This blog post was written by Kathy Floam-Greenspan.
Now, more than ever, everyone is on social.
With over 302 million users and a 91% market penetration, social media connects most people across a vibrant ecosystem.
They spend a lot of time there. The average person dedicates nearly 2.5 hours daily on social media platforms, a number that has increased almost every year since 2012. Collectively, users invest an eye-popping 4 trillion hours on social media annually.
Since social media is where the proverbial party is, it’s no wonder that 95 percent of B2B marketers rely on it as a central part of their marketing strategy.
They’ve found a receptive audience.
Ninety percent of social media users follow at least one brand on social media, proving that consumers prefer direct connections with brands and making social media an essential component of cultivating customer relationships and brand loyalty.
When implemented effectively, the results can be incredible. One survey found that 75 percent of B2B buyers use social media to help make buying decisions.
Social media is a crowded and fast-moving space, requiring B2B brands to be strategic and agile in their approach.
Here are five secrets to success in B2B social so your brand can capture attention and foster meaningful engagement with your customers.
1. Pick the Right Platform
The average person uses 6.7 social media accounts every month, making it difficult to reach the right people in the right place and at the right time.
Knowing where to reach your audience is a critical first step in an effective B2B social media strategy.
B2B marketing often starts on LinkedIn, where 93 percent of B2B content marketers leverage the platform for social media marketing, making it a significant lead generator for many B2B brands.
LinkedIn is ideal for businesses focusing on B2B marketing. It offers opportunities to connect with decision-makers and publish niche content tailored to a specific audience.
According to LinkedIn’s own survey data, 40 percent of B2B marketers say LinkedIn is the most effective channel for driving high-quality leads.
However, LinkedIn isn’t the only social media platform for B2B marketing.
For instance, Gartner reports that 70 percent of B2B buyers use Facebook when making purchasing decisions, while 62 percent turn to YouTube.
Undoubtedly, the right platform will look different depending on your industry and target audience, but prioritizing a few of the most important platforms is a better strategy than trying to be everything to everyone all the time.
2. Prioritize the Right Content
Social media users don’t just care about what information you share. They care about how you share it.
As a Forbes analysis succinctly explains, “Both brevity and authenticity are winning the day on social media, with short-form videos—typically less than a minute—capturing the attention of 66% of consumers.”
High-quality, short-form videos are a great place to start. When paired with compelling carousels, striking photography, and personal stories, B2B brands can effectively engage their audiences across platforms.
Most importantly, avoid constantly posting sales material. Instead, create valuable social media content that your audience wants to engage with, and let your audience grow from there.
3. Present the Right Vibe
Social media platforms are still, as their name suggests, social institutions.
As a result, people don’t just want information. They want to make connections, even with brands.
Therefore, don’t only publish long-form content and problem-solving posts. When posting, be sure to:
Be relatable: Share stories and experiences that resonate with your audience, showing that your brand understands and reflects their values and daily lives.
Be authentic: Let your brand’s personality shine through in every post, whether through behind-the-scenes content, team introductions, or sharing your brand’s mission and vision.
Be interactive: Encourage engagement and monitor accounts for near real-time follow-up when people comment or engage with your posts.
A dedicated social media person is critical to striking the right tone and presenting the right vibe. This person should have an excellent awareness of each platform’s strengths and limitations while ensuring audience engagement is always at the top of their minds.
4. Provide the Right Value
Social media isn’t second-tier content for casual consumption. It should be high-quality, compelling information that is valuable, relevant, and engaging to your target audience.
This might include links to informative articles accompanied by helpful commentary, entertaining videos that convey your brand’s personality, and eye-catching graphics that break down complex information.
This is important for engaging your audience today and growing your audience tomorrow.
When people find your content engaging and valuable, they are more likely to share it with their network, amplifying your reach, expanding your lead generation potential, and building your brand reputation as a thought leader in your sector.
It’s multiplied marketing that doesn’t increase costs while activating your audience to become more engaged buyers and better brand ambassadors.
5. Pivot at the Right Time
Social media trends come and go, and today’s captivating strategies are tomorrow’s cringe content.
Don’t let your social media strategy grow stagnant.
Stay informed on the latest trends, solicit feedback from your audience, and innovate boldly, recognizing that social media is a dynamic ecosystem where experimentation is often rewarded, and stagnation is the worst outcome.
Put differently, feel free to try new things, experiment, and pivot your strategy as you determine what works and what does not.
Pomerantz Marketing Supports Your Social
Social media isn’t just for influencers and celebrities. It’s a valuable part of any brand’s B2B marketing strategy, allowing you to connect with customers, share your story, and build brand loyalty.
