Social media isn’t just for duck-faced selfies. In fact, social media can be a valuable tool for B2B companies.

Fifty-five percent of B2B buyers search for product and vendor information on social media. And if you’re not there, they’re going to find your competition instead of you.

You’re probably not going to be able to pull a prospect all the way down your sales funnel with just social media. But it’s a valuable tool for distributing your content and promoting your business and product/solutions.

Like any other B2B marketing effort, though, you have to do it right, or you’re just wasting your time and money. So here are a baker’s dozen tips to help you maximize your B2B social media marketing efforts.

Tips for B2B Social Media

1. Post where your audience is. The first step is to choose the right social platform, the one(s) your prospects use. It’s best to start with one platform and focus your efforts on that one, and then add more as you build up your content base.
2. Study your audience demographics and develop an audience persona to help you write content specific to its pain points.
3. Continuously be adding content to your website so you have items to promote on social media. Make sure that each piece of new content offers something of value for the audience, and then play up that value element in your social media posts.
4. Remember, it’s not all about you. Sure, you want to promote your new white paper, but when you promote it, talk about why your audience would want to know about it. In all cases, think about how you can make the post about those personas you created.
5. Bring something new and different to the conversation. Get creative not only with your social media posts, but also with the content that feeds those posts. You want to stand apart from your competition, and the way to do that is by being different. 
6. Connect with or follow your prospects. Listen to what they post. Monitor what content they consume, what they share, and how they engage with brands and people. You might even be able to glean some pain points they’re experiencing.
7. Which leads us to this next point: Don’t simply follow or connect with them. Engage with them. When they ask a question of their community, try to answer. When they express frustration with a pain point, try to offer a solution.
8. Engage with your followers, as well. Respond when someone comments on your posts. Ask thought-provoking, relevant questions as a way to get them to interact with you. Follow trending hashtags in your industry; identify groups of industry experts and thought leaders; participate in conversations. That’s a great way to grow your social media community.
9. Join the social media conversation during events such as trade shows—even if you’re not there. If you use the correct hashtags, you’ll be seen even by people who aren’t connected or following you, and if they like what you have to say, maybe they’ll start following you.
10. Incorporate video to mix things up.
11. Try paid social media. That can allow you to talk to targeted prospects who aren’t in your connected community. And with PPC advertising, this approach can be surprisingly affordable.
12. Be sure to align your social media posts with sales and other internal teams, so that you’re all pushing in the same direction.
13. Track, measure, and optimize your efforts.

Become a Part of the Conversation

Social media is a part of everyday life for most people. And with a little savviness and plenty of effort, you can use that to your advantage when marketing your B2B product/solution.

If you need help creating content or managing your social media personality, let us know. BayCreative, a full-service marketing firm in San Francisco, has a team of writers who specialize in writing compelling B2B content that can drive any social media campaign. Or, if maintaining this level of social media vigilance seems too taxing on your internal resources, we can handle your social media efforts. 

Just let us know how we can help.

All the best,
- Team BayCreative -

Remember Ray Walston's character as the uptight history teacher in the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High?  He stands at the front of the class, reciting dry facts. 

Don’t be like that guy—and don’t let your audience be like these bored students. Even in a business environment, this type of dry, information-only approach doesn’t work for training sales teams and channel partners, guiding customers through smooth on-boarding, or showing prospects how to solve a problem.

If the approach you take when creating content for your B2B eLearning tutorials is a dry recitation of the processes, your audience will retain just as much information as Jeff Spicoli did that day in class. 

The result: you’ve wasted your time building the content, wasted the audience members’ time because they’ll leave just as uninformed as they entered the training, and wasted customer service representatives’ time because they’ll be forced to deal with customers and partners who are unaware of how to deploy, onboard, or use the solution.

When creating content for eLearning purposes, think back to your childhood. Just as children’s tales teach valuable life lessons with compelling stories that help children retain the story and its message, engaging stories set in the workplace can be a powerful teaching tool.

