Social media is an essential component of digital marketing outreach for B2B marketers. B2B businesses feel a lack of the right resources, regular strategy and planning, and other priority tasks that limit social media execution. The founder, the marketing head, usually tries to juggle digital marketing and other business goals. If this describes your experience too, you must go through our recommendations and case studies based on using marketing automation tools for B2B marketing on social media.

Social media has altered how we access information and exchange data, significantly impacting individuals and businesses. If you work for a B2B company—or, better yet, own one—social media should be integral to your digital marketing strategy. B2B marketers should pursue a customer-centric social approach to drive results.

According to current figures, 83% of B2B marketers use social media platforms, which is second only to search engines. From customer service to leveraging industry influence, social media offers a lot to B2B organisations.

B2B Lead Generation
SEO And Link Building
Brand Voice and Awareness
Event Amplification
Reduce Recruitment Costs
Connect With Employees/Customers
Thought Leadership
Customer Service and Social Listening

In 2021, the total number of users across social media channels crossed 4.55 billion globally. To establish and extend your business, you must first understand your target audience’s most preferred social network. We’ll look at five of the top social networks to help you with B2B marketing.

LinkedIn is one of the most popular and frequently utilised B2B Lead generation and social networking platforms. According to CMI research, over 95% of B2B organisations use LinkedIn for content marketing.

With over 300 million monthly active users, Twitter is a place to watch "what’s going on” and track distinguished brand voices. A CMI survey found that 87% of B2B marketers utilise Twitter for content marketing.

According to 42% of B2B marketers, Facebook is the most effective B2B buyer’s platform, and against the myth, it is suited for lead generation and content marketing.

Instagram has around 800 million active monthly users. 48% of companies use Instagram for B2B marketing campaigns.

SlideShare is a well-known tool for sharing documents and presentations. 19% of B2B marketers use SlideShare for content marketing initiatives. It is an excellent tool for content distribution and backlink generation.

Inadequate Human and Financial Resources

26% of firms’ most prevalent challenges are the lack of eligible knowledge workers and marketing budgets.

“I empathise with the marketers who can’t achieve their goals or reach the potential of social media because they are limited by budget,”
Josh Krakauer, social media marketing expert.

Almost 24% fail to formalise their social media initiatives. B2B companies should see social media as a traditional marketing instrument requiring a plan.

Creating a Follower Community

2/3rds of B2B companies struggle to create a social media community of followers. Social media shouldn’t be just a distribution channel. To have a positive impact on the brand, social media marketers must also be content marketers. Many businesses build their social media presence by sourcing information from other sources and repurposing it. In reality, audience can identify the difference between content that is fresh and innovative vs something you put only to show that you were on social media that day.

LinkedIn Groups have proven to be the most effective channel for creating the brand voice of B2B buyers.

Tracking Results

Tracking and measurement bring value to social media platforms. 25% of B2B companies find it challenging to define the right metrics, and 17% of companies believe they cannot determine the key business objectives. Tracking outcomes on social media may be complex because an impression does not always result in an immediate sale.

Overcoming these challenges is essential to a brand’s success. Fortunately, a simple answer to these social media marketing stumbling blocks is marketing automation. Different automation tools are used by industry-leading, dispersed businesses to improve their social media marketing activities.

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation provides B2B marketers with a comprehensive view of customer relationships, allowing them to create persuasive customer groups, engage with them in ways they love, and keep the conversation exciting and thriving.

It can free up valuable time from having to physically perform tedious activities by automating marketing and sales engagement parts. This allows more time to concentrate on generating and evaluating additional leads, nurturing the most promising prospects, growing conversion rates, and driving business growth.

Marketing automation tool is a game-changer for marketers teams. It helps with content marketing, bulk uploading, and scheduling posts. The tools improve marketing and sales performance by improving customer service and driving lead generation.

