B2B Social Media Marketing is REALLY Difficult
Does this conversation sound familiar?
CEO: “Our social media isn’t working.”
Marketer: “What’s not working? In an ideal scenario, what does ‘working’ look like to you?”
CEO: “At best, it should be generating revenue, and at least, it should be generating engagement. Currently, it’s doing neither.”
Marketer: “How do you know it’s not generating revenue?”
CEO: “We look at attribution data.”
Marketer: “Not everything will show up in attribution data. Many brand building activities are working behind the scenes – pushing and pulling to influence outcomes. They are invisible to you and are impossible to track.”
CEO: “Fine. Let’s focus on engagement then. It should be a lot more. Aside from me and a few other staff, nobody is liking, commenting, sharing.”
Marketer: “Is your content good?”
CEO: “Define good.”
Marketer: “Good content is interesting – visually appealing, compelling topic, engaging position, etc. It’s hard to define good, but you’ll know it when you see it. Typically, you want to educate, entertain, inspire… You want to add value, not try to extract value.”
CEO: “Some of what we post is good.”
Marketer: “Are you on the platforms your target audience is on, posting contextually relevant content for that platform, optimizing using SEO, hooks, editing techniques, using proper framing, sound, lighting, cadence, etc.?”
CEO: “I’m not sure.”
Marketer: “What kinds of things are you posting?”
CEO: “We talk about our features and benefits, show people how it can add value into their workflow, make announcements, post our blog content, we do webinars and in-person events once per month so we post about that.”
Marketer: “Okay, that sounds like more promotional.”
CEO: “Yes and no. We are educating.”
Marketer: “Educating people to buy?”
CEO: “Yes.”
Marketer: “Are you posting consistently?”
CEO: “Maybe 3 or 4 times per week.”
Marketer: “How many platforms?”
CEO: “LinkedIn and X. Occasionally YouTube.”
Marketer: “For how long have you been maintaining this posting frequency.”
CEO: “A little over a year now.”
Marketer: “Who’s in charge of your social media strategy?”
CEO: “We don’t really have a social media strategy per se, but everything we do is handled by our marketing intern.”
Marketer: “I see. How often do you or other team members get involved in what content you put out on social channels?”
CEO: “I would say rarely, if ever.”
Marketer: “But it’s important to you and your business, correct? Afterall, that’s the reason we’re even having this conversation, right?”
CEO: “Correct.”
Marketer: “Are there other areas of your business that are important, that you neglect, and that you would feel comfortable that an intern would own, such as your finance?”
CEO: “No, of course not.”
Marketer: “Okay, so I think we’ve identified the issue, haven’t we?”
CEO: “Yes, I believe we have.”
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I get it, social media marketing is really difficult, especially in B2B, and even for professional marketers. I’m not saying I have all the answers. Doing well on social media is about posting good content, consistently, over time. If you don’t post good content, you aren’t consistent, and not enough time had passed, then you can expect lackluster results.
Further, if you don’t even have a strategy in place, and you are not using an agency or expert, then you will be at a severe disadvantage.
Social media experts spend all day obsessing about social media – the trends, the algos, the nuances…
This is one of the most difficult areas of marketing to get right. There aren’t that many B2B brands that are consistently crushing it on social media.
I think what it requires is a highly creative individual or team, that can think outside the box with strategy, and then have the executional abilities to deliver.