Business Partners and Business Friends: How to Do B2B Marketing on Social Media

Everyone in marketing knows that nowadays a social media presence is a must have. With billions of people on social media and the ease at which it can share information with those people, there are few better ways to connect potential customers to your brand. It becomes a bit harder, though, when you are a business trying to connect to other businesses. When selling products to individuals, the simple idea is that you want someone to see your brand and react the same way they would to their friends on social media: With trust. When it comes to marketing to another business, though, who exactly do you market to? How do market to an entity rather than a person?

As a representative from LeadGen Compass put it:

‘There are two ideas we keep top of mind. First, we know individuals use social media to be social with others. Second, we know most B2B products we work with are not one-step purchases. They tend to be multi-step decisions and higher dollar amounts. With those two ideas in mind, we use social media to expand our reach with awareness as the main objective. We want the audience we’re targeting to see our ads while using social media for whatever they are doing. Then we want them to think of us when they are back at work where the B2B decisions are made. We don’t want to chit-chat with them on Facebook, and they don’t want to either. We do want them to say, “oh, I know that brand/product/service” when we market to them at work.’

As they said, generally the goal of social media advertising is to spread awareness of your company and your brand. A good first step is simply posting regularly. Posting on social media is a good way to get people to know about your company, and what you do, as well as to remind past customers that your company exists and that is actually a very big step to this. Part of increasing awareness is making sure those who are aware of you stay aware. It’s the same reason McDonalds and Sony still purchase all kinds of ads; everyone knows who they are and what they sell, they are simply looking to remind people at the right time. If you’re hungry you might not be thinking about McDonalds until you see their ad on TV and at that time it might sound like a really good idea. Social media can have the same effect over an enormous audience, millions of people use social media at least once a day at all times of day. There’s always the chance that an employee might go on break after a meeting, log onto Facebook and see your ad and then realize that your company does just what they need.

Of course, it’s not just about maintaining relationships with existing customers. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Tik-Tok provide cheap advertising to that site’s millions of users without the need to chat with millions of people individually. If you market your product well on these sites you can reach exponentially more people than you would be able to on any other platform. And it turns out, one of the keys to social media advertising is actually pretty simple: talk like a person, not a business.

It may sound counterintuitive not to talk like a business to a business, but it actually makes sense because of the platform. Social media is all about developing an online personality and if you look at the social media of successful businesses, many of them will say just as much about the company’s beliefs, and their employees as their actual products. Social media is, above all else, an entertainment platform, and recognizing that is the key to making it work, and traditional advertising is not entertaining; platforms make it incredibly easy to scroll past something that is not eye catching or amusing. Even without that, showing that your brand has personality can separate your company from others like you, because at the end of the day most companies can perform well enough; talking about what you do and how well you do it doesn’t stick in the mind the way a personality does. In summary, there is one thing that social media advertising asks of your brand: Don’t let your company be forgettable.