It can be difficult to cut through the noise in a crowded social ecosystem, but you don’t have to do it alone.
Pomerantz Marketing is your social partner. From strategy and branding to content creation and social media management, we are here to help you develop online strategies and campaigns that enable leading companies to engage with prospective customers, strategic partners, employees, and recruits on various social media platforms.
Connect with us today to learn how we can help you make social a central (and impactful) part of your B2B marketing strategy.
5 Ways to Make Your B2B Social Media Strategy a Success
/in Featured, Marketing, Strategic MarketingThis blog post was written by Kathy Floam-Greenspan.
Now, more than ever, everyone is on social.
With over 302 million users and a 91% market penetration, social media connects most people across a vibrant ecosystem.
They spend a lot of time there. The average person dedicates nearly 2.5 hours daily on social media platforms, a number that has increased almost every year since 2012. Collectively, users invest an eye-popping 4 trillion hours on social media annually.
Since social media is where the proverbial party is, it’s no wonder that 95 percent of B2B marketers rely on it as a central part of their marketing strategy.
They’ve found a receptive audience.
Ninety percent of social media users follow at least one brand on social media, proving that consumers prefer direct connections with brands and making social media an essential component of cultivating customer relationships and brand loyalty.
When implemented effectively, the results can be incredible. One survey found that 75 percent of B2B buyers use social media to help make buying decisions.
Social media is a crowded and fast-moving space, requiring B2B brands to be strategic and agile in their approach.
Here are five secrets to success in B2B social so your brand can capture attention and foster meaningful engagement with your customers.
1. Pick the Right Platform
The average person uses 6.7 social media accounts every month, making it difficult to reach the right people in the right place and at the right time.
Knowing where to reach your audience is a critical first step in an effective B2B social media strategy.
B2B marketing often starts on LinkedIn, where 93 percent of B2B content marketers leverage the platform for social media marketing, making it a significant lead generator for many B2B brands.
LinkedIn is ideal for businesses focusing on B2B marketing. It offers opportunities to connect with decision-makers and publish niche content tailored to a specific audience.
According to LinkedIn’s own survey data, 40 percent of B2B marketers say LinkedIn is the most effective channel for driving high-quality leads.
However, LinkedIn isn’t the only social media platform for B2B marketing.
For instance, Gartner reports that 70 percent of B2B buyers use Facebook when making purchasing decisions, while 62 percent turn to YouTube.
Undoubtedly, the right platform will look different depending on your industry and target audience, but prioritizing a few of the most important platforms is a better strategy than trying to be everything to everyone all the time.
2. Prioritize the Right Content
Social media users don’t just care about what information you share. They care about how you share it.
As a Forbes analysis succinctly explains, “Both brevity and authenticity are winning the day on social media, with short-form videos—typically less than a minute—capturing the attention of 66% of consumers.”
High-quality, short-form videos are a great place to start. When paired with compelling carousels, striking photography, and personal stories, B2B brands can effectively engage their audiences across platforms.
Most importantly, avoid constantly posting sales material. Instead, create valuable social media content that your audience wants to engage with, and let your audience grow from there.
3. Present the Right Vibe
Social media platforms are still, as their name suggests, social institutions.
As a result, people don’t just want information. They want to make connections, even with brands.
Therefore, don’t only publish long-form content and problem-solving posts. When posting, be sure to:
Be relatable: Share stories and experiences that resonate with your audience, showing that your brand understands and reflects their values and daily lives.
Be authentic: Let your brand’s personality shine through in every post, whether through behind-the-scenes content, team introductions, or sharing your brand’s mission and vision.
Be interactive: Encourage engagement and monitor accounts for near real-time follow-up when people comment or engage with your posts.
A dedicated social media person is critical to striking the right tone and presenting the right vibe. This person should have an excellent awareness of each platform’s strengths and limitations while ensuring audience engagement is always at the top of their minds.
4. Provide the Right Value
Social media isn’t second-tier content for casual consumption. It should be high-quality, compelling information that is valuable, relevant, and engaging to your target audience.
This might include links to informative articles accompanied by helpful commentary, entertaining videos that convey your brand’s personality, and eye-catching graphics that break down complex information.
This is important for engaging your audience today and growing your audience tomorrow.
When people find your content engaging and valuable, they are more likely to share it with their network, amplifying your reach, expanding your lead generation potential, and building your brand reputation as a thought leader in your sector.
It’s multiplied marketing that doesn’t increase costs while activating your audience to become more engaged buyers and better brand ambassadors.
