Social marketing is continuing to gain a lot of attention and budget share among businesses, but there's one type of company that I've seen continue to give objections against it. That's are our friends in the business-to-business sector. I'm passionate about bringing better marketing to B2B, and I believe many companies are missing an opportunity in social. Watch the video to find out more... Notes! Due diligence is important. There are 3 things that you're going to want to consider before you begin a new or updated social marketing campaign / strategy. Customer Personas Understanding the different types of customers you have can help you customize your outreach to best convert each of these groups. What is important to each of your customer personas? How can you best deliver value to each? Brand Stories Social media is one of the best ways to allow your visitors to get to know your company better via: Company stories Customer voices & testimonials Contributions from your employees, pictures, videos, statuses Know what your end goal is. It is so important to know where you want to go with social before you start. What do you want to accomplish? Write down these goals and then brainstorm how you can use social to get you there. If you have any questions about this please let me know in the comments below. Linkedin B2B social marketing is unique because you know who your buyer is. Within the context of the network, (even if you haven't made contact yet) if you have your personas locked down, you can make an assumption as to who might be a good person to talk to within a prospective client company. Linkedin groups are important to become involved in. Post your content and create discussion around it, and watch engagement happen with new questions, comments, and service inquiries. Twitter Twitter is the social network for breaking news and information. This makes is a great outlet for your company's news and announcements. Make sure you take advantage of the amount of journalists on Twitter, and the networking opportunities that it provides. Keep lists of niche competitors, but make sure to keep these private so your competitors don't see that you're tracking them. Google+ Despite your opinion on whether or not your target market will find or engage with you on the Google+ platform itself, it has massive search implications. Within a brand search, you have the opportunity to populate the knowledge graph real estate on the page with information from your Google+ page. This gives you one additional chance to put the content you want prospects to see right in front of them. Then of course, +1's can affect personalization and improve rankings for those that are within your circle of influence. Facebook This is one that also gets a lot of push back from B2B companies that ask, "Why do we need a Facebook page? It doesn't seem like it would be very effective for our business." There's plenty of reasons, but I'll give a specific example. I've seen companies that dismiss Facebook as a strategy, yet according to search volume estimates, a decent amount of people (on a monthly basis) search for "(brand name) facebook". This is a missed opportunity to control the experience of those searchers, and you let them continue on a wild goose chase. Make sure you have a Facebook page for them to land on, make sure you periodically post content so it's not a ghost town, and make sure you make it easy for them to browse through to your website. Industry directories These are niche social communities in themselves that allow your company to: Create and publish content Become industry experts Find prospects generally network in a social way This type of activity and outreach has proven to have big dividends. Thank you for watching! (Please feel free to leave any comments or questions below)