If you think for B2B marketers social media buzz has calmed down, you probably have missed the recent statistics. The 2024 HubSpot Social Media Marketing Report says a whopping 87% of marketers are in favor of either increasing or continuing with their budget for social media marketing. Other statistics reveal that the buying decisions of 75% of buyers in the B2B segment and 84% of C-level business executives are directly influenced by social media.
But there are both winners and losers in the social media marketing space and in between there is a huge crowd of marketers who switch sides often but cannot grasp the effective strategies and techniques for shaping a consistent social marketing success story. As a B2B marketer, if you fall into this category and want to know how to create compelling social media content, this blog post will help you.
What exactly is compelling content?
In this age when attention span is limited by incessant scrolling and intermittent glances, the content needs to grab eyes and generate interest instantly. In a sea of social media posts, getting attention requires posts that compel the audience to pause, read, and click to read the entire post.
Compelling social media content has the following qualities:
- It talks about something the target audience is interested in.
- It generates curiosity by pointing towards something unexplored or less explored.
- It invokes concerns, questions, and doubts that compel them to dig in.
- It promises to unravel the information they were looking for.
All the above qualities make content compelling for the target audience. So, B2B marketers need to build their social media content strategy around these four qualities.
Let us now discuss some of the most tried and tested social media content strategies for B2B lead generation.
Content Creation
As we have already mentioned the key qualities for creating compelling content, we will now discuss different content types and how to plan them accordingly.
- Social media blogs: Writing social media blogs is fine as long as you have an established audience and follower base who look forward to your updates. Otherwise, you can share company blogs or your guest blogs on social media with a small write-up. Here too, the same principles of writing compelling content apply.
- Carousel or sliders: People often complain about the visual content splashing their timelines creating too much distraction. This is where carousels help. Moving slides with engaging visuals and befitting small byte-sized text gradually reveal a narrative, that’s how carousels instantly compel you to walk through the slides till the end. Particularly B2B marketers cannot miss carousels from their content strategy. Always write a compelling short post to introduce the carousel.
- Infographics: Overwhelmed by visual cacophony, social media users often look for vital information presented neatly and intuitively to prove a point. Here comes the power of infographics. Especially for B2B audiences, it always remains a crucial content type to deliver the message compellingly.
- Case Studies: Enterprises cannot portray their capabilities or value propositions better through any other content type than case studies. Because in case studies you showcase not just just what you do but how you do it and how it delivers real-world benefits for specific business scenarios. For posting case studies on social media, highlight the benefits of numerical KPIs and pair the writeup with an interplay of graphics and fonts.
- Customer Testimonials: For B2B marketers it is extremely important to showcase client success stories and customer feedback. Testimonials help build trust through social proof. Make it compelling with befitting images or small videos.
- Interactive Content: Allowing your audience to interact is the best engagement strategy and that doesn’t work merely by asking them to opine through comments. From time to time post polls, quizzes, and surveys to engage the audience with their opinions, feedback, and choices.
- Live Podcasts & Webinars: Hosting live podcasts or webinars on popular topics around your business interest is a good way to engage the audience and generate buzz. In these live sessions, you can give product demos, discuss industry trends, and answer audience questions directly. These live sessions also help you to collect a lot of contact information through registration that you can utilize for direct email or LinkedIn outreach.
Boost Traction with Social Media Profile
Whether you hate it or love it, people know and make judgments about your business by looking at the profiles. So, just keeping a business page on Facebook or a business profile on LinkedIn is not enough. These pages and profiles need regular updates and continuous upkeeping. This is just one small part of it. You also need to showcase your brand leaders in a good light by portraying their credentials, contributions, and competitive skills.
- 100% Profile Completion: Social media channels make your job easier by showing what additional information you need to provide to make profiles 100% complete. This is the bare minimum for all business profiles and personal profiles of leadership teams for successful B2B campaigns. Some of the key details that cannot be left out include a clear description of the business or professional, a clear image of the business establishment or the person, company or personal career history, contact details, links to business websites, links to other social media channels, reviews by clients, stakeholders and industry leaders and a well-populated timeline full of relevant and thought-provoking posts.
- Custom CTAs: B2B marketers must take advantage of leveraging custom CTAs on social media business profiles to make visitors take real actions such as registering for podcasts or webinars, signing up for newsletters, downloading whitepapers, etc.
Social Influencer Marketing
Social influencers in the B2B lead generation space have evolved and now marketers focus more on thought leaders from the same industry to spread the good words. So, to amplify your brand message and generate leads you need to engage with leaders who cater to the same audience.
- Right Tools to Find Right Influencers: For finding the right thought leaders for your brand you can leverage some useful tools such as BuzzSumo, Traackr, and LinkedIn. Evaluate influencers based on their reach, content quality and traction, footprints across channels, and industry reputation.
- Rope Them in Through Engagement: The best strategy to get heard from influencers is to make thought-provoking comments on their posts, share their content with some genuine thoughts, and mention them in your posts related to similar topics. Once you get familiarised and your comments are answered or posts get their likes, you can reach out with a more personalised message, explaining why you look up to them for spreading the good word about your business.
- Collaborate on Content: At a later stage, propose to collaborate and co-create relevant content such as blog posts, and articles. Host webinars with leading influencers as co-speakers or co-hosts and start commonly hosted podcasts.
- Micro-Influencers: Instead of always focusing on high net-worth influencers with industry-wide reach, you should partner with micro-influencers with small, neat, and highly engaged followers.
Conclusion
Last but not least, an important piece of advice will be keeping a close tap on the content performance metrics like click-through rates, conversion rates, and audience engagement indicators. Leverage social media analytics tools and separate marketing tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator for keyword and hashtag performance and traction around content.