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Do you struggle to motivate your team to engage with your company’s social media?

Sometimes it can feel like a chore, always asking for social engagement.

Many of the top B2B marketing publications commonly mention “employee engagement” as a key tool for growing a social media presence and displaying company culture.

It is true that employees are your biggest advocates.

They should be on the front lines: selling, helping customers, and developing your services/products.

But what if we told you there is an untapped value when it comes to employee engagement?

When was the last time you shared an employee shoutout or a behind-the-scenes video of the team?

Why Employee Engagement Benefits You As Marketer: 

Did you know, employees are more likely to like, comment, and share posts that include themselves and/or other team members?

Sharing this type of content is the true value of employee engagement, which can spike your awareness and engagement rates.

Make employee engagement work for your team by incorporating more photos of your employees/teams and behind-the-scenes content.

Try some employee-curated content like photos/videos/blogs written or produced by different team members.

 Here Are 5 Ways You Can Incentivize Employee Engagement:

1. Lead by Example: Encourage your team to engage with social media by having a select number of leadership team members engaging (liking, commenting, sharing) with your company’s social media posts. When posting about your team or about relevant topics – tag other employees that have public profiles.
   
2. Incentive Programs: Incentivize employees to submit content (photos/videos) for social media. This could be used if you’re having a difficult time collecting employee-curated content. Example: Gifting a $10 Starbucks gift card to anyone that sends your social media team a photo or video from the work conference they attended.
   
3. Employee Curated Content: Give employees credit on social media if they authored a company blog. Or when industry “breaking news” happens, ask an employee’s opinion (written or video) and credit them.
   
4. Share Accomplishments: Share photos/graphics/videos of employees when they win awards. Share milestones of years of service with the company. Anything related to their work life that celebrates them and their achievements is fair game and highly shareable.
   
5. Fun Contests: This can be almost anything; a pumpkin carving contest, gingerbread house contest, a paper airplane-throwing contest. Document and share your employees enjoying their time and working together. Take it a step further by asking your social media following to vote on a winner. 

Baby Steps to Success:

Whenever you ask employees to be involved in social media, it is possible that you’ll receive some push back or resistance.

Start slow, find a few employees that embrace social media, and begin with them.

Sharing employee-related content is just one piece of a solid social media strategy.

Test and validate, and find what works for your company and team.

Most companies who have a strong social media presence have been working on it for years. It will take time, but the benefits pay off.

If you want help with social media strategy for your company, give us a shout.

Marketers love terms like pain points, validation, social proof — to name a few.

However, we consistently see B2B marketing using tactics based on the idea that “B2B buyers make rational, emotionless decisions.”

Here are our top three B2B marketing falsehoods.

1. B2B marketing is rational.

If you think a B2B service/product is just a solution to complete a necessary job — you couldn’t be more wrong.

Buyers aren’t strictly interested in the rational benefits of your solution. Instead, they are interested in what the services will make them feel.

Will it make them feel better about making difficult decisions? Will it give them confidence that they are staying ahead of the pack? The emotional benefit provided by your solution needs to be addressed.

You can’t set it and forget it.

B2B marketing is not rational, and emotion is involved throughout the process.

2. B2B marketing is not financially emotional for the buyers.

Another lie we strongly disagree with is that B2B buyers aren’t spending their own money, so closing a sale is more manageable. This is a common falsehood.

B2B services and products typically have large price tags — the type of price tags that can get people, or whole departments fired if an uninformed choice is made.

Despite the fact that it might not be their own money, most decision-makers do truly want to make the best choice possible for their company, with the best ROI.

With that being said, it is a very emotional process with multiple stakeholders involved. Each stakeholder has human emotions that need to be addressed throughout the marketing and sales process. Money always comes first, with feelings and egos.

3. B2B marketing is easy.

B2B marketing is challenging in the best ways possible, but it is not easy.

If your product or service doesn’t interest you, it won’t interest them.

Gone are the days of “necessity” and the thought process that “someone needs my B2B solutions, so I just need to make them aware we exist.”

B2B creativity and competitiveness are at an all-time high.

If this is all familiar to you, and you agree with all the items above, that is awesome!

We are here and ready to help your team take your B2B marketing to the next level.

Request our free B2B social media audit and see how your social media presence stacks up.

Prior to planning out your social media strategy, it’s important to first understand where social media fits into your sales and marketing process. Once you visualize this, you will bring more purpose to your posting.

“When we do Influence Marketing well, we widen the funnel at the top.”  – Anonymous

Social media is a tool to increase awareness and influence of your company and brand. And when you play to this strength, you can load up the top of your sales funnel with potential new leads.

In the sales funnel above you can see social media fits well at the very top under the Awareness stage. The Awareness stage is where “strangers” (or your target audience) are first introduced to your company. Where they receive their first impression of you. Tools under the Awareness stage can include: Google searches, SEO, web pages, blogs, and social media. 

From the first awareness (or subsequent), you drive your target audience into the second stage of the sales funnel, or the Consideration stage. Driving people from only “seeing” your content to engaging with it and seeking more.

The B2B Social Media Strategy

Now you can map out your social media strategy to fit the journey your potential leads (target audience) take from not knowing your brand to their first awareness on social media and into consideration of your product/service. 

Below is an outline of the B2B strategy that we use for our clients and have found success in. Spend some time brainstorming and outlining each section. If you have any questions or need assistance, please reach out. 

Blueprint

The blueprint sets the foundation for your social media. It identifies who you are, who your target audience is, and how you will be speaking to your target audience on social media. You will want to…

» Identify who you are and what you provide to clients.

» Identify who your target audience is on social media. 

» Identify your brand’s voice and tone for social media.

» Identify the specific pain points your target audience is experiencing.

