The majority of business-to-business social media content does not generate any actual sales revenue for the company. Instead, companies are spending enormous amounts of money on meaningless engagement metrics while ignoring how to create and develop a high-quality sales pipeline with their target audience.

In enterprise environments, the sales cycle is incredibly lengthy. Per Dreamdata, the average journey for a business sale will last exactly 272 days.

You must have a clearly defined system for building trust during the entire sales cycle. This means developing a methodical and structured process for executing the steps needed to secure commitments. For this approach to work, you must implement a system to identify each daily activity, attribution model and access to the right hidden networking channels.

The following describes how to create a systematic execution engine to convert community networking opportunities into product sales conversations. As a result of learning how to create a social media strategy for B2B brands, you will have access to valuable insights about your customer's needs and preferences that can then be used to enhance the sales process.

How Business Buyers Have Changed

Your B2B social selling strategy must reflect the lack of immediacy associated with sales decisions made by business buyers. Simply put, business buyers are no longer driven by impulsive decision-making; they will conduct extensive online research into various vendors and market participants for up to several months before reaching out to you or the sales person.

One of the most important reasons for this extended research phase is that they require increased digital visibility. In fact, 60% of US marketers indicated that social media represents the single most effective channel for generating business revenue.

Therefore, your strategy must take this slow burn approach into account. Stop expecting to see immediate sales from your single generic post.

Instead, every piece of content must be created based on the specific long-term objectives of the target audience. Younger consumers have a preference for a casual, more human, and non-corporate tone in the brands they purchase from. They actively avoid using highly polished, studio-produced materials when shopping for products.

Younger consumers look to their colleagues for recommendations on what software products to purchase. In fact, current research shows that 84% of all consumers prefer to trust the recommendation from someone they know or work with, rather than from a company.

How To Create A Social Media Strategy For B2B Brands

Figuring Out Who Buys Your Product

You must create a very clear picture of your ideal customer. Then, you'll need to identify the people who make up the purchasing committee for your product.

A demand generation manager and a CFO will require different types of information.

A daily posting schedule should include posts that address the different issues, metrics, and other everyday frustrations that each role will have.

Picking the Best Platforms

LinkedIn is the most important platform to focus the majority of professional marketing on. In fact, 93% of all business marketers currently use LinkedIn for their content distribution efforts.

Because of the large amount of executive attention that is focused on this social media platform, it has been shown in several studies that 98% of Fortune 500 CEO’s list LinkedIn as their primary or only social media outlet.

However, YouTube should also be utilized because of the high volume of searches and viewing that buyers use for looking for software demonstrations and other highly detailed technical information.

In addition, other social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok need to be approached on a situational basis and evaluated against your unique industry niche. This is a critical step when mapping out how to create a social media strategy for B2B brands.

Setting Goals That Actually Make Money

There must be a connection between what you aspire to and the financial success of your business. Metrics that you may set as goals, such as growing the number of your followers or increasing the number of impressions that your pages receive, do not have a real bearing on generating revenue.

A better approach would be to develop your strategy based on the established Trust Funnel model, which enables prospects to move through distinct stages of the buying cycle from visibility, to credibility, authority, conversation, and finally pipeline.

You should therefore ensure that every metric that you measure is related to these different stages and measure the level of quality around engagement, where leads came from, and the total number of revenue that has been generated by these leads.

Building a Content Machine

Matching Content to the Buyer's Journey

You should create your content based on the specific stage of the funnel that the buyer is currently in. Top-of-funnel content establishes initial visibility using practitioner stories and general industry insights.

Middle-of-funnel content is designed to develop authority. You do this through your shared strategy frameworks, operational checklists, and specific deep-dive webinars.

Bottom-of-funnel content generates the final purchase conversation. A few examples of these types of content would be product demos that are completely transparent, detailed customer case studies, and clear user-generated content.

Writing Posts That Sell

Generic marketing advice states that the best way to engage with an audience is to share content frequently. However, if you want to create real pipeline results from your efforts, you must create a specific formula for writing your posts.

Your formula for writing high-converting posts consists of the following components: a short one-sentence hook; followed by a specific business situation or problem; followed by unique insight into that situation; by the lesson you learned; and finally a soft call-to-action.

