B2B Social Media Marketing: Common Mistakes And Pitfalls

Let's talk about the nuances of B2B social media marketing: common mistakes, expectations and effective promotion strategy.

What do we know about social media marketing? This is a great tool for generating new leads, interacting and building communication and relationships with potential customers. This is the place where you warm up your leads. Social tools help you raise brand recognition, increase your market reach, build brand reputation and customer loyalty. Therefore, a comprehensive social media strategy will definitely make a positive impact on your business and sales.

B2B are B2C social media marketing are completely different. Many B2B owners are still skeptical of the benefits of social media channel for their business. But even if they take it seriously, many of them make a crucial mistake by applying B2C social media strategy to B2B brands. But it doesn’t work.

Why? Because of the wrong approach and attracting the wrong professionals. Behind every business are real people.

Let’s start with basic blunders and how you can do it better.

• Entrepreneurs overestimate their own marketing competence

We can see how the Dunning-Kruger effect works. Entrepreneurs sometimes overestimate their own competence. They believe that marketing strategy is easy to master, and when it comes to social media – all you need is to find a social media specialist who is able to craft short, emotional and beautifully-looking posts. Wrong decisions result in poor performance. In reality, marketing is among the most difficult majors, and you should use professional approach when dealing with social channels.

• Avoid the B2C marketing approach. Emotional posts with beautifully designed visuals do NOT generate leads for B2B brands.

The reason for this mistake is fundamental difference in B2C and B2B business strategy. B2C marketing appeals to people’s hearts and triggers impulse purchases, while B2B marketing appeals to heads and focuses on logic-driven purchasing. For B2B companies, social channels are more about meaningful interaction and sharing of expertise including helpful industry articles, news, videos, and more. The focus should be on adding value and offering solutions to problems.

I happened to have an access to website analytics of a couple of companies. Their social media pages were visually great and regularly updated. Moreover, their accounts were managed by external agencies. But in fact, they had poor social traffic that was not converting. These brands were wasting money on something that did not work. Why did not work? Because of the wrong promoting approach, wrong messaging and wrong professionals dealing with their social channels.

The truth is that with an advertising tool, you can even get a million followers on your social media but with zero effect on your business. Chasing fans leads to attracting the wrong audience. Instead, focus on acquiring highly relevant leads. You need to know that no more than 4% of your followers will see any of your Facebook posts organically. And the more fans you have, the more likely you are to get a lot of random strangers who aren't interested in what you have to offer.

Stop chasing after followers. Relevant content and smart targeting will help you reach your prospects.

• Lacking content strategy and posting inconsistently

Your content strategy determines whether your social media marketing is going to work. Write expert, engaging content and schedule social media posts. Stay consistent. It is very important to keep the monthly/weekly posting schedule.

• Ignoring visuals

Visuals increase engagement. Visual content is important not only for building and shaping the brand image. When it comes to social media, content with relevant images gets 94% more views, likes and comments than content without relevant images. This is because the right picture grabs social media users.

• Avoid becoming a channel for broadcasting marketing messages

Lots of businesses consider social networks as a channel for broadcasting their marketing messages. It’s a common mistake as people trust people and without trust you have nothing. Social networks are for communication, not for broadcasting slogans. Learn what your customers value and need, and build authentic relationships.

• Ignoring interactions

Thinking about how to create B2B social media content that will convert? It would be unrealistic to expect that just posting on social media will get you new customers. Build your audience through interaction. Be social. Try to immediately respond to messages and comments from network users. Engage with your community on industry-specific social networking groups.

Interaction in social networks can be a tricky yet powerful tool. This was proven by my experience when a negative comment from a former client on LinkedIn helped us gain several leads from top companies. With intelligent dialogue, acknowledgement of past mistakes and providing evidence of new effective solutions I was able to turn the situation around and transform the negativity into positivity. Eventually, even that same client came back to us as the seed of interest was planted.

• When used separately, expert social media content does not work to its full capacity

• YouTube pitfalls

Having a YouTube channel? Targeting ads for your videos? A common mistake is to evaluate the result by the total number of views. In most cases, those thousands of views are just random video clicks. The duration of 90% of such views does not exceed 3-10 seconds. Yes, just seconds. Engagement is the main indicator of the effectiveness of YouTube videos (duration of views, comments, likes and reposts). You're wasting your money if your videos only get a few likes. This is either due to poor targeting or irrelevant video content that doesn't appeal to your potential customers. Remember that the right approach to the YouTube channel will definitely have a positive impact on the image and reputation of your brand.

• Not paying attention to analytics

Tracking analytics metrics is an essential part of any social media marketing strategy. Only analytics tools will show you if your social media marketing is working. Use built-in social media analytics to measure social media performance and Google Analytics to monitor social media traffic and conversions on your website.

• Wasting money on external agencies and B2C social media marketers

As you know, B2C professionals appeal to emotions and impulse purchases. This approach is totally inappropriate for the B2B community. As for external agencies, they do not have enough authority and time to dive deep into your market and your company in order to succeed. But in the B2B world, social media marketing requires a deeper understanding of business niche and the company itself. Social media marketers need to research your target audience, their needs and behavior, on the industry social groups and communities, and your competitors. They need to know about the positioning and messaging of your company, as well as the nuances of communicating with a specific audience. What's more, they need access to your business activities to create professional content on a regular basis. Too much for those who are not your internal marketers.

For example, your target audiences are business owners and top managers. You need to identify their pain point and provide solutions to their problems. Your prospects will not engage with the B2C content. Even if you’re posting business articles taken from the Internet from time to time, you will be losing traffic and leads because the whole social content strategy is wrong. If you sell logistics software, your social media marketer should have at least basic knowledge of IT and logistics. If you’re trying to reach everyone, you’re going to reach no one. And moreover, you need a professional who understands the goals, objectives and specifics of your business in order to be able to generate professional content. This applies to website content, blogging and social media. This is kind of digital PR.

• Expecting instant results

B2B social media requires patience and time to build trust and relationships with the community. Results often take time to show up. Clicking on an ad or reading one of your posts is unlikely to get your prospect to submit a request. Please note, that B2B purchases are not emotional and spontaneous and the decision is often made by the team. Anyway, social media is the perfect tool to warm up your potential customers. People view your posts, analyze information, make research on your company, consult with colleagues before making a decision. This is a typical marketing funnel that has four stages: awareness, interest, desire, and action. It takes a while for your B2B prospect to take action. Therefore, your postings and interactions in the target community should be regular.

You can find various social media auto posting platforms that allow you to automatically post from your blog to social media. For example, HubSpot offers a social media tool to help you post and track your content. In addition, the HubSpot Blog provides tutorials and helpful marketing tips on how to create and publish great content. Get started!

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