Why B2B Technology Companies Should Be On Social
Many B2B entities discount social media’s potential to influence their market but, as more millennials take the decision-making reigns, social has become increasingly relevant and strategic.
The role of the IT leader is changing: CIOs are shifting their focus to enabling the organizational growth through new technology and improved processes. They are using social media to discover the latest technology news and trends, collaborate with their peers, and engage with customers.
For B2B tech marketers targeting CIOs, social media provides an opportunity to connect and engage with your target buyers. With the proper approach, it can drive traffic (valued by search systems as a signal of quality and authority), generate leads, help you connect with colleagues, foster media interest, and help establish thought leadership for your brand. Here are the benefits of being on social for B2B technology companies:
Learn More About Your Buyers’ Problem
CIOs are busy. They are under pressure to invest in the products and services that will power growth and results at their organization. As a B2B technology marketer who sells to CIOs, your marketing message must intersect with one of the core business issues CIOs face. It needs to focus on their problems, not on the capabilities of your products or services. If you really want to understand your buyers’ concerns, social media is an excellent tool. You can tune into conversations and scroll through their feeds to find out what content they are sharing and what topics they are most interested in. Focusing on the issues CIOs care most about will go a long way to helping you break through with your social activity and overall content creation.
Engage Directly with Your Buyer
IT leaders use social media to engage with the content of other tech leaders, industry commentators, and other influencers. Social media is a great place to build a targeted marketing campaign that focuses on nurturing leads from qualified companies. Put together a list of CIOs that fit your buyer persona and find them on Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, online tech communities, and even Quoara. Use popular IT hashtags. Follow and engage with influencers that IT executives interact with. Curate content from the top publications that CIOs read, then use that to inform your PR and media strategy. Follow them, share their content, and comment on their posts. Demonstrate your appreciation and likemindedness through these nurturing activities before reaching out directly.
Become a Source of Insights for Your Industry
Content is an essential part of your social media and overall inbound strategy. Social media is not only a place to promote your existing content; it’s also a way to create a list of topics to inform future content development. On social, you have the opportunity to give your brand a voice that engages customers and offers them valuable and relevant content. Post of mix of curated content (industry news or articles that you’ve read and recommend) and original content (posts from your own blog or news about your business). Consistent, valuable updates with keep your feed interesting and go far in establishing you as an authority on your industry. Take some time to identify and connect with other industry thought leaders as well as connecting with linear individuals/companies (ones that aren’t direct competitors) to help with organic reach, content generation, and SEO via opportunities for content exchanges and/or guest posting.
Put Your Content in Front of the Right People
Along with helping you to establish credibility and awareness, your business can use social to support and inform your SEO strategy as well as grow your audience through partnerships. Social does this by providing a unique opportunity for your company to connect with other thought leaders. Content syndication, the process of guest posting on other industry websites or partnering with another brand to share each other’s content on social, exposes you to a new audience and amplifies your organic reach toward a targeted group. Content syndication also helps build backlinks that add to your credibility and improve search rankings. Social leads to opportunities with partners and syndication which leads to improvements in search. Through social, you can use content offers to drive users to tagged landing pages, generating leads from users in-market for services.
The best way to develop an effective, strategic social media presence for your B2B brand is to simply get started. Focus on engaging with other B2B tech leaders online and publishing consistent posts that offer value to your target market and make sure you are tracking analytics so that you know what’s working and what needs to change. Once your get those accounts rolling, we’d love to connect with you! Find us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
