Over the last several years, brands from across B2B industries have demonstrated that social can indeed be a strong tactic to complement your brand building, prospecting, acquisition, and customer engagement strategy. From GE to Novartis, Drift, and Hubspot, we have seen diverse companies leverage social media to humanize themselves, drive value for their stakeholder community, and more.
Unfortunately, not all of us fall in that category. Chances are your company has a tepid presence on social media, since with all the other pressures around demand and revenue generation, social seems like a last priority tactic – even more so for salespersons.
But it’s 2021 now. Your B2B customers expect seamless experiences with brands across touchpoints, and we know social media plays a significant role in their day. So now is a great time to explore how your organization’s marketing and sales team can work together to leverage social media not just for brand building and engagement, but for lead generation and selling.
We call this approach a tag-team social strategy, because of the deliberate way in which marketing and sales can play off of each other’s strengths to extend their brand voice into the social domain. When you think about the way buyers seek, find and share information along their buyers journey today, as well as remind yourself of just how hard it is to get a face-to-face meeting at a reasonably early stage of that buyer’s journey, leveraging social media seems almost like a no-brainer. Yes, it takes time, and a different mindset, but the results could be well worth it. But before we get into that, here is a closer look at why social media is such a great fit for B2B selling.
The Top 3 Reasons Social Counts for B2B Marketers
- The number one reason is, of course, that it provides salespersons a direct window into the prospect’s professional and even – to a limited extent – personal life, and tells us about what inspires or engages them. It tells you about events they’re attending or people they’re following, and that can be very valuable when it comes to trying to engage with them meaningfully and find insights and opportunities your competitors will miss. Think of social as not a ‘talking tool’, but a ‘listening tool’.
- It’s a potentially great way, if done right, to bypass gatekeepers and other obstacles and engage prospects directly in a relevant, relationship-building conversation. Social can help widen the network across multiple personas in the buying collective at your most important prospect and customer accounts, and deepen the relationship with specific individuals beyond the transactional.
- Social is perpetual – it’s not a three-day event or a single email campaign, but an ongoing engagement platform where you can reach out repeatedly and connect at an appropriate frequency or as an opportunity presents itself. In other words, build ongoing relationships.
Winning with Tag-team Social
So, how do you play tag-team social? Think of it as an additional dimension to the ‘marketing and sales alignment’ that is so critical to successful B2B marketing. In the ABM context, this translates into a concerted effort to understand, engage with and draw insights, through social media interactions, for specific ‘must-win’ accounts and specific personas within those accounts. This makes the effort measurable in terms of relationship and engagement outcomes, and opens valuable windows to deploy other ABM outbound and inbound tactics with specific individuals, leading to better ROI in the end. To make it actionable, start with a small tag team – one marketer coordinates brand social efforts with four to five salespersons for some early wins, and then scale the approach to the larger team.
Marketing Plays at a Brand Level
In the tag-team approach, the role of marketing is to create an engaging brand voice that is useful and interesting for your target audience. The trick is for sales and marketing to collaborate and build a voice around issues that matter to your target personas. Aim to build an engaged community of interested stakeholders. For example, a B2B SaaS marketing team may build a social community around B2B tech by sharing brand-neutral, expert perspectives about innovations and new use-case scenarios from across verticals, industries and geographies. Avoid traps like ‘number of followers’ and ‘frequency of posts’ – focus on quality and relevance of content and followers instead.
The job of marketing is also to humanize the company and brand – now, more than ever, people want to do business with people. Social media gives us ample opportunity to build authentic empathy. Speaking up for important causes, congratulating achievements of others, and highlighting complementary opportunities that may benefit the target audience is always appreciated, as long as it’s done well and consistently.
In today’s omnichannel world, it’s also important to go across social platforms. LinkedIn and Twitter are obvious choices, but brands can also explore other platforms to showcase different sides of their personality. For example, Instagram could be a great place to showcase itself as a great employer or a fun place to work. Communities and forums that enjoy engaged audiences also act as trusted advisors to address questions posed in the community. For example, salespersons of an IT solution brand could become members of a community such as Spiceworks, to not only learn about what questions IT decision makers are asking, but also engaging with and deepening relationships with them in a non-brand environment, while they’re in the work mindset. Ultimately, each bit of ‘humanness’ adds up to the overall perception of the company as a desirable partner to trust, engage and work with.
Salespersons Support at an Individual Level
In tag-team social, salespersons should balance marketing’s company/brand focus with a strong individual voice to engage in 1:1 conversations with members of the buyer collectives on your must-win, must-retain or must-win-back list. Authentic individual voices are truly powerful.
Even though an individual’s social media profile is a personal page, it helps to start by establishing a proud and personal association between yourself and your company. It shows that the individual and company share values and a belief in their product or brand, and that is aspirational even for potential customers.
Tell human stories that showcase vendors, employees and even customers from various verticals and geographies beyond local borders – it brings new perspectives and enriches the conversation, while highlighting your connectedness to your larger team.
Add personal meaning to a brand announcement. For example, when the brand page shares news of a product launch, you can go deeper, offering granular insight into how specific new capabilities can help customer needs or pain points. Just keep the language personal and rooted in customer problems – not what marketing would put in a brochure.
People love helping others solve problems or share their opinions – even your customers! Share interesting industry reports and stats, or insights from an event you attended, and invite perspectives. Ask for feedback and suggestions to problems that you yourself may be facing in your job. For example, a salesperson of a B2B martech tool may ask – “Why don’t more martech managers want to see product demos?” You may be surprised at the wealth of responses and insights you may get, not to mention engagement.
Last but not least, listen to learn and make your communication more relevant. Listening may even help spot immediate opportunities – often prospects complain about a current vendor or other industry pain points that frustrate or vex them. Joining and participating in groups and community forums is also a tried and tested technique to be where customers are, and mine for insights and opportunities. Don’t underestimate the potential to convert these ‘golden moments’ into business – social engagement is a great tool for salespersons who happen to be in the right place at the right time!
Blending it Together
Strong tag-teaming reflects a strong connection between the company and its salespeople – that’s always compelling for prospective customers,and reassuring for existing customers.
For tag-team social marketing to succeed, it has to be a documented element of your ABM tactics. Track quantifiable outcomes to measure impact on ABM outcomes – number of new connections at must-have accounts, volume and value of new cross or upsell opportunities in existing accounts, relationship strength scores with key influencers etc.
Finally, enrich ABM outcomes by weaving insights from social into your performance marketing, content or event plan. For example, running a targeted outbound search or display campaign to all the new network contacts added by salespersons in a month; creating new content based on the listening insights shared by salespersons, or inviting select prospects for an exclusive C-level interaction based on salesperson relationship score are all tangible ways to drive a more integrated ABM effort. Not only does it help focus precious marketing dollars on very specific targets, it makes the whole of your ABM stronger than any one part.
In a world where customers are making buying decisions based on credibility, trust, and relationships, salespersons (and their managers) should see social not as ‘time spent on social media, but as time invested in high-quality prospecting, relationship building, and value creation for stakeholders in your most valuable accounts.