Grow Your B2B Audience By The Right Platform And Engagement

For B2B CMOs and marketing professionals, leverage social media to educate audience with useful contents is critical for growth. As a graduate student in Northwestern University Medill’s Integrated Marketing Communications Masters program, I focus on digital marketing strategies for B2B companies and here are 2 articles on social media platforms and customer engagement that are informative and relevant for B2B companies.

Twitter Loses Its Crown As More Preferred B2B Social Media Platform

In the article “Twitter loses its crown as most preferred B2B social media platform”, Bob Apollo discussed a few interesting findings through a comprehensive 60+ page survey of B2B social media and one of the key findings is that LinkedIn has replaced Twitter as the most effective social media platform for lead generation. Another important finding is that participants rated “difficulty in proving ROI” as the most significant challenge facing them in B2B social media marketing.

source: http://emea.marketing.linkedin.com/

Grow Your B2B Audience by Considering Size, Engagement and Value
In his article “Grow Your B2B Audience by Considering Size, Engagement and Value”, Jeffrey K. Rohrs, Vice President of Marketing Insights at ExactTarget, discussed about the importance of audience development in B2B marketing and how this idea needs to be considered as a crucial part of achieving success across social media, email and more. He argues that the “built it and they will come” content creation model no longer exists, so audience development professionals are needed to help bring more people to the table so that when you do have content, audience are going to consume and share and amplify. 

Based on my analysis of these two articles and other social media strategies research on B2B marketing, here are the three steps that can help you grow and engage your audience.

1) Focus on media used by your audience 

LinkedIn has become the top platform for B2B engagement. Are you shifting to LinkedIn or still with Twitter? You can understand where your audiences are by testing and measuring different social media platforms. 

2) Invest in audience development

Your success of campaigns needs the support from audience development. These professionals can manage your very siloed audiences across email, mobile, and social channels.

3) Build call-to-actions with every contents

I’m sure you want to see the fantastic outcomes of your great contents. But how? The trick is to ask your audience to take actions such as sharing comments. Then you have the conversion rates to measure your social media ROI.

“Rome wasn't built in a day.” If your aspiration is far beyond one-time engagement, remember the three steps: Media, Audience Development and Call-to-actions.

Daisy Chen is currently pursuing a Masters degree in Integrated Marketing Communications at Medill, Northwestern University.  She is a strategic thinker who is interested in Content Strategy and Digital Analytics. She has previously worked on brand and social media strategies for entertainment, pet food and home appliance industry and is interested in a career in digital marketing.

Follow her on twitter @daisySYC or LinkedIn to continue the conversation