Prohibition’S B2B Social Media Team
Our B2B social media marketing services are designed to get your brand in front of the key decision-makers for your target audience.
Our team of LinkedIn specialists will help to create a bespoke strategy, encompassing both organic and paid social media marketing, to leverage your brand and help drive the results you’re after..
Prohibition B2B will work with you to drive best practice so that together we can secure real business results.
What is B2B social media marketing?
B2B stands for business-to-business. B2B social media marketing is where a brand uses its social channels to market its products/services to prospective clients.
B2B social media marketing is rapidly becoming a crucial aspect of brands’ marketing strategies. In fact, social media now accounts for 12.6% of B2B marketing budgets – a figure that is only set to rise.
Not only this, 84% of B2B executives say they source information on social media before purchase, meaning a strong presence across social media platforms is vital for B2B brands to thrive.
How is B2B Social Media different from B2C?
The primary difference between B2B and B2C marketing is in their audiences and how they communicate to them. B2C marketing often focuses on fun, engaging and enjoyable content. On the other hand, B2B marketing centres around building relationships with key decision-makers and providing content that will be beneficial to professionals.
While B2C marketing centres around emotion, B2B marketing is all about logic – a brand needs to communicate its product/service, features, and how it’ll help its organisation. There is little to no personal emotion involved in the B2B purchasing decision, so instead brands need to focus on marketing the informational and educational messages that will resonate with their targets.
B2C VS B2B Sales Approach
While many B2C brands use social media for the objective of driving sales and brand awareness, B2B marketing is more likely to centre around lead generation and driving purchase consideration. The B2B buying process is very different from B2C. In B2C brands, the customer is the decision-maker. But with B2B companies, the decision-maker is often not a single person; there are multiple layers of approval required before a purchase is made, such as accounting, procurement, and heads of several departments.
Therefore, B2B marketing must be much more strategic in its approach; marketers need to consider how to use social media platforms to nurture relationships that have the opportunity to convert to large contracts.
How can B2B social media marketing help your brand?
B2B social media marketing opens the door for your brand to position itself in front of exactly who you want to be targeting. In fact, 84% of C-level and VP-level buyers are influenced by social media during their purchasing journey.
On top of this, it’s estimated that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions will occur on digital channels.
Social media marketing, and paid social advertising, support B2B businesses in reducing their sales cycle, as well as engaging existing and potential customers better. In short, social media can help your brand identify prospects, position your products or services in front of these prospects, nurture the relationship, and convert these leads into sales.
Why social media marketing is important for B2B businesses
-
- Helps maintain a positive reputation
- Offers valuable insights on your audience
- Establishes you as a thought leader
- Engages with stakeholders
- Helps support your overall branding experience
- Creates qualified leads
- Connects your wider marketing efforts for multichannel lead generation
- Drives traffic to your website
Influencer Marketing
As a B2B business, ensuring there’s an influx of high-quality leads is integral to growth. A good way to develop the quality of these leads is through a solid-proof influencer marketing strategy.
We know influencers bring an added level of trust, reach, and brand advocacy to social communities – so why not use these to bring a stronger level of lead to your B2B business? By building higher levels of brand awareness and trust amongst your audience, you’re able to push prospects further down the funnel.
Influencer marketing can range from guest bloggers, social media influencers, or brand endorsements to promote your B2B brand and support your wider marketing campaigns. For every campaign, we make sure the influencer is matched with the brand’s audience and goals to ensure maximum effectiveness.
Business growth is achieved when reaching the right audience at the right time on the right platform – and rest assured we will achieve that.
Paid social advertising
Paid media supports your social media campaigns to reach a wider and more targeted audience.
By running paid ads, we can re-engage users that might have seen your brand before and not interacted with your brand or people who haven’t and convert them. Paid media ads can target stakeholders based on locations, demographics, or behaviour’s to build a selling persona of your audience.
This can help B2B brands by targeting job titles or specific industries for instance; health, retail, public sector, food, and many more. This can provide greater clarity to stakeholders on your projects, services, or products that sometimes-organic content can’t reach.
LinkedIn is a great social media channel to be active on as it has a professional and business audience – which proves even more beneficial for LinkedIn ads. We’ve done this for leading luxury botanical drink brand Fentimans, through a B2B lead-gen paid advertising and integrated marketing communications campaign to target key buyers in the hospitality industry.