5. Pivot at the Right Time
Social media trends come and go, and today’s captivating strategies are tomorrow’s cringe content.
Don’t let your social media strategy grow stagnant.
Stay informed on the latest trends, solicit feedback from your audience, and innovate boldly, recognizing that social media is a dynamic ecosystem where experimentation is often rewarded, and stagnation is the worst outcome.
Put differently, feel free to try new things, experiment, and pivot your strategy as you determine what works and what does not.
Pomerantz Marketing Supports Your Social
Social media isn’t just for influencers and celebrities. It’s a valuable part of any brand’s B2B marketing strategy, allowing you to connect with customers, share your story, and build brand loyalty.
It can be difficult to cut through the noise in a crowded social ecosystem, but you don’t have to do it alone.
Pomerantz Marketing is your social partner. From strategy and branding to content creation and social media management, we are here to help you develop online strategies and campaigns that enable leading companies to engage with prospective customers, strategic partners, employees, and recruits on various social media platforms.
Connect with us today to learn how we can help you make social a central (and impactful) part of your B2B marketing strategy.
How to Use Competitor Insights to Level Up Your B2B Marketing in 2024
/in Featured, Marketing, Strategic MarketingThis blog post is written by Kathy Floam-Greenspan and appears on the Forbes Agency Council. You can read the full post here.
Successful B2B brands are intensely focused on their customers, and they should be. After all, without a thriving customer base, brands will struggle to build and maintain thriving, sustainable companies that succeed. However, brands can’t afford to ignore the other part of the successful company equation: the competition.
Competitor analysis—the process of identifying your competition and researching their products, tactics and communication strategies—allows brands to better understand the competition, enabling their success in the process.
This doesn’t mean brands should lose sight of what they did well. Rather, competitive market research contextualizes their offerings to identify paths to differentiation, not emulation.
Let’s make it more personal.
Competitor analysis isn’t about replicating what your peers are doing. When implemented effectively, competitor analysis creates opportunities for original marketing strategies highlighting your product or service’s unique value proposition.
Here are three things every B2B brand can learn from competitor insights that allow them to level up their marketing in 2024 and beyond.
1. Product or Service Positioning
Many products or services seem revolutionary when they are in development. Of course, promise and potential are very different from actual consumer impact…
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B2Bs: 5 Questions to Ask When Shaping Your 2024 Marketing Plan
/in Featured, Marketing, Strategic MarketingThis blog post is written by Kathy Floam-Greenspan and appears on the Forbes Agency Council. You can read the full post here.
As we approach a new year, it’s time for companies to reflect on their marketing strategies and sales outcomes.
The past 12 months have been uniquely disruptive, so these efforts can be especially fraught, as identifying patterns, trends and best practices from an atypical time can be incredibly difficult.
Many companies know they will (slightly) increase their marketing budgets, incorporate generative AI, and accommodate the latest B2B buy preferences. They are much less sure about how they will achieve this.
Asking the right questions can help illuminate shortcomings, opportunities and strategic steps marketers can take to elevate results in the year ahead.
Here are five essential questions to ask to elevate your 2024 B2B marketing plan.
1. What does my sales team say?
Marketing and PR should support sales outcomes. These teams should work in tandem, collaborating to better connect with customers and drive sales outcomes. In this regard, content is king…
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5 B2B Lead Generation Ideas to Fill Up Your Sales Pipeline
/in Featured, Marketing, Strategic MarketingThis blog post is written by Kathy Floam-Greenspan and appears on the Forbes Agency Council. You can read the full post here.
Lead generation as a concept is simple: Find buyers with a problem and provide a product or service that solves that problem. When your brand is a good fit, your leads will convert to buyers, bolstering your bottom line and enabling business growth.
If only it were that easy. Lead generation can be incredibly difficult, as any sales or marketing professional will tell you. Many rank lead generation among the most pressing business challenges, allocating significant financial and personnel resources to generating new leads.
However, quantity and quality are not synonymous. Effective lead generation isn’t just about volume. Inundating sales teams with low-quality leads can be debilitating and counterproductive.
Rather, effective lead generation is about leveraging the right strategies to generate high-quality leads that convert. Here are my top five ways to identify and engage with these high-quality leads.
1. Provide Useful Content
Content marketing works. It allows you to promote your products and services while providing value to an eager audience…
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A Marketing Blueprint For Scaling Your Small SaaS Business Effectively
/in Featured, Marketing, Strategic MarketingThis blog post is written by Kathy Floam-Greenspan and appears on the Forbes Agency Council. You can read the full post here.
