Effective B2B Social Builds a Brand and Drives Sales

Marketing is all that Kipp Bodnar does. He cut his teeth on the agency side, and now he’s leading the inbound marketing efforts at HubSpot with tactics including search engine optimization, social media, and email marketing. What Kipp has found over the years is that most executives don’t value marketing. Rather than drive revenue, they feel like it’s “arts and crafts” without a higher purpose, Kipp told marketers at a Go Inbound Marketing 2015 session. “This is an opportunity, not really a problem. It’s time to change perceptions and take the chance to shine.” How do you shine? Generate leads. If you connect the marketing to the leads that you’re giving sales, that shows your worth.

Fuel your movement

Traditional marketing no longer fits how people buy. The purpose of social is to “fuel your movement,” Kipp says.How do social leads happen?You tweet and a prospect clicks through to a landing page where they break the privacy barrier by filling out a form with information like an email address and name.Or you tweet and a prospect clicks through to a blog post, reads the blog post, and clicks on the call-to-action that takes them to a landing page where they fill out a form.There are any number of other ways that social leads happen. Regardless, information transactions are the place where the deal hinges; you need their information to allow sales to effectively follow up.The business-to-business sales funnel allows you to:

• Grow followers
• Drive content shares
• Convert clicks

3 must-haves for effective B2B social media

1) The first must-have is to build your social media reach. Kipp says that B2B companies should obsess over this. Here’s how to build your reach:

• Share a lot of links to get people to connect with you.
• If you share the best things, people will think they need to follow you to make sure they don’t miss out.
• “Start a fire” app: When you share a post, it adds on some links that are going to be interesting and valuable to the reader, and it’s effective in getting people to go from post to post.
• “The shelf life of a social link is 3 hours”: If you share one link a day, you’re missing out on 21 hours a day of visibility.
• Leverage existing contacts by using email to build your reach and tell people about your accounts.
• Make sure your social accounts are a key part of your website so people know they exist and where they can be found.

2) Must-have number two is to maximize your content discovery.

• Create a content calendar. Ask yourself how many links you can share this week and when you can do it. Make sure there aren’t any gaping holes in your strategy.
• Build social thank you pages. After someone downloads something from your website, give them a chance to share it on their networks.
• Automatic sharing: If your company has a blog, it’s automatically published to networks like Facebook and Twitter. Or you can send staff notifications that there’s something that they should share on their networks, either automatically or manually.
• The 10-4-1 rule: This rule involves 10 links to third-party articles, 4 links to company blog posts and one link to a company landing page. This builds your worth to followers past just regurgitating your blog posts. It’s a ratio, so it doesn’t just apply to one day or one week.

3) The final must-have for killer social is conversion ubiquity.

• Much of this depends on having some really awesome content.
• People are moving from just knowing about you to actually becoming a prospect.
• Marketing is math. It’s all about optimizing things.
• Make your social CTAs the natural next step for people.
• The most difficult part of conversion ubiquity is that the process of conversion depends on someone knowing and trusting you and your business. When someone’s new, there’s a bigger gap to cross in order for them to buy.
• Conversions follow the trust that you establish with your audience. Help your prospects solve real problems rather than being selfish. Make the prospect’s life better and easier, and you’ll build trust and value with them.
• Whether it’s Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, your click rate will improve by 3-4x when you include an image along with the link. Make sure everything is clear and simple and include a short, clear subject line.
• Connect the landing page to the place where people came from so they don’t feel like they’ve gotten lost.
• Make sure that you take mobile devices into account when developing your conversion process.

Never waste a conversion opportunity, Kipp says, adding that snip.ly allows you to add a CTA to links you share and get a few extra conversions.Finally, monitor your social conversions. Observe what questions people are asking and figure out how you can help them in the buying process.