The Role of Social Media in the B2B Buying Process

Social media marketing strategies can be implemented in the top of funnel (TOFU) stage, with a specific focus on building brand awareness and reaching new audiences, via targeted advertising, or sharing content organically. In this stage, free, bite-size content featuring attractive visuals, such as infographics, is your best option to draw user attention.

LinkedIn, the preferred platform for B2B social media marketing (utilized by 96% of B2B marketers), even has its own proprietary lead search solution, the Sales Navigator, which Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) can use to prospect for qualified leads and accounts.

As your leads progress on their buyer’s journeys, social media marketing has other functions that can be explored to encourage these prospects to continue down the sales funnel.

In the MOFU stage, social platforms can be leveraged to address client queries, engage leads in nurturing cadences, and attract visitors to your website, where prospects can offer opt-in information in exchange for valuable gated content. Marketers should strive to build social media strategies at this stage to establish and strengthen relationships with prospects, creating a positive client experience (CX) that keeps your brand top of mind.

For the BOFU stage, social media platforms offer an opportunity to boost engagement with BOFU leads in your audience by amplifying the reach of social proof, such as testimonials or case studies. BOFU leads who indicate intent to purchase are also prime candidates for social media advertising that features limited-time offers, encouraging conversions.

These platforms can also be leveraged as nurturing channels for BOFU leads that require further nurturing before being pushed towards a sale, complementing strategies deployed across multiple channels, such as email.

Social media marketing also plays a role after leads have converted and can help to keep current clients engaged, as well as lead to stronger relationships, brand loyalty, and evangelism. Furthermore, referral programs, surveys, and feedback requests can all be actioned with clients on social media platforms, all of which offer relevant insights to inform marketing efforts.

At this stage, social media can also be utilized to kickstart driving upsells or cross-sells for other products or services, enhancing client lifetime value (CLTV).

As evidenced, social media has the potential to be incredibly useful as a lead nurturing channel and an alternative for ensuring that content is delivered to prospects on their preferred platforms, and contribute to expanding reach with paid advertisement and organic sharing.

Furthermore, leveraging social media alongside other nurturing channels helps to diversify your channel approach, avoiding lead fatigue. This also grants prospects greater freedom to determine their own buyer’s journey, amounting to an improved experience, and paving the way for tactics such as multichannel marketing and omnichannel marketing.

As single-channel marketing strategies lose efficiency and become obsolete, campaigns leveraging multiple marketing channels, including social media, grow to be the industry standard. Marketers hoping to stay ahead have two primary approaches to choose from: multichannel marketing and omnichannel marketing.

Both strategies leverage multiple channels to reach their leads and prospects, but achieve this in distinct ways. Multichannel marketing leverages different channels separately, with each performing distinct strategic functions, whereas omnichannel marketing is based on a client-centric outlook that aims to deliver a single, uniquely personalized experience that transitions seamlessly between channels.

Therefore, social media platforms play a crucial role in both of these strategies, as their ubiquity makes them advantageous to reach prospects and clients.

Social listening refers to the process of tracking and analyzing social media conversations that directly mention your brand, industry, competitors, and other related topics. Thus, businesses can acquire relevant data that serves as a reference to plan marketing initiatives and ensure their relevance to target audiences.

To ensure the efficiency of your social listening practices, it is essential to select the appropriate topics, keywords, and hashtags to monitor. As a starting step, identify your audience's predominant demographics, interests, and behaviors to help draw correlations.

By conducting an in-depth analysis of data and tracked conversations, marketers can evaluate audience opinion and general sentiment towards your brand, competitors, and industry developments. Furthermore, social listening grants insights into major pain points and audience preferences, such as favored channels and ideal posting times and frequency.

Finally, regular analysis of social listening findings is essential to keep track of changing behavior and ensure your strategies are based on up-to-date data.

Strong alignment between marketing and sales teams is crucial to ensure the maximum efficiency of your strategies. Just as SDRs must strive to leverage their close contact with leads to glean valuable insights that bolster marketing initiatives, marketers should leverage relevant data gathered from social listening practices (alongside other marketing feedback) to equip salespeople with relevant materials. Sales teams can then  keep prospects engaged with these assets, and encourage their progression.