Whether it’s for a B2B or B2C barnd, I believe passionately that good marketing essentials are the same. We are all emotional beings looking for relevance, context and connection.
Beth Comstock, Former CEO and Author

Use a Marketing Automation Tool to drive your social media strategy, with added advantages:

B2B marketers should focus only on social media marketing strategy, content creation, and #tags and use social media automation for posting. Automation software can boost a company’s social media presence by content curation and organising social media posts in advance. It gives decision-makers the ability to see ROI across the customer buying journey.

Almost 40% of organizations that are not already adopting marketing automation plan to invest in the next three months. These businesses will use marketing automation tools to enhance their current social media approach.

Social media automation saves more than 6 hours per week on social media administration andkeeps the content on business profiles up-to-date. Brands use real-time performance metrics to tweak or re-look at the overall strategy. Over 80% of businesses believe that social media post scheduling is the best use for a marketing automation tool.

When B2B brands use social media automation, the response rate increases by 250%, enhanced message targeting is an essential advantage of B2B social media marketing automation. According to 64% of businesses, the marketing automation approach to advertising drives B2B sales.

We have covered the foundations of social media automation, let’s look at how you can combine brand voice, social media presence, and engagement.

Social Media Post Scheduler
Gain valuable insights from multiple networks.
Social listening tools.
Make use of chatbots.
Social Media Tracker Brand Monitoring

These schedulers enable a company to plan out many postings ahead of time. This implies that a team member does not need to log in to each account and create posts daily. Calendar your postings across social media profiles with daily, weekly, and monthly views. Marketers can plan and schedule posts using a social media automation tool, including links and attachments, eBooks, company profiles, lead magnets, and event promotions.

B2B marketing on social media is incomplete without access to different metrics like followers, likes, clicks to websites, leads, and customer engagement. Obtain data on the number of times your content is displayed, i.e., impressions. Use analytics to decide the optimal time for posting.

Configure each promotion as a focused campaign, for example, dealer promotion or customer loyalty. These reports make it easy to compare the success of a campaign across several channels. You can obtain data on the total number of people who see your content, i.e., reach

Track campaign wise lead performance and lead assignment to the sales team and then map it to overall lead performance. All the social media marketing performance data across all social media profiles can be presented on one dashboard.

Social listening essentially monitors the brand voice and compares it to people’s sentiments. There are multiple social media automation tools to monitor the target audience and their opinions about a business or industry online. B2B companies can view brand mentions across all platforms by using a social listening tool.

Track conversations on specific keywords, concepts, events, or hashtags across social media platforms. Furthermore, companies may utilise social listening tools to track their competitors’ social media marketing activity.

Lastly, social listening tools assist B2B marketers in developing ideas for social media postings or even new product or service ideas.

5 must-have features of a social listening solution:

Converged media ~ view paid, owned, earned metrics all at once. Is it print ads, television ads performing better over your owned media like website and mobile apps? or is it social media getting you the best ROI

Engagement metrics ~ what pulls audience towards your brand? Engagement covers everything, keywords,  consumer sentiments, channels - much beyond just likes and shares. Audience leave hidden cues about their brand experience and not always explicit

Geofence capabilities ~ Thing global, but act local. Dial into specifc areas of your market. Social audience don't discriminate by region. A pained consumer in one region can sway consumers globally. Social Listenting tool let you view both forest and the trees.

Voice of customer ~ segment consumers by psychographic interest and behaviours. It is important to know what moves various segments to engage and shop. After-all a working man and a working woman will certainly have common issues. So differentiation can't be generic, gender or age biased.

Image recognition ~ social media afficados prefer to communicate in the language of emoji, gif or an image. Social users love to communicate visually. A clever troll can damage brand's identity.

Make use of chatbots.

B2B companies use Chatbots to leverage Social Media Automation technologies. Chatbots may be used standalone on websites, landing pages, and mobile apps or utilised with Facebook Messenger, Instagram Messages, and even LinkedIn Sales Navigator. One can build automated workflows, container responses or recommended responses to customer queries or comments on a chatbot.

