Social media has become an inseparable element of 59% of the world’s population. Thanks to the exponential rise of mobile devices and cheaper connectivity, almost every business now has the potential to find its unique customer demographic through social media in 2022.
With every platform having its unique set of characteristics, digital marketers have found specific ways to promote products and services to potential users through social media campaigns. The campaigning knowledge, although vast, bottoms down to some particular frameworks that drive engagement and sales.
Our discussion today will revolve around the unique properties each social media platform holds and how you can leverage those for your B2B and B2C campaigns.
Instagram Marketing
Instagram thrives on graphics. Without high-quality graphics aiding your brand awareness of sales campaigns, you can’t utilize Instagram. In contrast to Facebook and YouTube, Instagram also lets businesses encourage their relevant customers to follow them by following them first and paying for ads.
Get a Business Account
To access the analytics, ads, and other business-centric features, you must have an Instagram Business Account. As it doesn’t require any prerequisites, you can create a new business account for your brand from the start.
With a business account, you get access to:
- Call-to-Action Buttons
- Post and account insights
- Paid ads
It’s okay to be confused when starting with Instagram Business Account analytics and paid ads. But your B2B marketing agency specialized in strategic social media campaigns can help you mitigate the hardship and not lose money in the process.
Generate Stunning Graphics
Instagram was made to share photos and short videos. Therefore, it’s safe to assume that Instagram users love stunning visuals. Give them what they need by leveraging the platform’s visual capabilities. Graphic generation apps like Canva and Crello are great for this purpose.
Build a Brand Theme
Build a fluid theme out of your Instagram business account with the visuals that you post. Consider choosing the brand colors that fit your business and generate graphics out of them. Not having a brand theme makes your followers confused as to whether you resonate with their requirements or not.
Follow Users who Follow Your Competitors
A proven method to increase your initial followers is to follow the interested users first. To find interested users, you may have to peek at your competitor’s Instagram page and see who follows them. Keep following the users that you think have the potential to follow you back. Typically, accounts with a similar ratio of “followers” and “following” are more lenient towards following back.
Use Stories and Reels
Instagram Stories and Reels offer infinite scrolling opportunities to the users like TikTok and YouTube. Although Stories may require you to build followers before you can garner significant engagement, Reels are reliant on algorithms and can reach millions of users without you ever interacting with them.
Generate a lot of interesting and informative graphics, follow the users who follow your competitors, and keep updating content at least 2-4 times a week to solidify your Instagram campaign. Instagram Reels, a newly added short video format, is also quite effective for reaching potential customers.
Facebook Marketing
Despite the decline, Facebook still has more than 2.9 Billion users as of July 2022. And as social media marketing (or any marketing) is heavily dependent on the user base, Facebook is still the most popular social media platform among digital marketers.
If you can disregard Facebook’s latest attempt with the virtual environment, it’s mostly a social media platform that lets users share text, images, and videos. With its users typically being Boomers and Millennials, it somehow has struggled to implement the short video formats that Gen Z prefers.
However, that shouldn’t keep you from including Facebook in your next marketing campaign. Here are some ways you can use Facebook to increase engagement and sales.
Facebook Pages
The first thing that you, as a marketer, want to do is create a Facebook Page. It’s the cornerstone of your Facebook marketing campaigns. Without a page, Facebook wouldn’t allow you to boost your campaigns and interact with other users.
Be mindful to include your business name, details, products, and other relevant attributes on the page. Maintaining a Facebook Page requires that you post regular content related to your business niche and find other accounts for your B2B campaigns to target. With Facebook, you can directly interact with these accounts through messaging, commenting, and other options.
Groups
Facebook Groups are equivalent to online forums that allow users to share and discuss mutual interests. You can create a Facebook Group to implement that to your marketing campaigns. However, as businesses exploit this feature to promote their product or service, most groups are considered nests of spam, but moderated groups can be included in your social media campaign by communicating with moderators about your intentions.
Hashtags
Reaching out to interested prospects has become much easier with the introduction of Hashtags on Facebook. You can include hashtags in your posts by inserting a # before keywords. For instance, if you’re promoting a post about insecticides, including #insecticides can make the post reach potential customers. For new businesses, choosing a hashtag with lower competition is a smarter idea.
Marketplace
Facebook marketplace allows businesses to sell their products and services directly to potential customers. Although it may not be much effective for B2B campaigns, it proves to be profitable for B2C campaigns that focus on end users to generate sales.
Audience Interaction
A number of interactive features are offered by Facebook for businesses. From messenger and comments to share and tags, your marketing campaign can utilize the rich set of functionality to interact with existing and new customers. Most businesses use the comment section to their favor by letting the followers talk about their products and services.
Paid Ads
Several types of paid ad campaigns can be designed on Facebook including brand awareness and lead generation campaigns. As a marketer, you’d be glad to see how easy it is to run paid ads on Facebook than on Google.
YouTube Marketing
YouTube is the largest video-sharing platform that’s used by 2 Billion users monthly. Although the market isn’t untapped, you still can include YouTube in your social media campaigns. Let’s understand how.
Create a Channel
To start with YouTube, you must have a YouTube channel. A channel is a creator account on YouTube that works as your central hub for managing all aspects of it, including uploading, commenting, and deletion. Choose a channel name that works for your business and refrains from using ambiguous names, though it has worked for many marketers.
Upload Quality Content
YouTube uses two types of engagement strategies. One is based on subscriptions (followers), and the other is algorithms. YouTube’s core algorithm ensures that every user is recommended videos that are preferable to them.
Therefore, for marketing purposes, you need to upload contents that are relevant to your users and carry your unique value proposition. Promotional videos, except YouTube Ads, don’t work on this platform. The best approach to utilize YouTube for your marketing campaign is to upload relevant content and leave links in the description for your audience to decide.
Use Keywords
Except for some popular videos that magically appear on the feed, the YouTube algorithm and search work mostly on keywords. If you want to reach potential customers as a business, consider keyword research to generate content. Include the keywords on your video title, description, and subtitles to trigger YouTube to show it to relevant audiences.
TikTok
TikTok, formerly known as Muscial.ly, is the first short video format social media platform that has grown massive. Although most brands in the early days of TikTok found their success unexpectedly, you can utilize its content-driven approach to your benefit.
Despite TikTok trends being mostly random, you can ride the tide by producing the latest content on the trends. Moreover, TikTok also allows showing paid ads to users.
The Bottom Line
B2B marketing through social media may be tough, but it isn’t impossible. If you can utilize the platforms by respecting their individual properties, you can build a marketing campaign that’s effective and profitable. Facebook and YouTube are the most popular social media platforms in terms of the user base, followed by Instagram and TikTok. Develop your paid and non-paid campaigns according to the theme of the social media platforms and see your brand grow in sales and revenue.
