As you will know, marketing to customers online is a very different prospect to marketing to businesses. This is particularly the case when using social media as a tool, which around 87% of B2B marketers (at least in the U.S.) are doing.
When marketing to customers through social media, signs of engagement such as Facebook likes and re-tweets often convert into new customers, sales or even a measureable return on investment (ROI). It just doesn’t work the same way with B2B social media marketing, so you need a proper strategy and the right tools to run successful campaigns, track their progress and achieve your ultimate goal – to win high-value new business customers.
4 rules to manage and track B2B social media marketing campaigns
Managing and tracking a social media marketing campaign for B2B customers can be a complicated business, but here are 4 sound rules to base your plans on:
- Set clear, realistic and measurable KPIs. The only way to track what’s working well with B2B marketing and which campaigns are underperforming is to set yourself Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Just as importantly, make sure you have a scientific and accurate way of measuring them.
- Compare CLV to marketing spend. In order to work out the ROI of your digital marketing efforts, it can be useful to work out the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) of each customer. This is the amount of revenue each customer generates for your company during the whole period of time they buy your services or products, broken down to get an average monthly figure. You can use this to determine how much you need to spend each month to win that customer’s business. The total spend will differ from case to case, but you can use your previous records to get at least rough figures and work out what represents a good ROI – this will help you to set your marketing budget.
- Forget about quantity of followers – it’s all about the quality. Acquiring tens of thousands of followers may seem like a top priority, but this won’t help you to generate leads or win new business customers. It also isn’t likely to impress potential customers. What you need are relevant, high quality contacts that are actually likely to become customers (or be in touch with other businesses that will).
- Categorise your customers and take a targeted approach. A useful tip from Business2Community, along with making use of marketing automation tools, is to segment your customers and take a targeted approach with each. Not all of your business customers will be interested in all of your social media content, and they may not all be ready to buy either. You need to gather as much data about each customer as possible, so you can categorise them with other like-minded customers and provide a similar marketing approach.
 These rules are just a handful of the best practices used by social media marketers to win high-value business customers – but what other rules do you swear by? For you, what’s the key to success in B2B digital marketing?