Study after study has shown that telling a story helps the audience retain more of what they’re being told. Not to mention it captures their attention and keeps them engaged. For business eTraining and eLearning situations, this means that if you can tie the lesson to a relatable business objective that resonates with the challenges the learners might be facing, you’ll capture their attention, unpack complex ideas in a meaningful way, and help them retain the information better. 

How To Build Content for B2B eLearning Programs

Training content should start with a clearly defined statement of what the audience will learn and how learning that will benefit them—otherwise, they may not care to engage in the first place. Think of that as your pitch to them. Then build the content of the course around a scenario that relates to the pain points the audience may be experiencing.

Give the content a narrative arc—a beginning, middle, and end. Introduce a main character, someone the audience would recognize from their own workday, and present his/her obstacle. Walk the audience through the problem. As you do so, be sure to relate what’s happening with the protagonist back to the learner. That shifts audience members from passive observers to active participants.

Then move on to how the protagonist solves this problem, which would be by doing what they need to with your solution to solve their pain points. Show the best practices that got him/her the desired results, and show the benefits they get from it. Conclude with a summarization of what was learned.

Include a mix of engaging text, graphics, and video, if appropriate. But be careful: You want your content to be engaging but not superfluous. Only use text, graphics, and video that support the course, and stay narrowly on that path. Don’t add needless side trips that distract from the lesson.

And remember, eLearning offers the opportunity for interactive elements. Hopeful, you get more response than that poor economics teacher.

Does Laying the Foundation Seem Like a Lot of Work? Fear Not!

By building a narrative arc into your eLearning and eTraining content, you create stories that will engage with the audience and help them remember what they learned—and what they need to do going forward. 

But creating the content for B2B training takes a lot of upfront work.

That’s where BayCreative can help. We have experts who can guide you through the process, or even take on most of the course creation themselves. If you think it might be time to take create more engaging eContent, let us know.

All the best,
- Team BayCreative -

BayCreative talks to our clients quite a bit about thought leadership. But what exactly is thought leadership, and why is that important to your B2B marketing efforts? Read on, and we’ll explain.

B2B Thought Leadership Is …

An industry “thought leader” is somebody or some company that has demonstrated knowledge of the real problems and issues plaguing their industry and have suggested solutions to those problems. You offer those examinations and solutions in free content such as white papers, presentation decks, eBooks, infographics, webinars, and videos.

Even if your suggestions aren’t universally agreed to be the best solutions, the fact that you homed in on a real problem shows that you’re plugged into the industry and the community in your industry. (Note: This only holds up if you are examining real problems, not “problems” that you’re making up to fit your product/solution.)

Just that demonstration of industry knowledge makes you credible in the eyes of those inside and outside the industry. They’ll come to trust you—as long as the thought knowledge demonstration isn’t accompanied by overt sales pitches—and that trust will transfer to your product or solution, which can help sell it when the time comes.

The Benefits of B2B Thought Leadership Content

The B2B decision-making process is complex and lengthy, with a lot of people involved. That’s another reason why thought leadership pieces are so important. When you lay out the problem and solution in a non-biased, non-salesy way that everybody involved in the process can understand and relate to, you help them gain alignment with each other, potentially hastening the buying process.

A study by Edelman and LinkedIn found that thought leadership has meaningful impact on attracting RFP invitations, creating preference with buyers, and directly contributing to increased sales. It also revealed:

• Decision-makers value timeliness and relevance of thought leadership content more than pure originality of ideas.
• However, poor-quality thought leadership piece can directly lead to lost business opportunities.
• A majority of decision-makers are disappointed in the quality of available thought leadership.

So it’s important that your thought leadership pieces speak to a real problem in the industry; offer solid, credible data to support your statements; and offer an innovative, relevant solution to the problem being discussed.

You Can Be A Leader in Thought Leadership

Whatever formats you choose for your thought leadership pieces, they’re well worth your investment. In the competitive B2B marketplace, any advantage you can gain is important.

At BayCreative, we’ve produced numerous white papers, presentation decks, eBooks, infographics and videos that demonstrate our clients’ thought leadership. And we can help you do so, too. Just let us know when you're ready to speak up.