As many companies tighten their belts and conserve financial resources, some budget categories, including software and IT services, continue expanding. This trend has continued mostly unabated for over the past decade, soaring during the Covid-19 pandemic and continuing to escalate in the following years, totaling more than $783 billion in 2022.
Small software as a service (SaaS) companies looking to reach bigger audiences and broader verticals with their high-quality products and services can capitalize on this trend. However, a significant gap often exists between ambition and new customer acquisition, requiring companies to take strategic steps to grow and expand at scale.
While a haphazard expansion can cause growth companies to stall out, a well-planned rollout can provide fertile ground for small SaaS companies to grow.
Here is our proven marketing blueprint for taking a SaaS business to the next level.
1. Research & Test Vertical Markets
Taking a SaaS small business to the next level requires a better understanding of your existing customers and the vertical markets where you want to expand. Penetrating these markets requires a blend of data-driven insights and customer understanding…
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How To Transform B2B Engagement With Video Marketing
/in Featured, Marketing, Strategic MarketingThis blog post is written by Kathy Floam-Greenspan and appears on the Forbes Agency Council. You can read the full post here.
Almost one-third of Americans say they are online “almost constantly,” scrolling through social media feeds, scanning headlines and responding to Slack messages.
Even a decade ago, when the web was much less widespread and smartphones were just achieving mass market appeal, the average American consumed more than 100,000 words daily between print and web content. That’s almost a quarter of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a famously verbose text. Today, this total is undoubtedly higher.
People are awash in text, swimming in an ocean of words, while trying to achieve the proverbial equivalent of drinking from a firehose with a straw. Unsurprisingly, online audiences have become skimmers, overwhelmed with the volume of online information flooding their screens. As a result, finding potent strategies for capturing audiences’ attention has become paramount. This is especially true for B2B organizations looking to optimize their brand messaging for a word-saturated ecosystem.
Cue the video, including live-action, screen-recorded and animated productions, as valued assets to augment or replace written content online. In 2023 and beyond, video isn’t a nice-to-have B2B marketing asset. It’s a critical pillar of any effective B2B marketing program.
Why Video Is Essential In Your B2B Marketing Strategy
While everyone has their own unique content preferences, data shows that video content is quickly becoming people’s preferred medium. According to one study, 83% of consumers prefer video over text for informational or educational content. Wyzowl’s 2023 State of Video Marketing report found that businesses are responding to audience preferences, with 91% leveraging video as a marketing tool this year, an all-time high.
Notably, 96% of marketers reported that video is an “important part” of their marketing strategy, as 92% said that video provides a positive ROI, driving sales, understanding of products or services, and brand awareness.
Consumers share this sentiment. Ninety-one percent of people said they want to see more videos from brands this year.
In total, 88% of consumers have made a purchase after watching a company’s video, underscoring video’s capacity to propel purchasing decisions.
Even the nonbelievers are starting to take notice. Seventy percent of “non-video marketers” plan to implement video marketing this year.
5 Steps To Implement A Successful Video Marketing Strategy
Implementing video into your business and brand strategy efforts can feel overwhelming. After all, nobody wants their new brand initiatives to fall flat.
Here are five steps you can take to begin implementing video marketing into your business…
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5 Ways To Improve Your Website Performance Without Starting Over
/in Featured, Marketing, Strategic Marketing, Web Design, Web StrategyThis blog post is written by Kathy Floam-Greenspan and appears on the Forbes Agency Council. You can read the full post here.
In today’s digital-first world, brands must have an attractive and engaging online presence to remain compelling, competitive and convincing. In other words, whether you’re a small business or a major corporation, you need a website—a good one.
According to a consumer survey, nearly three-quarters of respondents said a company’s website carries at least “some influence” over their buying decisions. Additionally, a Gartner sales survey found that 83% of B2B buyers prefer purchasing through digital commerce, underscoring the centrality of a brand’s website as part of a holistic sales strategy.
However, time constraints, finite resources and limited expertise prevent many companies from putting their best digital foot forward, making an outdated and unfocused website the brand’s first—and often only—impression.
Fortunately, improving your website doesn’t necessarily require an expensive, ground-up rebuild to cultivate success. Making tangible improvements that account for common website pain points can help brands enhance their online presence without starting from scratch.