ChatBots provide customer service and enhance the customer experience. Eventually, a social media chatbot should assist clients with minor difficulties while escalating more significant concerns to a dedicated customer service team.

A chatbot can respond automatically to frequently asked questions, raise a ticket, or provide access to marketing materials, product documentation, self-help guides.

The Social Media Tracker tool works in the background, automatically monitoring and collecting all of your essential interaction data into a single, easy-to-read table to identify the best performing platforms and content. It generates automatic reports on your most compelling content, and competitor campaigns, hashtags, and top-performing posts. Tools can also create resizable, easy-to-read PDF reports and send out automated messages to decision-makers on social media performance, SEO, paid marketing campaigns, and website traffic.

Brand Monitoring

Media, Customer, Competitor, Government, Experts, Opinion Makers, almost anyone can tag a brand name and opine about it. Brands need to stay on top of social media and continuously monitor their reputation. The underlying emotions can elevate and destroy a brand’s reputation, earning a marketing horror.

Brand monitoring tools can track any term or phrase you choose to monitor the internet mentions. You may watch LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram feed for specific keywords, hashtags, or identities, such as influencers or rivals, and website mentions.

Both B2B and B2C brands using the customer-centric social media marketing strategy have built a famous social media brand. There are plenty of examples of prominent brand voices on social media platforms. We are sharing highly impactful ones:

Texas A&M’s mission was to create persuasive customer groups and build more engaged social communities. This was realized through a marketing automation tool with quick response time, facilitated collaboration between social media accounts, and provided a vast social landscape. All this is in one platform.

Lead Generation: automobile dealerships

On a year-over-year basis, a leading automobile company saw a 1,000% increase in website traffic from Facebook, accounting for 92% of all similar traffic achieved in 2018. Over the same time period, website lead generation from Facebook increased by 3300%.

“Our Social Media Marketing Strategy for the company has already paid off to the tune of $2M in the last year, and there are no indications of it slowing down.” – said the head of marketing.

The B2B company generated more than 350,000 link clicks across all Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest profiles in June 2019. Total social impressions increased by 153.2% with a 73.5% increase in followers and a 100% increase in engagement levels.

Nonprofits like Northwestern Settlement use social media marketing to share their stories and meet new people. It’s also a great way to get people to participate. 55% of people who interact with nonprofits on social media take action, whether donating money (59%) or volunteering (53%).

Northwestern Settlement, after using a social media automation tool ~

Social impressions have increased by 73%.
It increased social engagement by 10X. The number of social messages received has increased by 590.6%.
This includes the following: 2,000,000 impressions 25,100 engagements 4,100 clicks on links

If you are still not sure, let us share this:

Marketing automation is widespread because the benefits outweigh the complications. According to Forrester, business spending on marketing automation solutions will increase to $25.1 billion annually by 2023, up from $11.4 billion in 2017!

You may run an infinite number of tests on your social media accounts. Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

Use questions and facts in your text to discover which one draws your audience in.
Test alternative link placements to see if it increases clicks.
Increase engagement using emojis. If it works, keep up the good work!
Alter between high frequency to low frequency and test
You may test which works better by placing sponsored advertisements behind both a video and a static picture.
Segment your audience to see how people respond to an ad.
Examine how many hashtags you use to determine whether it influences impressions.
Spend more time responding to posts to see if it improves your following.

Next Steps:

Social media automation may be an excellent method to attract new consumers, strengthen existing customer loyalty, increase a brand’s social media presence, and demonstrate industry expertise to consumers. B2B marketing on social media does not have to be complicated. If you’re sick of switching between platforms and figuring out what works, it’s time to try the Marketing Automation Tool.

Fortunately, most tools have a free trial period, allowing you to test them out and choose which best meets your company’s business objectives! Book your appointment with a DINTW Marketing Automation Expert to complete your company’s business objectives.

DINTW is an award-winning B2B social media marketing agency. We specialize in the integration, onboarding, development, and operations of marketing automation platforms like Sproutsocial, HubSpot, MailChimp, Engagebay, Marketo, and others.

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