Community building around a brand, even if a long-term and complex endeavor, helps companies keep their clients and prospects engaged, leading to a steady flow of qualified leads, renewals, and recommendations.

Establishing a solid community also helps businesses earn brand awareness and client loyalty, while presenting an accurate, trustworthy source of feedback that grants unique insights into an audience's pain points.

Utilizing social media to build communities involves not only monitoring and replying to user interaction, but also fostering meaningful, productive conversations among audience members. Leveraging user-generated content (UGC) also helps to build relationships with dedicated followers, and may serve as a powerful source of social proof. Finally, these platforms offer great opportunities for promoting incentivized referral programs and gifting campaigns, as the inherently social nature of these channels enables users to easily share your content.

However, prior to launching your community building initiatives, be sure to identify and target the appropriate audience, through social listening, for example. Furthermore, social media community management can be a time-intensive activity that often relies on third-party software—which makes it essential to allocate sufficient budget and resources.

According to LinkedIn research, 60% of surveyed buyers identify thought leadership as one of the most powerful tools for new brands to build trust in their product categories, while 47% of buyers state that thought leadership initiatives encouraged them to purchase from companies not leading in their industries.

In social media marketing, thought leadership should be promoted via company leaders' and salespeople's personal profiles, through which they develop their personal brand and reach unique audiences. This helps cement their position as experts, which, in turn, earns the company client trust and engagement. Furthermore, team members and executives must play an active role in supporting brand initiatives on social media by boosting each other's posts and engaging in discussions.

Such an approach becomes especially effective as human-to-human (H2H) marketing continues to gain popularity, placing greater value on forging relationships between a brand and its audience.

Influencers are individuals who guide their followers with their opinion to affect perception, behavior, and purchasing decisions. In the B2B space, these influencers gain prestige for their unique perspectives, knowledge, and authority in their fields (essentially, thought leadership). Influencer marketing, therefore, involves striking partnerships with these individuals in order to achieve certain marketing goals.

Partnerships must be established based on the audience, reach, and engagement of each influencer to achieve the desired outcomes of campaigns. Be sure to research and choose B2B influencers who are an authority in their niche and effectively engage their communities.

Furthermore, be sure to provide influencers with clear terms in partnership proposals, including the content creation process expected for the campaign. Consider revisiting campaigns while they are live to offer the influencer additional guidelines and assets to ensure success.

Finally, it is essential to track the performance of these campaigns. These are some KPIs to analyze the outcomes of your influencer marketing campaigns:

Most social media platforms offer paid advertising solutions, which allow companies to go beyond their follower base and extend their reach to new, unengaged audiences. Platforms provide highly detailed targeting options that allow brands to engage with audiences most in line with their ICP and buyer personas, increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion.

Paid social media advertising also plays an important role in deep funnel marketing techniques, which make use of pixels, cookies, and other data collection systems to track lead progress in individual buyer journeys, and deliver retargeted ads that offer content according to their stage in the buying process.

Social media networks also offer programmatic marketing options, which leverage real-time bidding on digital advertising space. Programmatic marketing systems analyze user profiles and match them with different ads from an inventory, conducting split-second automated biddings, optimizing placement and cost-effectiveness.

Furthermore, programmatic marketing provides rich data insights that enable marketers to enhance their targeting accuracy, therefore increasing their return on ad spend (ROAS). For this reason, this marketing method aligns perfectly with performance marketing strategies, which focus on delivering tangible, measurable outcomes (such as measuring cost per click, CPC).

Hashtags are keywords marked by the number sign (#) that serve as search identifiers in different social media channels, often utilized to indicate topics, inviting other interested people to the discussion.

For this reason, hashtags present a unique opportunity for brands to join ongoing conversations to engage prospects, by utilizing trending hashtags related to the audience's interests to tag their content. This also helps users in the same niche to discover these brands, expanding reach and attracting new prospects.

To leverage hashtags in social media marketing strategies, marketers must first identify and analyze hashtags that may resonate with the audience's interests, monitor user behavior (social listening), and collect insights to inform their initiatives. Brands with a well-established social media audience can also utilize unique or branded hashtags for effects similar to that of catchphrases or slogans, earning brand awareness.