This campaign had gone beyond anything Fentimans had done before and was a CIPR 2022 award-winning Cooperate and Business Communications Campaign. If you’re looking for a B2B social media agency that can create the same award-winning results for you – then you’ve come to the right place!
B2B social media channels
Although you won’t be able to directly drive sales from social media as a B2B brand, it can be used to reach your marketing goals by building long-lasting relationships and an online presence. Here are the key channels:
TikTok
This might be thought of as a B2C channel, but this is extremely useful for B2B brands as it rewards accounts for quality content rather than large fan bases. So, whether you’re looking for lead-gen or brand awareness – through quality content you can achieve leads for your B2B brand.
Meta
Meta is the biggest social media platform out of these, and its cross-channel ad experience makes for a seamless lead-gen experience.
And if your B2B brand hasn’t delved into the metaverse yet, then you should consider it. The metaverse encompasses virtual realities, which offer a customer experience like no other platform.
YouTube
Video can educate and inspire your audiences about your products in a much more watchable and engaging way, especially on YouTube.
Its long-form and short-form (YouTube Shorts) is one of the most used social platforms and is already used by 42% of B2B marketers.
Instagram is great for interacting with new communities in any industry in the B2B space.
It’s image and video content format make it easy to share social media content and Instagram Reels also heighten the reach of content – making it really effective for brand awareness and product exposure.
LinkedIn is the holy grail of B2B social media marketing, it’s the largest online professional platform. As a B2B brand, you’re appealing to other businesses rather than consumers and this is where they will be.
To create even more sales opportunities, your social media content can be amplified further with ads to enhance performance marketing.
Twitter gives the opportunity for B2B brands to share information and respond back to prospects in real-time.
It’s a great way of showing you’re working with other businesses, charities, or partnerships to help shape a positive employer brand and nurture leads down the funnel through community engagement.
How To Build A B2B Social Media Strategy?
Creating a solid B2B social media strategy is a crucial first step in ensuring success. Despite this, 24% of social media marketers say the biggest challenge their business faces with social media is not having a formal strategy.
A social media strategy needs to answer the questions of “why”, “who” and “how”. No brand should be on social media “just because”, so it’s important to know why you’re doing this and what you want to achieve – awareness, reputation, qualified leads?
You also need to consider exactly who your audience is. Brands are increasingly adopting a customer-centred approach and B2B companies are no exception to this. By working out your audience, you can then start to think about the “hows” – how you’re going to get your message across and achieve your brand goals. This “how” stage includes everything from which social media channels to use, the content to create, and how you’ll measure success.
Find out further information on developing a social media strategy for your brand.
Creative content marketing
In order to create scroll stopping content, creative should be at the heart of your content marketing strategy.
We’re a full-service creative agency that houses specialists who can create content across a multitude of video and image formats such as animations, social media graphics, and ad creative production.
The B2B sector can be a highly competitive field with many businesses fighting with other operators to promote their services. To get a competitive edge, video is a good way of advocating a product or service using a key company figure, influencer, or customer to communicate authentic messages that a stand-alone graphic can’t replicate.
Community management
In the B2B market, community engagement and management are key to building a loyal community of stakeholders and buyers.
Community management can be built through effective digital marketing, business marketing, public relations, email marketing, and social media strategies to create networking opportunities that then blossom into prospects.
Not only can connecting with other businesses create business marketing opportunities but using review sites or collecting regular feedback on social media can help to build a trusting reputation for your B2B brand – which is one of the first things businesses are going to look for when wanting to work with a B2B brand. They’re not going off sales units or following, they’re looking at brand reputation and the value you can bring to their business.
This is also really important for search engine optimization or SEO- as these point more positive search signals to your brand – which Google likes.
The importance of social media advertising in SEO
Just because your social media posts don’t include direct backlinks doesn’t mean that it doesn’t provide SEO value.
This is a wrong conception; search engines will recognise high-quality content from your social marketing campaigns – as it shows you have expertise and authority in your specialism.
The more people speaking about your social campaigns in a positive way online, the more signals that’s sending to crawlers (the tech that indexes and ranks your website SEO) that your content is helpful to audiences. Also, many social media apps can be accessed on desktop on mobile, meaning search results will also come up for that content. That’s without positive press attention on your campaigns, which could result in backlinks from news publications or bloggers mentioning your campaign online.
Remember if you’re investing in a B2B social strategy, then also invest in web development to ensure your website is optimised in order to direct users to a working page – otherwise users will bounce.
