If You Were to Give Your B-to-B Social Media Activities a Grade, What Would it Be?

by tradesmeninsights | Nov 7, 2012 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing

Come on now, let’s be honest here. You got into social media maybe because you thought it might help your business overall, but maybe you got into it because everyone else was doing it and you didn’t want to be left out.

No matter why you got into it, many B-to-B companies are getting a big F in social media and they can’t figure out why. Social media isn’t a silver bullet, it’s not a stand-alone tactic, it’s something that should be used in conjunction with your other marketing tools.

In order to use social media, you also need to understand how and why to communicate using this media. Traditional feature/benefit, “how great we are” copy won’t work in this arena. Your customers/contractors are looking at ways to solve their problem, not get a sales pitch. They are going to Google it…” How to troubleshoot a specific plumbing problem?” If you want any chance of getting in front of that person, you had better written content and have it tagged properly with the right key words if you want to have a chance of being on the first page of the search results.

I recently read an article by Kipp Bodnar, 10 Reasons Why B2B Companies are Failing with Social Media, that outlines some very important points. Here are some highlights:

• Lack of content – The more valuable content you have up there, the better your chances of success.
• Focus on lead generation – Not number of followers or clicks. Leads turn into sales and isn’t that our end game?
• Get management to buy-in – To do social media right it takes time and talent, and if you can get support from the C suite, you’re paddling upstream.
• Identify your target audience – If you can’t do this, then how will you be able to find out what their critical issues are?
• Don’t be boring. Make your communications exciting – Give them “HOLY COW” content.
• Improve your website – You could be doing everything right in social media, but if where you’re sending them sucks, then you’ve lost all the momentum and credibility you’ve worked so hard to establish.

Learn from your mistakes and go out there and kick some butts!