When it comes to marketing innovation, B2B companies are widely considered to be far behind B2C. However, B2B marketing is catching up every day, creating new and innovative content and finding new ways to spread their brand’s message.
Here are some B2B social media trends we’ve noticed shaking up the internet.
1) Interactive content
When you think of B2B content marketing, you traditionally think of stuffy white papers and complicated blogs. But the best, most attention-grabbing content is interactive – infographic, videos, podcasts, and other nontraditional media forms.
Consider breaking down your blog and repurposing it into a podcast or infographic. Why not summarize it with a quick video? Making B2B content easier to digest meets the needs of your busy target audience and gets your main points across quickly.
2) Answering customer questions
Whether it’s responding to an inquiry in a tweet or writing a full blog post, it’s important to position yourself as an industry educator. Even if your reader has never heard of your company or doesn’t care about your product or service, they care about what’s in it for them.
Becoming the best educator involves answering your customers or future customers questions before they think of them. That way when they find the answer from you, you’ll be at the top of their mind when making their purchasing decision.
3) Documenting your story
While educational content is important, it’s also becoming increasingly necessary to humanize your brand. Tap into the history of your business but focus on the people in your company now. How much do they love their jobs or your product? What kind of company culture activities are you doing to engage your employees?
Whatever it is, document it! Take a video, snap some photos, or livetweet the experience. Trust us – that’s the kind of content people like to engage with on social media! And, once you get them into your sphere it is more likely they will start exploring and noticing more of what you are doing.
4) Chatbots
Chatbots have been hyped up as a new and exciting way of engaging with customers for months now, but they’re just starting to become a functional tool within the B2B sector.
Chatbots are important because they can answer your customers’ questions 24/7 without the need for a human to be on call. Customers making a purchase decision outside normal business hours or in another time zone might have a quick question. And if your competitor has a chatbot to answer it and you don’t, you might be second choice.
5) LinkedIn Direct InMail
Traditionally, LinkedIn is a go-to for B2B businesses hoping to reach their customers. The platform has begun ramping up its paid advertising program and has really delivered with Direct InMail.
With Direct InMail, you can pay to send hyper-targeted messages that appear in your audience’s inbox. And it’s not easily ignored. Sponsored InMail only shows up in a user’s inbox when they’re online.
6) Live Streaming
Remember what we said about documenting your story? Live streaming is a great way to do this. It’s quickly becoming one of the best and easiest ways to capture audience members scrolling through their feed.
In the B2B sector, you can live stream:
- Company events (professional and internal!)
- Question and answer sessions
- Company news and announcements
- Behind the scenes – how your product is made
- Employee interviews/get-to-know-you sessions
We’re living in the future of marketing, and in B2B it’s all about storytelling, connecting with people that have an need and genuine interest in your brand and products, and leveraging that relationship to generate qualified leads. Keep on top of social media trends moving forward and brainstorm new and creative ways you can use technology to get your brand’s message out into the world.
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