7-Step Social Media Management Strategy for B2B Marketers

Use this 7-step guide to help you plan out your social media marketing strategy. Revamping your whole social media management strategy could be a daunting task, but with Oktopost as your one-stop-shop for social media management, you will get real results fast, easy, and powerful.

Step #1: Set S.M.A.R.T. Social Media Goals to Generate Leads

S.M.A.R.T. is a system that is commonly used in marketing. In this case, we suggest that you apply it to plan and gauge your social media marketing success because, how does that saying go…a goal without a plan is just a wish.

S=Specific. Get as specific as you can with your SM marketing goals. When setting your specific goals, be sure that your goals are the kind that will help you get to your ultimate business objective. In other words, it shouldn’t be about the number of posts or the number of likes, follows, and comments you get on social media. It should be the number of leads that your social media is generating.

To help you define your specific goal for your social media, answer these questions:

• Who is your goal targeted to?
• Where are you going to target them?
• What do you want them to do? What is the purpose of this goal?
• How will you target them?
• When will you take action, and when is the deadline for reaching your goals?
• Which tools do you need to overcome any obstacles to reach your goal?

M=Measurable. If you cannot measure your goal, you cannot know if you have reached it; just ensure that you’re measuring outcomes, not action. For example, measure how many leads your social media should bring you and the minimum social ROI value, not the number of posts you will create or the number of likes, followers, and/or comments you hope to get.

A=Attainable. It’s great to set yourself up for high-reaching goals, but be sure to make your goals close to realistic so you can plan other marketing efforts accordingly. With time, once you A/B test your social media posts, you’ll start to better understand what is and isn’t achievable and then continue to build higher attainable goals based on success.

R=Relevant. Choose a goal that matters. For B2B marketers, a relevant goal is one that has the potential to influence your business objectives, vision, or values.

T=Time-bound. Every goal should have a deadline so that you have a sense of urgency to complete the tasks you need to complete in order to reach your goals. Be realistic when you create a targeted date to accomplish your goals.

Step #2: Identify Social Media Marketing Challenges

Once you identify your goals, you need to do an audit of your social media content to identify what your challenges are. According to the most recent Forrester report, the top three social media challenges for social media marketers are:

1. Finding time
   • Believe us, we know that as a B2B marketing professional time is the one resource that is in the shortest supply. With big-picture strategy, conferences, meetings and creating content, it can be incredibly difficult to find the time to focus on social media. Find a social media management platform where you can do all of your social media marketing in one place to save time.
2. Measuring the Real Social ROI
   • When talking about the challenges of measuring social ROI, B2B marketers should be focused on knowing what posts in social media are bringing them leads and knowing the monetary worth of their efforts–NOT tracking likes, comments, or follows. Knowing the number of likes, comments, or follows is nice, but these fluff KPIs don’t really bring home the bacon. Leads are where you can more accurately see the success of a post. The ROI is not there unless your audience is actually committing.
3. Finding relevant content to curate
   • There is so much content out there, and more every day, that it can be hard to find the right content for your company. Luckily, Oktopost has an excellent content curator engine that finds the best and most relevant articles, blogs and information for your particular business. All you have to do is click and post!

From this point on, you should know that Oktopost solves all three of these challenges.

Step #3: Check Your Valuable Social KPI’s

It’s easy to get lost in a list of social KPIs, but narrowing it down and choosing to focus on one or two targets that bring you success is best. Ask yourself what the purpose of being on social media is in the first place. For B2B marketers, the ultimate social media metric that holds any real value is the leads that you get from social media. As we mentioned above in Step #2, engagement frequency and the number of likes and follows are nice, but they only pump your ego. In other words, it’s not proving to be worth anything, and to get real results, you need to pay attention to what they depend on. Ironically, even though everybody agrees that measuring the real ROI of social media activity, they don’t know how. Here’s your answer…use Oktopost. (WARNING: Do not depend on Google Analytics for this data. We love them, but their data is limited when it comes to the social conversion metric.)

Step #4: Listen and Engage Aggressively

Listen to:

• Your audience and competitors
• To your keywords, your the hashtags your target audience uses, and the hashtags your competitors use

Engage:

• Give timely, helpful, and meaningful replies in social media networks, forums, and blog post comments. Now when we say to do this aggressively, we mean don’t just do this to the people talking directly to you. Hunt people out on the net who are looking for answers in social media, forums, and blog posts. For example, if you are a B2B company, find people who are talking about “B2B” in Twitter by searching and following “B2B” and then answering them with helpful answers.
• Suggest CTA’s with a relevant link. (NOTE: With Oktopost, the link can point to any website and you will still be able to track the lead if they convert later.)

Listening and engaging alone can take up a huge portion of time. Being done in each network separately is not productive and is totally unnecessary. Your social media manager will be the most efficient and effective by using a social media management tool where they can listen and engage in multiple streams at once. We recommend Oktopost, of course.

Step #5: Setup Social Media Editorial Calendar

Each social media network has different limitations, with different etiquettes in voice and an optimal number of posts per day. Be a part of each community accordingly. Other tips to keep in mind when posting in social media:

• Posts should be about 30% your content and 70% curated content that is helpful for your target audience, which should include links to blog posts, tutorial videos, news articles, press releases, white-papers, webinars, events, and so on. Even if your social link does not point directly to your website, Oktopost can still track your social leads and their social activity.
• Be sure to always have an image accompany the text. With Oktopost, you can add an image, if the link does not have one associated with it.
• Use Oktopost’s Content Curator Engine to scour the web for you according to the interests and topics that you decide, making high-quality content curation faster, easier, and more relevant to your needs. You can filter out keywords, like mentions of your competitors, to avoid accidentally promoting a post that’s not good for your business.
• Use Oktopost’s Smart Autopost Engine or use the Controlled Queue to post as many posts as you want, on as many profiles as you want. Instantly.

Step #6: Expand Your Reach Exponentially

Every social media marketer’s dream is to have their post go viral. The truth of the matter is, in B2B marketing, it’s not that simple. Even if your post is super helpful and well-written, it can get lost in the matrix of content posted daily. But what if you have access to thousands of employees, distributors, partners, and other friendly entities? Are you utilizing them to share your content? If not, you could be missing out on making everyone your company’s personal evangelist. With Oktopost, you can easily have your savvy marketing team create pre-approved posts and pin them to the company’s Advocacy Board, and with one click, they can easily amplify your reach with trackable links to the leads they bring to you.

Step #7: Rinse and Repeat

Your work as a B2B marketer is never done, but today, you have the tools to accomplish more in less time.  Oktopost is rated the fastest to set up compared to Buer, Tweetdeck, and Hootsuite, so what stops you from getting started today?

Overall, Oktopost allows you to manage all of your social media strategy steps in one place.

Some of the key features that Oktopost entails include:

• Enhance the value of your marketing automation and CRM platforms with Oktopost’s deep integration.
• Know the monetary value of your Social ROI
• Track social conversions
• Lead Capture
• Amplify your brand reach with the advocacy board

Put these social media strategies to the test. Start tracking your social leads, measuring your social ROI, and getting social media management to work for you with our free trial.