For example, a software founder could create a post offering a 90-day execution plan outlining their most recent internal failure along with the solutions they implemented to resolve the issue. This format creates the maximum level of trust with the reader while being transparent and not sounding salesy.

Why Real Videos Work Best

As part of their social media strategy, video content has quickly become standard business marketing strategy for many companies, as evidenced by a whopping 78% of business marketers, that state that they currently use video as part of their business marketing strategies through social media.

The number of users of video continues to increase every year, as 56% of those who currently use video plan to increase their investment in video over the coming 12 months.

LinkedIn recently reported that marketers publishing video content on their network increased by 12% over last year.

Low-cost, naturally shot, short-form, real-life video captured using a smart phone are outperforming high-cost, professionally produced.

Why Customer Content Matters

Modern-day consumers trust other consumers more than they do businesses and their marketing departments. Therefore, you should include user-generated content in your overall social media strategy and posting schedule. It plays a vital role when defining how to create a social media strategy for B2B brands.

Industry reports indicate that marketers receiving the highest returns on their marketing dollars are those who rank user-generated content as one of the top three types of assets.

Genuine, documented customer reviews and observed customer usage are much more persuasive than even the most compelling marketing message.

Letting Your Team Speak For You

Growing Your Team's Voice

Employee-generated content receives a much greater organic reach than content created from a company page. Therefore, employee-generated content serves as an effective multiplier of your corporate message.

When employees share marketing documents and links to your organization, they achieve up to 200% higher click-through rates than when the same marketing messages are shared from a corporate page.

In addition, employee-generated content receives up to 700% higher engagement than content created from a corporate page.

However, simply telling your employees to create, share, and post does not work. You must create an environment where employees are willing to share their passion for your organization, by providing an extensive library of creative and relevant content to use and share, and providing examples to help them become comfortable with the process.

Following the Rules in Strict Industries

A marketing department in a regulated industry has to comply with the rules, regulations, and existing controls of their particular industry. The financial, health care, and insurance industries must implement an advocacy program that completely eliminates all legal risks.

To accomplish this, you will generate legally-cleared and pre-approved content blocks.

With tools such as Sprout Social or Hootsuite Amplify, marketing administrators can provide vetted, safe updates to internal teams.

Teaming Up With Industry Voices

Businesses are currently experiencing an enormous shift in the marketplace toward using external industry influencers. Currently, 53 percent of businesses are increasing their budget for these external influencers.

Micro-influencers can provide the most engaged audience within extremely specific industry niches. Conversely, macro-influencers have the largest audience reach, and are suited for major launches.

Another important aspect of trust-building with outsiders is podcasting. A survey indicates that 68 percent of business podcast listeners trust recommendations made by the hosts of those podcasts.

Additionally, 49 percent of these podcast listeners report taking specific action based on a relevant ad they heard during a podcast.

Hidden Groups and Private Chats

Finding the Hidden Buyers

Most of the influence over an enterprise's purchasing decisions occurs in digital locations that cannot be tracked using traditional marketing tools. This form of access is referred to as 'dark social'.

Many businesses have ongoing conversations regarding software products in private Slack groups, closed Discord servers, and direct messages on LinkedIn.

When your potential customers are referencing your links within their personal networks, and since they generally do so in private, that reference will typically arrive at your website without any tracking data.

Using Small Online Groups

If a small start-up wants to leverage these very active, niche networks, they should leverage Reddit and other private industry Slack channels, for example, to identify early adopters.

However, to leverage these niche networks, you cannot simply walk into these private spaces and try to sell your product. Those who oversee the community will terminate your account without exception.

Rather, your in-house specialists must contribute freely and unselfishly. They should be willing to respond to inquiries that are complicated and labor-intensive, and to distribute helpful information without charge, thereby establishing your reputation over time.

Asking People How They Found You

Since the dark social space cannot be accessed via software, you will need to make inquiries directly with those who purchase from you.

The easiest method of measuring the impact of hidden influencers is via a simple text box on your inbound sales forms.

You would need to ask prospective customers, "How did you hear about us?"

In some cases, prospective customers may provide you with a more precise answer by saying, "I read an article by your founder on LinkedIn," or "A colleague posted a link to your podcast in our Slack group."

