B2B sales are getting more competitive in today’s era. B2B sales take more time and efforts over B2C sales and one of the reasons behind this is B2C companies are getting their brand on social media. Social media has become a vital part of your lives and now it is necessary for your companies also. B2B companies still believe in building relationship through offline marketing channels, which is good but to remain ahead of others, it’s the time that one must consider of taking his business on social media. In-fact, using social media for your B2B sales generation should be considered as a top priority.
Social media marketing cannot be ignored over cold calling and other lead generation methods to get better results. You must make the most of the huge opportunities that are provided by social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Read this article to find out amazing ways to use social media for your B2B sales generation.
Buying Pattern has Changed
Gone are the days, when people were just following brands those used to offer products at cheaper rates. Now people are working smarter and living life in a smarter way. They won’t buy anything from you until are completely satisfied. Yes, before approaching to you, they will first refer your site or read about your products on the internet. Also, your targeted audience will scan through the reviews provided by your current customers on different social media platforms. Nowadays, people are ready to pay a bit extra, if you provide them value for their money.
Why consider social media for your B2B sales?
There are many reasons that one shall consider social media for gaining more sales but to make it easy to understand I’ll provide you the information in numbers.
(i) 56% of B2B marketers have rated YouTube as an important media for their overall success.
(ii) At present, 9/10 B2B companies are using LinkedIn.
(iii) 74% of B2B marketing companies are making use of Twitter to distribute their content.
Source: Content Marketing Institute
Thus, you can see in order to survive in today’s digitally competitive world you must need to take your business on social media platforms.
Related: Social Media Trends For 2019 That All Businesses Need To Follow
Ways to use Social Media for B2B sales are :
Before getting started, I want all the B2B companies to take a note that you are not a boring company. Don’t know why many companies consider themselves as a boring one and hence, they avoid getting into online business. It is nothing like only the beauty products and clothes are considered as cool to promote on social media channels. Instead, any product or service that helps people can be advertised and sold through online platforms. Let’s see how to do so.
1. Create an Effective Profile
The first step to generate sales is to create an effective business profile that can convince your audience to stop by you and find out your offerings. By this, I simply mean of creating a well-versed web site, incorporating call-to-action buttons, making contact form easily accessible, proper internal linking on your website and of course make your value proposition.
Think from the website visitor’s perspective. If they don’t know how to reach to your business, then how would they ever become your lead? Thus, landing pages need to be created with special attention and let’s see how you can do so:
For Facebook :
(A) Create a business page –
Creating a business page is very easy, but remember you create a page by your business name. Make sure you use the name that is easy for the customers to remember so that they can associate with your business. This will help in building brand recognition and this business name will also let you know whether or not your Facebook business page is shown in search engine results. Make sure that your business name and its URL match.
(B) Create Vanity URL :
A vanity URL is a customized address for your Facebook business page. As soon as you get 25 likes for your business page, you become eligible for the Vanity URL.
Facebook business page URL: https://www.facebook.com/pages/MilesWeb/1564789506
Facebook business page Vanity URL: https://www.facebook.com/MilesWeb.
From this, you can see that vanity URL looks cleaner and is easy to understand also. Although most of the people call this custom URL as Vanity URL, Facebook calls them as usernames.
• Call-To-Action Button :
Facebook allows adding CTA button to your business page. It provides seven options for CTAs and they are Book Now, Contact US, Use App, Play Game, Shop Now, Sign Up and Watch Video. The best part about these buttons is, you are allowed to link buttons to your business website. Make sure that you send your visitors to informative pages like contact sales, trial form, deals, and coupons page, etc.
• About Page :
Facebook allows the business to place their information such as an address, phone number, hours of operation, a brief summary of the business, etc. Make sure that you fill all this information correctly as it helps users to know about you and also, boost the pages SEO value.
For Twitter :
• Bio :
Your bio must be compelling and inventing rather than a funny one. Create your story in 160 characters that make others view your profile and make them learn more about you.
• Profile / Header :
For B2B companies their profile picture must comprise of their logo considering its color, size, font and how it looks on different devices.
On the other hand, your header image must be something that matches with your business line.
For the header image, you can use the banner of the product, offers, and discounts, new products, etc.
• Pinned Tweets :
You can pin important tweets to the top of the feeds so that visitors can easily view it. For lead generation purpose you can pin a tweet containing CTA with a link to your business site.
• Hashtags :
Tweets with hashtags have the ability to generate 2x more engagement than Tweets without hashtags. But make sure that you use only relevant hashtags because too many hashtags may give a spammy look. Use such hashtags that people use to search for your products.
Along with Facebook and Twitter, other social media platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. also help to generate sales by making the most of their features.
2. Create an Effective Content
Content marketing is the heart of social media. Content has the power to keep your visitors engaged with your website for a longer time. Preparing content in a way to generate leads is a challenging job but if done properly, it also boosts up the SEO ranking of your website.
Related: Top 23 Content Marketing Statistics That Will Rule 2019
Gated content helps to generate leads by asking users to fill a form with their information such as name, address, email id, phone number, etc. If you just want to create brand awareness then offering content with a gate is a better strategy. Content without gate allows visitors to access the content without filling any form or providing any information. Thus, gating a content need to be done right because even now most of the people are uncomfortable in providing their information.
An effective content also means the information explaining your product and guiding visitors about it.
3. Use the real figure
Most of the B2B companies use robots to deliver information about them. This mostly is a case in the manufacturing sector where a genuine human doesn’t take the efforts to carry a heavy workload.
Every B2B needs some human efforts to create a genuine bond and this can be done by :
Using a real person with his name for the customer service purpose.
Using humans to initiate conversation and to outreach in the market.
Using human voice at the inquiry panel.
4. Giveaway
Social media contest is the best way to expand the reach of your business and to create hype about it. You can run a contest by offering some giveaway to the most entertaining prospect.
Paid advertisements are good away to create a buzz about your contest. Make sure it looks tempting so that large audience gets convinced. But avoid doing the vague advertisement just to entertain the readers because then the contest will be able to carry leads but won’t be able to generate sales. Hence, target only those people and platforms that you think are genuine and helpful to your business. For running a successful contest and attracting the genuine audience, you can limit the participants depending on your content and business needs.
For example: If you are running a coding competition for C++ then limit the participants by mentioning only those can participate having 2years of C++ working knowledge or by asking them to write a code while filling a participation form. This is the best way to filter out the genuine and useful audience.
Aren’t these easy but helpful ways?
Many of the times, we don’t know how to utilize the platforms that are available for us. We all use social media in our day to day lives but we don’t think of making it useful beyond just posting our personal photos, videos, etc.
Closure
We all know that selling to other business is a tough job, but you can make it way easy with the help of social media. You may need to do lots of testing through trial and error methods but once you hit the bullseye after that there won’t be anything stopping you. Take your business to the next level and start generating your B2B sales. So what tip are you going to use today?