Google likes high-quality content whether it’s on social media channels or on website content.
B2B Lead Generation
A core element of Prohibition’s offering is the use of social media marketing for lead generation. We utilise LinkedIn’s sophisticated targeting capabilities to position your brand in front of key decision-makers and generate leads for your sales team.
We will develop a campaign that incorporates ‘added-value’ content that will encourage your target audience to provide their data for you to input into your CRM database.
By installing a pixel on your website, our lead generation campaigns are designed specifically to nurture your targets through the sales funnel through a complex retargeting paid campaign.
Account-based marketing (ABM)
Account-Based Marketing is a laser-focused approach to B2B marketing, that concentrates its efforts on a set of target accounts, to engage with them and nurture them through the sales funnel. ABM shortens the duration of the sales funnel by increasing the involvement of marketing.
We utilise LinkedIn’s sophisticated targeting capabilities to deliver this approach, positioning your brand in front of key decision makers to generate leads for your sales team. Through complex retargeting campaigns, we’re able to offer a personalised approach for each of your targets, no matter where abouts in the sales funnel they sit.
With our ABM marketing offering, you’re able to identify your targets, personalise the marketing experience for each of these and ultimately allow your sales team to convert the leads.
Prohibition’s B2B social media packages
Our B2B social media services include:
Social media strategy – analysing your brand’s current social media presence, compared with your key competitors, and developing a bespoke strategy to help your brand achieve its business objectives via social media.
Account-based marketing –we will develop a focused social media marketing strategy to target specific key contacts in your industry and nurture these through the sales funnel.
Creative solutions – the way to truly get people excited about your content is through creative assets. As a full-service agency, we have the marketing strategies to ensure success and the specialists to bring your campaigns to life.
Bespoke training – we will work with you and your team to identify the areas you’re keen to develop, before creating a bespoke training package and deliver this to your team either in person or virtually.
Online reputation management for businesses – managing your reputation is critical for your business or brand. Reputation management involves a combination of social media management, content marketing and public relations to take control of how you’re seen online.
B2B Social Media Marketing and PR
Whilst you might not be able to achieve direct sales from our social media marketing communications, a B2B marketing strategy is all about identifying opportunities, positioning the product to attract these prospects, then building stronger relationships to push them further down the sales funnel.
This is the value that PR and social media brings, especially together. They’re both really useful for brand positioning, as you’re distributing your brand messages to the media that are then seen by larger yet targeted audiences. Especially when your B2B brand is mentioned in high-authoritative news publications related to your industry, which will position you as a market leader to your target audience.
Relevance is key – and we only create campaigns relevant to your audience. Through integrated PR and social media, you’re able to achieve, greater brand awareness and positioning to truly place your B2B brand as the ‘go-to’ operator in your field.
Integrated Social Media and Marketing Services
We’re not like other social media agencies, we dedicate ourselves to B2B social media marketing, as well as take a fully integrated approach to our services.
This means as a full-service marketing agency we’re able to combine the world’s of social media advertising, paid media, PR, influencer, event and content marketing to achieve real business growth.
Not only this, but we’re able to link offline and online marketing with our social media services to reach your B2B audience wherever they may be.
Why Prohibition PR?
One of the North’s Leading Social and Marketing Agencies
It’s only right that you want to work with an agency that are industry specialists and we’re exactly that.
We may look like an average UK based agency, but we’ve bagged over 45 awards, including Best Use of B2B PR at the PRCA Awards 2022.
We also work with some of world’s biggest brands in the B2B sector including C4, Kurt Geiger, and Autoglym.
Long-lasting B2B social media and marketing experience
We’ve been working in the B2B social media space for 10+ years, building a wealth of B2B marketing knowledge and experience in that time.
Our team have lots of experience of working with B2B brands, especially our Founders and Directors Chris Norton and Will Ockenden who collectively have worked in the B2B industry for 50+ years – they will be directly working on your account.
Offering ‘always-on’ support and marketing solutions
There’s no greater compliment than when a client classes us as an extension of their team – and that’s exactly what we are.
When you work with a full-service agency you have access to a team full of paid social, organic social, creative, PR and media relations experts; whether that’s for strategic consulting, business intelligence, or campaign management.
If you want a general chat for advice on the best way to optimise your B2B social media marketing strategy, don’t be afraid to get in contact for a free strategy call with one of our experts.