In this way, you will obtain more reliable information on what actually works for your organization as you figure out how to create a social media strategy for B2B brands.

How to Track Your Social Media Strategy For B2B Brands

Adding Tracking Tags to Your Links

You cannot continue to function based on a basic growth in followers. You must establish a clear connection between what social media activity results in pipeline influence.

This requires good hygiene relative to the tracking of all possible links being shared by your organization; therefore, each and every link must include the appropriate parameters for tracking.

This standardizes your data and establishes how your internal operational systems will identify the exact source of the lead once the click on social media occurs.

Connecting Your Social Posts to Your Sales Software

To accurately reflect and demonstrate the usefulness of an organization's digital tracking system, digital activity must be fully integrated into the customer's main customer database (such as Salesforce) so that the required fields are completed at the time of form submission.

Doing this allows demand-generation managers to fully support their budget requests to the CFO. You demonstrate your impact on the sales pipeline and lower customer acquisition costs through actual metrics rather than a mere tally of likes.

Giving Credit to Every Step

Do not use broken last-click attribution models. Social media generally presents your brand to new buyers months before they ever convert.

You need to build a multi-touch attribution model. This type of framework provides the proper credit for the initial social post, to the intermediate funnel member's attendance to the webinar, all the way to the final direct Google search.

Even a very simple form that tracks engagement quality, primary lead source and total pipeline impact makes all the difference in how executives view your work.

Final Thoughts on Making Money

In order to build a B2B social media presence that drives profits, you must go far beyond vanity metrics. The data is clear that enterprise level sales cycles must utilize a strategic & systematic approach to digital distribution.

As stated previously, companies must prioritize executive thought leadership, a multi-touch attribution methodology and specific content writing methodologies that align with the buying committee's needs. Also, it is important to recognize and leverage the considerable mathematical influence that employee advocacy can have on those purchases that cannot be tracked through "dark social" channels.

Partnering up a selection of platforms with the actual behavior of your buying committee allows you to turn social media into a consistent, measurable tool to grow your revenue stream. Mastering this connection is the ultimate secret of how to create a social media strategy for B2B brands.

Frequently Asked Questions About A Social Media Strategy For B2B Brands

How long until you see the impact of your social strategy on your pipeline?

The first 90 days of an inbound demo campaign after starting business development efforts typically do not produce large numbers of inbound demo appointments from qualified sales teams. A primary objective of this initial three-month period is to develop initial baseline visibility for new inbound leads and to develop an in-house posting habit to begin testing initial content and assets.

A measurable impact on pipeline generally occurs between 4 to 6 months into the campaign because deep trust is built with your targeted primary audience during this time period. Your qualified leads begin transitioning into the middle section of your sales funnel.

What is the best method for justifying a social media budget to a CFO?

To adequately justify a financial investment for social media marketing, you will need to completely redirect your internal conversations on social media away from the discussion of engagement rates, impressions, and number of followers to the process of implementing attribution on your inbound forms that are of high value and using proper UTM parameters through your CRM systems.

When available to the finance team, present them with clear and concise reporting that identifies the number of qualified conversations, booked product demos, and won sales opportunities that originated directly from the social media channels, along with how much of those conversions were influenced by social media.

How do highly regulated industries limit employee advocacy risk?

By offering centralized content libraries for employees, finance, insurance and healthcare brands are able to alleviate the restrictive operational bottlenecks associated with operating within these heavily regulated industries.

Through the use of specialized management software, brands allow their marketing teams to write and approve post content (in advance), thereby creating an opportunity for brands to give employees access to pre-approved and legally vetted content that they can share via their personal accounts.

Employees simply have to access the brand's internal content library, find the content that has been pre-approved, and share content through their personal profiles with no risk of violating compliance regulations.

How should a startup participate in private communities without being penalized?

When working within any closed or limited access community, such as Reddit, Slack, etc., you must abide by the rules of that community. When your employees participate in these communities, they must do so as industry practitioners and not salespeople.

Employees should commit to answering difficult, technical questions and providing a free framework for their peers, and supporting their fellow community members.

If your employees provide their community members with uncompensated value on a consistent basis, the members will likely become curious about your product offerings and investigate further about the solutions/services that you provide on their own terms.