

Are you Ready to Create Valuable Customer Conversations with your Social Media?

Like everything else in marketing, there is no one size fits all approach when it comes to social media. Better alignment between social media teams and marketing leaders can drive more social media ROI.

In an environment where customers and prospects have access to 24/7 content by multiple brands, a more optimized social media approach is a necessity. Using data, the right metrics, insights and strategies can actually help social media marketers boost pipelines and customer conversations thereby creating value to the business as a whole.

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