Social media is no longer a tool for leisure and lifestyle, but it has become an essential tool for businesses across industries to attract potential clients. In recent social media marketing statistics, 95% of B2B marketers included social media marketing as part of their marketing strategy. B2B marketers know the essential role social media marketing plays in growing business value in both tangible and intangible revenues.
In this article, we will cover the key benefits B2B companies can acquire when applying social media marketing to their business plan:
Introduction to social media marketing
In simple terms, social media marketing is a form of marketing strategy where a business promotes its brand, services, and products to potential clients through the use of social media. This includes but is not limited to short-form product demo videos on YouTube, product launches through creative images on Instagram or sharing business annual reports on LinkedIn.
Businesses opt for social media marketing to capitalise on the reach it can take a business in the industry they are in. If you are in the retailing industry, you can reach more potential distributors, production houses or factories that can increase your business value to top leaders within the same industry through social media marketing.
Below are valuable B2B social media marketing statistics from global companies:
- In a 2023 marketing research, LinkedIn (96%), Facebook (26%) and X (70%) (formerly known as Twitter) are the top three social media channels that B2B marketers defined as the most effective platform for organic social media growth.
- According to a study on social media marketing ROI, businesses receive an average of 250% ROI for their ad campaigns.
- 96% of B2B marketers agree that social media as a platform provides positive returns to their companies.
- 84% of B2B executives and 75% of overall B2B buyers credited social media as the place where they obtain information before they make their purchase decisions.
As we move further into the world of digital communications, businesses should start investing further in social media marketing to excel in their business operations. Let’s move to the benefits businesses will gain from investing in social media marketing.
Improve brand visibility as a company
To grow your influence in the industry you are operating, one of the key decision-makers is your brand reputation. Social media is the source of information when businesses want to discover more about a brand, the same circumstances as when they want to know more about their paying customers.
Source: Hivekind LinkedIn Page
Social media marketing increases your social media presence and provides credibility to your business operations. Clients can see the value of your business based on the content you produce and evaluate the way you treat your customers through social media engagements. Through these lenses, other businesses will be open to engage and purchase from you. Your brand will eventually grow its networks and establish long-term partnerships that could elevate its brand visibility further.
Strengthened business-to-business relationships
To create a long-lasting partnership between businesses and convert them to be your paying customers, the framework for nurturing that relationship is similar to that of business-to-customers. The sustainability of business-to-business relationships is important because they are usually long-term and in need of greater transparency (about the quality of the product, the value your business operates by, the product functionally itself, etc) to continue the conversion cycle down the road.
Creating engaging content that highlights business news, expertise, values and contributions allows you to position your business as one of the industry’s thought leaders in the market. Nurturing such relationships also helps your business to connect better with like-minded people from other businesses who see an opportunity for a long-term collaboration.
Build communities among top leaders and industry experts
Social media is a powerful tool to build communities and it should be leveraged to boost your brand’s selling points to potential clients or build networking opportunities at a faster rate. This is an opportunity for businesses to meet top leaders, key decision-makers and industry experts that could open doors to new opportunities and innovations through conferences, webinars, conventions and events.
Source: Wall Street Journal
You never know what strategies you could adapt to your business modules or what value you can provide to other businesses alike without getting direct intel from the people who made the decisions themselves. It is always a good opportunity to experience knowledge-sharing, but at the same time give your contributions as a brand to boost your ROI in the process.
Increase clientele portfolio
The targeted approach of social media allows for personalised interactions, making it easier for B2B companies to attract and convert leads. This, in return, grows their existing clientele portfolio which could be a reference to understand the type of businesses they produce content for and understand the needs of their potential buyers.
Lead generation not only allows you to ensure your client receives the content made specifically for them, but it also comes with valuable insights you can implement into your business strategies. The more you grow your clientele portfolio, the better input you will get about who the decision-makers are, the kind of information that will get their buy-in and the scale of the market within your niche.
Support SEO strategies and outcomes
Whether you are B2B or B2C, SEO plays an important foundation in growing your brand’s presence. For B2B, increasing SEO traffic could help your brand upstage your competition on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) and at the same time, make you more discoverable to potential clients. Thus, implementing the right social media strategies could help both your SEO and social media value in unison.
Social media promotes your website to a wider audience through various social media channels and it can be done organically or paid. By creating engaging content and providing them with the direction to your website, you could easily grow your SEO traffic and at the same time your social media presence as well. On the SEO front, your website will gain more visitors and as they find value in your website, the search engine will recognise this result and promote it frequently in their SERPs.
Source: Lyfe Marketing
Final Takeaways
Social media marketing is a great framework businesses can adopt as part of their digital marketing strategies this year. It helps businesses to grab leads from potential buyers, reach the global market easily, surround themselves with decision-makers and leaders, and elevate their brand awareness.
One of the biggest challenges we see from companies that have not leveraged this business strategy is insufficient resources in planning and execution, which happens to be the two most important things to do when you are running a social media campaign. Companies like ours among many others provide social media marketing services to tackle this hurdle faced by other businesses globally. We provide a strategic campaign and help our clients execute each phase to optimise their ROIs.
At the rate we are witnessing the advancement of technology in the world currently, social media will continue to become more robust in their abilities to provide a space for business ventures for their users and a valuable source for businesses around the world to reach new paying customers.