How to create a compelling social media content Strategy for B2B lead generation?

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.  

How to leverage AI for effective marketing campaigns?

Digital marketing has become so much of a level-playing field, that marketers often struggle to find creative ways to beat the competition. Every trick is tried and tested and no channel is left open for new experiments. With this overwhelming cacophony all around, marketers’ search for uncontested space often becomes a futile exercise. 

If as a marketing strategist, you are having a similar experience, AI-enabled marketing can bring you some good news. But remember, you are not alone and AI has already made deep inroads into marketing. But even while the field is leveled for all marketers to grab AI opportunities, they enjoy the more creative scope to make their voices heard. There is more scope for personalization than ever before and you can do a lot more with the same marketing resources. 

But how to leverage this AI opportunity to the favor of your marketing campaigns? Let’s explain. 

Define what you want to achieve

Do you have a clear idea of what extra you want to achieve by leveraging AI into your marketing campaigns? If not, you may not reap the right advantages and may not see any significant change in your marketing output. You must begin with a clear assessment of the gaps and shortcomings and the ways you can turn things around by leveraging AI tools. This assessment should be followed by setting up precise metrics and KPIs for evaluating the results. 

What marketers want to achieve by integrating AI into their campaigns, may vary. Common goals for most marketers may include the following: 

• Enhanced ROI: Figure out the extra leads or business conversion the use of AI tools can deliver through marketing outreach. 
• Optimizing brand traction: Figure out how much extra traffic, additional session time, and customer interactions your brand can get across channels by leveraging AI. 
• Agile & data-driven decisions: How far AI can help in agile and real-time decision making through data-driven actionable insights, you need to assess.  

Establish critical metrics & KPIs

Once you have figured out the above objectives, you need to set specific metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for evaluating the achievements against the set goals. Here are some important things for setting relevant KPIs. 

• Specific & measurable: You need to specify the desired progress in precise and measurable numerical terms. For example, you want a 30% increase in lead generation from email campaigns. 
• Achievable: Don’t go overboard when setting goals. Make sure the target remains tuned to the baseline figures and sounds realistic. For instance, when your website gets a mere 2% month-on-month increase in traffic, you cannot set a new target of 15% just because you are using AI.
• Deadline-bound: You can only measure your achievements against your goal when you have a deadline. For instance, you want a 20% increase in website traffic within the next 3 months. 
• Fix priorities: Last but not least is the need to set your priorities right when chasing a goal and measuring your achievements with the right KPIs. This is particularly important when you have simultaneous goals and corresponding KPIs. 

AI-powered personalization at Scale

How does your content, pitch, and presentation resonate with the target audience on a personal level? This has become a key determinant for marketing success. But despite the rigorous focus on personalization, at times marketers end up generalizing things. This is where AI can play a crucial role by curating your marketing approach based on individual customer data. 

Moreover, thanks to AI personalization doesn’t necessarily limit your scope to reach out to a large number of people. It allows you to scale your outreach without compromising on personalization. For example, using AI you can shoot thousands of personalized emails in one go.  

By leveraging AI you can also ensure dynamic personalisation of the end user experience. For example, the content flow of a landing page can dynamically change with specific user preferences. AI tools based on user behavior and intent can dynamically change the webpage content and send messages or emails. The way product recommendation engines in e-commerce websites change featured product catalogs based on user intent or browsing behavior, AI can bring the same dynamism to website content or personalized messaging. 

AI-enabled automation in Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

AI by automating the vast majority of routine tasks can improve customer interactions. Besides personalized messaging based on customer data, AI can completely eradicate human errors and bring agility to the CRM processes through auto-scheduling and auto-adjustment of communication based on customer interactions and preferences. AI tools can also help marketers detect unhappy customers and corresponding pain points and ensure proactive actions for enhanced customer retention. 

Last but not least, AI-enablement can help businesses garner more relevant customer insights for creating more effective strategies. AI by analyzing all facets of customer interactions across touchpoints like web browsing, in-app interactions, emails, chats, and calls, can provide a detailed view of customer intents, sentiments, and preferences. 

AI-enabled customer support 

Conversational AI, particularly customer support chatbots and virtual assistants has helped countless organizations to deliver prompt assistance to customers. Built with natural language processing (NLP) and neural network systems, these bots are capable of deciphering human language nuances to understand customer intent, pain points, and preferences more precisely to deliver more personalized and context-aware support and assistance. 

AI-enabled content marketing 

Let’s be honest about the fact that we all use AI tools to various degrees for content creation. Though fully AI-generated content still lacks the strength of human storytelling and interactive narrative, 

AI tools still can reduce the burden of writers for creating outlines, doing quick research, and pulling out a lot of relevant information together. Human skills coupled with this heavy-loading capability of AI can help scale up content outreach initiatives. 

Besides content generation, AI can also make your content rank higher in search engine results. There are AI tools like Zyro that can detect areas where your content lacks SEO attributes and can help you with remedies. HubSpot offers AI tools that can write the most compelling blog titles and meta descriptions for the best search engine ranking results.  

Media purchase and Ad placement

Knowing media channels where your ads can generate the highest traction is key to the success of ad campaigns. Now AI-enabled programmatic advertising by leveraging machine learning algorithms is making this happen. Advertisers in real time can now buy or sell ads through auctions based on their target audience and ad spending budget. The AI-enabled auction system places their bids automatically when these criteria are met. This streamlines the media buying and ad placement processes ensuring more accuracy. 

AI tools are also helping advertisers to dynamically adjust their ad spending based on audience behavior, engagement, and interactions. These tools are also helping marketers and advertisers to segment audiences more accurately based on demographic, financial, cultural, and behavioral data and individual user engagement data. 

Conclusion

Just as the invention of electric bulbs not only offered an innovative way to dispel darkness but almost paved the way for all forthcoming scientific milestones, AI is going to transform almost every human endeavor. The digital marketing space remains at the forefront of encountering AI-enabled transformation. As a marketer, you simply have no option but to leverage the AI for all your campaigns and tasks. 

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