Posting Strategy

The posting strategy outlines the specifics to the day-to-day operations of your social media accounts. As a team you will need to decide upfront…

» What you want to accomplish on social media (your goals/objectives).

» What social media platforms will work best to reach your target audience and achieve your goals.

» How often you will be posting on each social media platform.

» What type of content you will be posting on your social media accounts.

Content Strategy

The content strategy dives into the plan for reaching your target audience on each of your designated social media platforms. By using your messaging and content and keeping your goals in mind…

» Lay out the “big idea” for each social media platform.

» Lay out which type of posts will be published on each social media platform.

» List the KPIs (key performance indicators) for each social media platform.

Hashtags

Do the hashtag research. Each social network’s hashtags differ, so you’ll want to lay out your industry hashtags ahead of time for each social network you will be posting on. You’ll want to…

» Research the popular industry hashtags being used on each social media platform.

» Research the fastest growing industry hashtags on each social media platform.

» Research location based hashtags that are related to your business.

» Research some general popular hashtags that fit well into your social media strategy.

Industry Influencers

Industry influencers are people or companies who are the experts and industry leaders in your business field. Knowing who your industry influencers are can help you stay in the know, add expert content to your social media strategy, allow you to engage with them on social media, and advertise to their followers. 

» List out the industry influencers your company can connect with.

» List the social media networks of each industry influencer.

Paid Advertising

Social media is a pay-to-play environment. Social media platforms like Facebook utilize the willingness to pay for ads as a determining factor between an actual business account and spam account. Having a plan for consistent monthly advertising spend will help to play towards the social networks algorithms and help to boost your overall monthly analytics. You will need to decide…

» What is your monthly budget?

» What will be your campaign objectives?

» What type of content will you promote each month?

» How long will your campaigns run for?

KPIs

When you set a goal, it is important to follow it up with trackable KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Avoid falling prey to vanity metrics and lay out your social media KPIs in advance. Here are some common B2B KPIs…

» Impressions – the total number of people who had the opportunity to see your content in their News Feeds.

» Clicks – the number of times people clicked on your content to engage with it.

» Outbound Clicks – the number of times people clicked to a blog or landing page.

» Engagement Rate – the total number of engagements divided by the total number of impressions.

» Leads – the number of new contacts, forms submissions, downloads, etc.

Request Your Audit

When it comes to social media, building a strategy is essential. It should serve as the foundation to everything you communicate about your business across platforms. A successful strategy should:

• Explain your “why”—the reason you’re even using social media
• Describe your target audience, which will help guide every social media decision
• Establish key objectives and map out your “how” so you can begin measuring success
• Ensure you know whether you dollars are being put to good use

The bottom line: You should always know the “why” to every single post or ad campaign across your social media accounts and be able to explain the greater goal each is working to accomplish.

If you cannot, you are wasting time and money because you have no way to measure whether or not your marketing has been successful.

Let’s repeat that.

If you don’t know the strategy behind your social media posts, you aren’t marketing.

You are posting and praying something works.

In order to avoid the “posting and praying” trap, here are 5 steps to developing a successful social media strategy:

1. Start with the “blueprint” of your business

Begin by laying out the most important features of your brand—elements that are necessary to weave into your social media strategy. Nick Westergaard, author of Get Scrappy, Smarter Digital Marketing for Business Big and Small, describes this as defining your brand and how you will tell your story online. “You can’t always see your brand, but it’s what the rest of your work stands on.”

Important features include:

• Know your target audience (Be specific. Utilize Facebook ad categories to help)
• Define what makes your business/brand unique
• Map out your brand story
• Describe your brand personality and voice
• Define your brand visuals

2. Map out your social media plan

Asking questions is the key to mapping out your plan. Begin with asking the why, what, where, when, who and how.

• Why are you even using social media?
• What is your objective, and what are you expecting as a return on investment? Are you looking to increase brand awareness, discover new leads, provide customer service? What social media networks and content can help you reach your goals?
• Where will the action steps take place?
• When will they take place?
• How will you implement them?
• Who is going to do it?

These questions might be tough and take some time to figure out, but answering them will help clearly define the work that needs to be done and who is expected to accomplish it.

3. Understand no two social media platforms are the same

Every social media network is different and contains its own best practices for marketing. It’s important to understand each in order to map out how you can use it to reach your goals.

Decide on your objectives for each social network in terms of reaching and interacting with your target audience. For example, how are you going to use Instagram to achieve your social media objectives? Will you use Facebook, or LinkedIn, or any other social media network differently? Using each social network in a way that matches best practices will help you clearly define and measure whether or not you’re reaching your goals.

4. Map content to your yearly sales cycle

Every business has a sales cycle, which includes seasons and trends. What are yours?

It’s helpful to take a step back and review how your social media content could align with specific seasons and trends. What are your potential customers thinking about during specific times of year? Can you match your sales trends with topics to use on social media?

For example, a landscaping company is looking to book summer lawn care packages when the snow is starting to melt. Or a retail shop is gearing up for the holiday season in the fall. Match your sales trends with potential content and call-to-actions in your strategy. You will use this later when building out your monthly content calendar.

5. Plan on paid advertising

Social media is pay-to-play. The days of reaching your customers organically (free) are over. The research is clear. It’s a foregone conclusion across social media news networks.

But that doesn’t mean you should jump off Facebook or other social networks. It means you have to step up your money spend. Determine what that looks like for your business. What can you spend monthly? What content should you promote on which networks?

The importance of paid advertising makes having a strategy even more important because it allows you to be strategic from the beginning, ensuring you’re not wasting money in places that make no sense for your audience and goals. When looking at how to use your advertising dollars, refer back to your goals. How can you accomplish them through paid advertising? Can you establish monthly, quarterly, yearly campaigns with a corresponding budget? Map out what that looks like for your company.