However, there are some necessary precautions for utilizing hashtags in your social media posts, such as avoiding an excessive number of hashtags to not be marked as spam. Furthermore, hashtags must be thoroughly researched to better understand the way they are currently used, avoiding negative interpretations.

Finally, remember to measure the success of content utilizing different hashtags, in order to discover which ones best resonate with your audience.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a business approach that seeks to integrate social concerns into a company's business practices. This concept has rapidly grown to be a standard among large companies not only for its inherent importance, but also to address changing public demands.

Social media grants businesses a unique opportunity to showcase their CSR initiatives and get prospects involved—visually appealing posts, thought leadership content, and hashtags are some social media strategies that can be leveraged to boost the visibility of your CSR efforts.

Furthermore, as the general public develops deeper awareness of social and environmental issues, they become more likely to take action and engage with campaigns that resonate with their personal values and causes.

For this reason, it is also beneficial for companies to establish psychographic profiles on their audiences, seeking to uncover interests and values that may resonate with ongoing CSR programs, or even serve as a starting point for new initiatives.

As a starting step in their campaign, WorkSafe analyzed current followers to identify  audience segments, looking into demographics, verticals, and interests to create detailed buyer personas. Furthermore, the company conducted social listening on topics related to their practice, their brand, and major competitors.

From this, WorkSafe could notice a predominance in their audience of male 35+ year-old project managers, working in construction and manufacturing verticals. Worker safety was a priority topic, but their marketers also noticed a trending concern with worker mental health. This information serves as a foundation for accurate targeting and content creation.

Armed with the data insights, WorkSafe crafted easily-digestible posts with visually appealing content, such as infographics, regarding personal worker safety and PPE legislation. By making strategic use of hashtags and promoting their posts via influencer partnerships, WorkSafe ensured their posts were delivered to a wider audience, earning new followers that proceeded to share content, boosting reach even further. Furthermore, a steady stream of CSR posts cemented WorkSafe’s brand values of workplace well-being, industrial safety, and health concerns, contributing to brand awareness.

In order to focus on building meaningful relationships with their clients and prospects, WorkSafe published thought leadership content that sparked deep discussions across social platforms. The company then allocated dedicated marketing professionals to interact with these visitors, answering questions and furthering the discussion, earning the brand a reputation of being a caring, human-based initiative.

Employing lead scoring and qualification methods, WorkSafe compiled a list of social media users that engaged the most with their posts, filtering for the appropriate verticals and company sizes. These leads were then engaged with nurturing cadences sent through their preferred platform—in this case, LinkedIn, via InMail.

WorkSafe also engaged these leads via other channels such as emails and events with an omnichannel approach to deliver relevant content according to their progress in the buyer’s journey. Keeping careful track of these leads’ interactions with the brand’s materials, WorkSafe was able to identify leads in the final stages of the funnel, who demonstrated urgency to purchase solutions as well as interest in their brand. For these leads, WorkSafe shared case studies and testimonials that highlighted the efficiency of their services.

In order to encourage these leads to take the next step in their buyer’s journey, yet allow them to progress at their own pace, WorkSafe deployed targeted paid advertising campaigns toward key accounts offering attractive discounts and bundles. Marketers also shared data on these leads and accounts with sales representatives, informing them of their clients’ most relevant pain points, and how WorkSafe can help users overcome these challenges. Marketing teams also designed content pieces to address these topics, that sales teams could utilize to inform themselves and their leads.

In the post-sale stage, WorkSafe marketers leveraged their social media communities to continue engaging clients with nurturing materials, supporting the onboarding process and sharing other information that may improve CX and Client Success (CS) initiatives. Later on, they leveraged their social media contacts to deploy a feedback campaign in order to gather client input on possible points of improvement for future service updates, involving the clients in a collaborative dialog with development efforts.

Finally, WorkSafe marketers developed a referral program, encouraging clients to invite peers in exchange for perks, such as discount packages for additional features. This also presented WorkSafe with an interesting opportunity for upselling. The program was announced with social media posts that highlighted the importance of client collaboration for the platform’s development, featuring testimonials from brand evangelists whose suggestions were incorporated into future product updates.

The referral program finishes the campaign with a step that feeds back into its start, enabling it to be repeated continually, taking advantage of any insights and observations that arose throughout the process.