Common Website Pain Points
There are more than 1.13 billion websites worldwide, and while just over 200 million are actively managed and maintained, differentiating your website from the competition can be extremely difficult. With the average visitor forming an opinion about a website in less than one second, brands have a very limited opportunity to capture their audiences. However, many websites fail to achieve their goals because they are:
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4 Strategies for Marketing During Times of Uncertainty
/in Featured, Marketing, Strategic MarketingThis blog post is written by Kathy Floam-Greenspan and appears on the Forbes Agency Council. You can read the full post here.
Economic uncertainty, like the laws of physics, is an inevitable part of a company’s life cycle. What goes up will, at some point, come back down.
For many business leaders, economic uncertainty seems to be coming around a lot more often than it did before.
They may be on to something.
According to the Harvard Business Review, researchers have documented an uptick in economic uncertainty, identifying five modern crises amplifying uncertainty across various sectors. When coupled with the fact that 75% of CEOs expect declining growth in the year ahead and 40% think their company “will no longer be economically viable a decade from now,” it’s no wonder that people feel uncertain about their company’s future.
Often, a leader’s first response to uncertainty is to slash advertising and marketing budgets. For example, one 2022 survey found that 75% of respondents said that “signals of economic downturn” impact their media budget decisions, and 30% plan to cut their budgets in 2023.
However, leaders should be careful not to react too quickly. Nielsen notes that, historically, 75% of recessions last less than a year, and 30% last just two quarters. Economic uncertainty is cyclical, and every down cycle brings challenges and opportunities that will determine a brand’s potential moving forward.
Why does marketing during times of uncertainty matter?
Marketing through uncertainty requires a disciplined, data-driven resolve to maximize the most important outcomes.
For starters, leaders must leverage historical insights to determine potential impact. During the Great Recession, 63% of brands that increased their marketing investment saw positive ROI from their efforts.
What’s more, as Nielsen reports, “Considering most brands are already under-spending—depressing their ROIs by a median of 50%—any additional cutting of media expenses could only serve to reduce ROI further, at a time when brands need to maximize profits most.”
Meanwhile, when brands prioritize marketing spending, they continue to work toward critical outcomes, including:
Economic uncertainty doesn’t necessarily indicate an imminent downturn, but even when times get tough, companies can still thrive, and the right marketing strategies can help make that possible…
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5 Marketing Activities B2Bs Should Employ During A Recession
/in Featured, Marketing, Strategic MarketingThis blog post is written by Kathy Floam-Greenspan and appears on the Forbes Agency Council. You can read the full post here.
Recessions are defined by reduced spending. First, consumers shell out less money, lowering business revenues and forcing them to behave similarly by cutting costs, shedding staff or both. This cycle can continue unabated until spending picks up and economic expansion resumes.
Faced with an economic downturn, many companies’ knee-jerk reaction is to cut marketing spending to conserve resources and lower spending. As a result of the 2008 Great Recession, ad spending dropped by 13%, a fad that I hear many brands expect to follow in 2023. This is a mistake. Reactionary marketing cuts are shortsighted and are not backed by empirical evidence.
In fact, as VentureBeat notes, “many research studies have confirmed that the best strategy is to continue marketing—and often increase investments—during a slowdown to capitalize on long-term ROI.”
According to research, 60% of companies that cut TV ad spending during the Great Recession experienced a 24% decrease in brand use and a 28% decrease in brand image. Additionally, an extensive analysis of 600 companies from 1980-1985 discovered that companies that maintained or increased their marketing during the recession amplified their sales when the economy recovered, outpacing companies that stopped marketing by 256%.
When budgets are limited or economic factors feel bleak, focusing on “recession-proof” B2B marketing activities can mitigate risks while maximizing ROI.
Here are five recession-proof B2B marketing activities that can help companies advance their bottom-line objectives in any economic environment…
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Combining Teams Post-Merger & Acquisition: Why A “We First” Mindset Matters
/in Featured, Marketing, Strategic MarketingThis blog post is written by Kathy Floam-Greenspan and appears on the Forbes Agency Council. You can read the full post here.
Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) can be a significant business opportunity, but they can also be corrosive to company culture, causing people to leave when expertise and stability matter most.
Before the recent pandemic and the accompanying “great resignation,” an EY report found that nearly half of a company’s key employees depart within a year of a merger or acquisition, and 75% leave within three years of a transaction. This reality is even more prevalent today as employees are increasingly willing to quit their jobs in search of better opportunities.
Since M&As can create significant organizational anxiety and swift cultural change, it’s unsurprising that turnover often accompanies the process. While employees change jobs for many reasons, company culture is often one of the most common reasons.
That’s why businesses need a “we first” mindset when combining teams post-merger and acquisition. Here are four ways leaders can begin creating that dynamic now:
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