Article

Ryan Pell
Ryan Pell 14 April 2021

How to Use Social Data to Launch a B2B Marketing Campaign

There is a misconception that a B2B company can hardly get anything useful from social media. After all, when your audience consists of C-suite decision-makers, you don’t expect them to hang out on Instagram to check out your product.

In reality, B2B businesses can get as many benefits out of social media as B2C businesses do. There’s a reason why 82% of companies invest in marketing on LinkedIn – it brings their brands a lot of exposure and awareness.

And even when it comes to Instagram, some brands are successfully using this platform for marketing. Just take a look at SEMrush – each of its posts gets 200+ likes:

Credit: SEMrush

But brand exposure is not the only reason why your B2B business could benefit from social media.

Since social platforms have billions of users (Facebook alone has 2.8 billion), these people constantly share information and feedback. This information is called social data, and it can come in handy to help you launch a successful B2B marketing campaign.

How?

Let’s take a look.

1. Define a Comprehensive Buyer Persona

The first essential step of every marketing campaign (and B2B is not an exception) is to build a target audience persona. But, compared to B2C businesses, a B2B company usually focuses on a smaller number of personas, who are usually the decision-makers in their businesses.

So, to the basic demographics (age, gender, language, location) and psychographics (wants, needs, interests, challenges), you’ll also have to add the information in which industry your target audience persona works and what their job position is.

Where can you find this information?

If you want to focus your marketing campaign on a particular segment of your general audience, social data can show you where your audience members are coming from and where they work.

For instance, if you go to LinkedIn Analytics, you’ll see not only the demographics of your followers but also the industry they work in:

Based on this information, you can build a more precise audience persona, which will make your marketing campaign more targeted and personalized.

2. Build a Strong Content Strategy Based on Audience’s Interests

The success of a B2B marketing campaign depends on the content a lot. It can be very hard to impress picky B2B buyers; that’s why the content that you create for your campaign should address their needs and interests as closely as possible.

Can social data supply you with this information?

Absolutely. Each social platform shows the data on the audience’s content preferences differently, but it can give you a general idea, which content your audience would like to see more of.

For instance, on Twitter, you can find a clear breakdown of your followers’ interests:

You can later feature some of these interests in your content to drive reach and engagement with your posts.

For example, suppose you see that your followers are interested in improving their English level, and this interest is relevant to what your business is doing, it might give you an idea to launch a podcast about learning English, which can become a regular part of your general B2B content strategy and an opportunity to promote your services.

If you want to look up audience interest on LinkedIn, you would have to go through each post to find the ones that get the most attention. Under each post, you can find the total on impressions, reactions, and the engagement rate the post has to determine the topics that your audience likes the most:

How else can you collect social data to find out your audience’s content preferences?

It’s always a great idea to run a quick survey and see what your followers have to offer.

For example, if you’re running a SaaS company, you can run a survey asking your audience whether they want to see you post more case studies or research on the hottest industry topics.

Whatever your specialization is, your audience can help you figure out which content would drive your campaign to success. So, run a quick survey on social media or via email to collect social data.

3. Pick the Right Platform for Your B2B Marketing Campaign

Some B2B companies ignore social media because they think their audience is not interested in these platforms. But some companies go all out and start advertising on every platform, which is a common social media marketing mistake among B2B businesses.

While building a presence on social media is good, if you want your marketing campaign to succeed, you need to be picky about the platforms you choose for it.

What impacts your choice of a marketing platform?

First and foremost, it should correspond to the description of your target audience persona. And there’s general social data that can help you figure out whether the platform is the right fit.

For instance, if your audience is predominantly female, Facebook (54.7% of users are women) is a better choice than LinkedIn (56.9% of users are men).

This way, you can check any social media platform for age and gender distribution to see if it matches the description of your target audience. Only then can you consider the type of content to target your audience with.

Wrapping Up

As you can see, it’s absolutely worth it for your B2B company to have an active social media strategy, not just for exposure but to collect social data that you can later use to launch a successful B2B marketing campaign.

Social data can help you build a precise audience persona, create a targeted content strategy, and even choose the right platform for your marketing efforts. A data-driven campaign is always a step ahead because it focuses on real-world data, and that’s why such a campaign has more chances to be successful.

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