What Social media Techniques Can Increase B2B Sales?

Introduction

• What Businesses are doing now
  • Marketing Funnel Falsehood
  • Why Automation Fails
• Too Much Blogging & Not Enough Teaching
  • How do I Promote My Business

Understanding the Google Rules

• The Anatomy of a Page
• The Role of Google Search
• Is The Employee Searching
• Writing for a 12-Year-Old
• Are you Invisible to Google
• Retiring Under-performing Content

The Content Strategy

• Content Format
• Content Classification (New)
• Content Type
• Content Stacks
• Content Suggestions
• Call to Action

The B2B Exposure Strategy

• Engagement Kickstart
• Traditional & AI Generated Images
• How Social 444 Works
• Auto Posting Every Day
• Engage, Analyse, Edit, Repeat
• Review your tone of voice
• Provide Digital Access to your Business
• Landing Pages & Segmentation
• Social Policy and Advocates

Conclusion

It’s not rocket science; if people understand what’s in it for them when you’re talking about, or selling a product, they are more likely to engage with you.  The same applies to content, an article or blog image cannot replace an advert.

The invitation and awareness process begins with automated social media posts; we call it Social 444, and it stands for Four adverts, posted Four times a day over Four weeks to promote content and it works as follows:

• Provide varied media content to educate prospects
• Create 120 content adverts such as graphics, motion graphics and video, in advance
• Auto post 4 adverts, 4 times a day, over 4 weeks and repeat for 12-18 months

You don’t want leads, you want sales, but processes have changed to the extent that many businesses have made marketing departments responsible for new business development.

Previously sales-driven organisations have become marketing-driven, relying on technology and pay-per-click to find new business, albeit unsuccessfully.

Leads were expected to come from online content or events, followed up by telesales or BDRs.  However, with the success rate being in the region of 400-1, and little value being placed on high quality content, combined with marketing automation platforms, a downward spiral has occurred to the detriment of all sales teams and vendors.

After much research and analysis, we realised that the approach to B2B marketing mirrored B2C strategies, i.e., posting blogs and using marketing automation platforms and associated tactics and it was not working.

We looked at business performance over the past twenty years and discovered the consistent failure rate and low, average turnover of businesses acutely illustrated that marketing technologies had not lived up to expectations.

Businesses cannot be expected to fly if their wings have been clipped.  Marketing automation software for B2B is a red herring, it does not deliver. 

The first stage requires a review of existing content and your website to ensure you are exploiting the maximum benefit from your online presence.  Once complete, you will be ready to activate Social 444. 

Overthe past twenty years businesses have been conditioned to invest in, and accept, marketing software technologies.  Through repetitive marketing campaigns by Big-Tech, they have been presented as the only solutions for new business generation. 

Today this has translated into most C-Suite members believing they are instinctively making the right decisions to use pay-per-click and marketing automation, in conjunction with their websites. 

This type of behaviour is referenced in the book Thinking, Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahneman: -

• System 1 – Fast – intuitive and reactionary thinking and decision making
• System 2 – Slow - considered and strategic decision making; now required
• ‘Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.  A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.’   (Page 62)

Marketing automation was designed for the consumer market to increase mailing lists.  However, B2B C-Suite teams want to keep their strategies and plans secret.  They do not want to tell vendors who they are or what they are doing, which explains the reluctance to fill out forms and accounts for poor automation results.

However, businesses - their owners and employees - do not want to engage with salespeople.

Demand Generation: creating content to raise awareness of a brand and product(s) that engages potential prospects, drawing them to the so-called ‘top-of-the-funnel’, to deliver content that is restricted or gated by an automation form requiring contact details. 

Lead Generation: creating content or an event that is gated and requires a form to be completed before providing access and states that the company may contact them etc.

Account Based Marketing: accepting that more than one person is in the decision-making process and each person has different expectations and requirements from the new product.  A combination of demand gen and lead gen is required in addition to distributing multiple content items to each interested party.

Reverse IP Lookup - De-Anonymizing: stalking you! Due to ABM not working, the main players have normalised stalking.  It is a practice whereby their system logs your visit via your IP address, then matches the data with consumer activity and if you have given your details elsewhere, it will give them your mobile number.

Gifting:  an API methodology of instigating small bribes to hopefully lead to larger incentives they can give you to buy from them. 

I rest my case.  Digital marketing automation has failed.

