If you run a B2B business, then social media offers you a great platform to engage your audience and improve conversion. B2B is an area that’s becoming more competitive every day as businesses try to get potential customers to choose their businesses over others.
A major way that most businesses use to attract more clients is by ensuring they get Instagram followers for their business pages.
Making social media to work for your B2B business should be one of the major factors to consider to ensure you get maximum results. Here are ways you can use to target the right audience for your B2B business using social media.
1. Identify the Target Audience
Before you even seek your audience, identify them considering the following factors:
- Common values.
- Their average incomes and,
- Age groups
Considering such factors helps you see a bigger and clear picture of who your perfect customers are. Therefore, if your business provides social media services to small, mid-sized or large businesses, ensure you help them know the specific audience they should target.
You also have to consider the different social media platforms to make sure you invest in the right and most efficient one.
For you to do that, you need to do some research on the different platforms and how they can help you target your audience. You, however, don’t have to worry as you will learn about the best social media sites to use, later in this article. So, keep reading.
2. Survey the Customers
Statistics might allow you to see the outside picture of your target audience, but it’s not enough. You need more information to draw the exact portrait of your buyers’ persona. Therefore, to get all the information, ask people the most appropriate questions.
The best way to do that is to survey your customers. Doing so helps you find out the social networks they prefer and why. Getting such information from your existing customers helps you know which sites to use and which ones to avoid.
3. Determine the Size of Your Target Audience
Facebook ads are not only about promotions, but you can also use them to get data about your audience and its size. For instance, if you’re targeting women and men in New York who are interested in social media marketing, you will find out that approximately 240,000 people, especially on Facebook, match with that audience.
If you are dealing with a large audience, you need to narrow it down to get a fewer number to make the targeting more efficient.
4. Give It Some Time to Ensure You Get It Right
One crucial thing that a lot of B2B businesses don’t really understand is that they need to give it time for it to work. Ensure you don’t spend a lot of time every week checking if you’ll see some returns.
Make sure you sacrifice some time to stay on social media to build relationships with the potential customers you’re trying to target. Also, do co-marketing. As this B2B marketing strategy explains, this involves working with one or more companies towards a mutual brand boost.
Spending time on social media leads to better results. However, you also need to make a plan on how to do that. So, you might also need to set up a dedicated team purposely for that.
5. Exploit the Different Content Formats for Your Audience
B2B sales involve a lot of engaging with the target audience. It’s unfortunate that most B2B businesses today don’t have any real diversity in coming up with content. Being unable to create good content is a major problem as it makes you hit only a small portion of your target audience.
You have to appeal to everyone in the market to be unique and competitive enough.
The market has different kinds of people, which mean that their taste in content also varies. Therefore, you need to make sure that you use different types of content in your marketing strategy.
Your B2B content should be available in different forms like visual, audio and written. Video marketing is the most popular form right now as its use is increasing exponentially.
6. Focus More on Building Relationships
Social media typically feels and looks like a sales platform, but it’s actually more than that. Building stable relationships before you get to the buying stage makes the process easier and faster.
Most highly ranked B2B companies don’t spend the most time thinking of how they can sell their goods and services on social media.
Instead, these companies think of how they’ll spend their time building strong relationships with their prospects on sites like Instagram and Twitter.
It is very crucial for you to build a good relationship as it’s a major way and the secret to getting more leads in this modern age.
Most B2B buyers need to see that you care about your company’s performance before they can buy from you.
You have to remember that it can take you over ten brand touches before you finally secure a sale. A lot of companies today don’t take enough time to build relationships as they should hence end up giving up quickly, and finally leaving when they should have spent more time focusing on achieving a better relationship with their prospects.
7. Use Paid Options
Many people don’t consider paid options when targeting their prospect customers. I case you don’t know; there are paid options that are available in sites such as Instagram and Facebook and can be quite useful in reaching a broad audience.
Understand the big learning curve that Instagram and Facebook have since they are networks with lots of competitors is significant.
The results might not be much at the beginning but ensure you set a budget aside first for testing that strategy.
Job title targeting is probably the most helpful in Facebook B2B advertising. Why? It’s the most beneficial because it allows you to search for anything you want from farming to recruitment.
Facebook also gives you recommendations, and you can see the size of your audiences for the fields you’ve chosen in particular.
There are billions of Facebook and Instagram users. You can tap into that vast pool of people, and get Instagram followers who can turn to active customers of your business.
8. Target Audience on Linked In
LinkedIn has a great campaign manager that’s easy to use and very advanced, which makes it a perfect tool for your B2B ads. So, you can use LinkedIn to target certain demographics, then exclude or include other factors to make your target audience a little more specific.
9. Don’t Be ‘Salesy’
Most promotional posts are usually about special offers and discounts. It is therefore easy to seem like you’re more focused on selling your products without really caring about anything else.
The best way to avoid creating that impression is by using webinars, news and other types of content that leads your potential customers to your page without looking ‘salesy’.
10. Use Visual Quotes in Your Social Media Pages
If you are using engagement posts and ads to advertise your B2B business, people are more likely to notice the text you accompany with a picture.
When potential customers see a picture in your post, the writing on the picture determines if they’ll continue reading your post.
You can use visual posts in your social media pages to motivate people, and as they feel aspired, they just might end up being your customers.
Audience targeting is very crucial for every B2B business. Therefore, ensuring you use social media to do it correctly can yield you great results. Additionally, building a great site will play a crucial role in keeping them.
For instance, if you are making an online course on WordPress, then you should consider using many helpful plugins that are available online.
Image sources
- www.shanebarker.com
- www.business2community.com
- www.lyfemarketing.com
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