Each of the above activities demands/requires a potential prospect to give up their contact details knowing they will be contacted by a BDR or salesperson.

However, when it comes to B2B, businesses want to keep their plans secret.  Their plans are private, and businesses are acutely aware of privacy issues and do not want their contact details being held on servers.  They also do not want to enter dialogue with a salesperson until they’re ready.

Despite this, most businesses know marketing automation fails to deliver the revenues they expected, yet pursue it as there appears to be no alternative even though it  makes their content invisible to all the search engines!

Part of the fallout from this failure is that, for the past seven years, the average tenure of a CMO, and senior marketers, is between nine to eighteen months, which indicates that CEOs and Investors know there is a problem. 

Using marketing automation for the distribution of newsletters was one of the founding features of these platforms.  However, there are a few problems with this: -

Many businesses do not produce sufficient content in the first place to create a newsletter.  The mere existence of a subscription email sign up is usually because the web designer made the decision, not a copywriter or content editor.

Some newsletter subscriptions are automatically appended when someone fills out a form and downloads some content.  However, if the content is not up to scratch, and poor content arrives in the form of a newsletter, they simply unsubscribe.

A buyer may think to themselves, “why keep on a newsletter subscription once I’ve bought from you!”  So, to keep their Inbox clear, again, they unsubscribe.

B2B is significantly different to B2C; you only need a certain amount of the ‘right content’ to provide to your prospects.  You don’t need to be ‘blogging’, and posting, multiple three or four paragraph blogs every other day of the week.

In the consumer market, it’s all about keeping front-of-mind with the customer.  Producing attractive short clips, blogs and snazzy images is what B2C marketing is all about. 

Another point to make is that ‘professional bloggers’ create content, both through their own experience and knowledge as well as writing to attract traffic, only.  They do this because the traffic will earn them money from Google Adsense.

Part of their approach is to scour keyword platforms like Ahrefs, Niel Patel and Moz as well as Google Adwords, to find niche markets they can write for that has sufficient, exploitable traffic.  They will do their own research, copy, paste and edit articles to garner ‘worthiness’ from Google and hey-presto they are making money from visits from interested parties.

Now merge that thinking into B2B marketing and you soon realise that many senior marketers are attempting to achieve the same and continually fail because the buyers have different motivation.

You are selling highly technical or complex solutions, not jeans or sports trainers, so multiple short-form posts are not required.

Unfortunately, poor copy writing is also prevalent in B2B because the objective is to obtain the prospect’s name and email and not to educate them - that is the perceived role of the salesperson!

There is a difference between a four paragraph comment and a business article that is intended to educate an audience.   Unfortunately there is a proliferation of short form blog posts and not enough though-leadership articles.

You can never have too much content.  But having too little will force browsers and prospects to click away from your site. 

The most common questions we hear are “How do I get our company’s name out there?”, “We’ve got little or no social presence, so what do we do?” or “How do we get traction?”

According to the American Marketing Association and Forbes Magazine, we are all subjected to between 4,000 and 10,000 marketing messages per day! 

It is also a well-known fact that it takes seven to ten ‘touches’ before your business name or product becomes recognised and familiar with a buyer. 

However, only 1-in-3 messages get through due to spam filters, they’re deleted, missed, ignored and so on, so you need to prepare a minimum of thirty messages in advance. 

Most businesses give up after two or three attempts!

Added to these statistics, is the fact we all consume content at different rates and by different methods.  Some prefer video, some podcasts, some long reads, some short, therefore a variety of media is required.

As many businesses have come to experience, few prospects find your content on search engines or on social media.  I know it sounds counter-intuitive, however there are three factors to contend with: -

Pay Per Click adverts attract more clicks from your competition and ‘bots’ than real people and linking to a landing page to demand contact details has become less then desirable by B2B prospects

The sheer quantity of content on the Internet makes it difficult to attain a position on page one, because Google has its own parameters that determine what constitutes a good article

Whether you use PPC or organic, it does not have any real value unless you have a greater strategy once a prospect is on your website

Current thinking surrounding content, distribution and promotion is very different from this and goes a long way to explain why so many businesses fail. 

Whilst this document is marketing orientated, it is important that sales departments are aware of existing problems if they want to achieve their targets and higher success in sales!

If this resonates with you as a CEO, or if you’re a Chief Growth Officer, Chief Revenue Officer or VP of Sales, keep reading to see why Social 444 needs to be part of your new business development strategy.