Business-to-business (B2B) social media is drastically different than consumer-to-consumer or even business-to-consumer. For example, “you” are not an individual; “you” are an organization or a brand.

How you write, when you publish, and what you discuss are ways in which you humanize your business but maintain a level of approachable professionalism. Social media marketing can be a powerful way to increase conversions and keep your brand top-of-mind. The catch is you have to manage and implement your marketing campaigns correctly. If you are on social media and not seeing the return on investment you expected, odds are you are excluding one or all of these B2B social media marketing best practices:

1. Create and Maintain a Schedule

Execute your social media campaigns in advance, on a six- to twelve-month schedule. This allows content managers to research topics and platforms that will be needed well before due dates arrive. It also provides a fallback for slow news cycles when you need to fill the content gap. However, approving a schedule is only step one; setting the standard for sustaining consistent social media marketing is necessary to successfully leverage social platforms. Intermittent Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn posts reduce the likelihood of your overall campaign resulting in lead generation and improved audience awareness.

2. Use Paid Social Media

The average Facebook user has about 338 friends, LinkedIn members at the CEO-level have around 930 connections, over 500 million Tweets are sent every day. There is a lot of noise on social media, and the only way to ensure your message is being received is to utilize paid social marketing. All three primary B2B platforms (Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook) include marketing options that require a low minimum budget. The functionality is similar to that of Google Ads; a user selects their campaign goal, bid strategy, and creative content, and the platforms essentially do the rest. As a result, ROI is significantly easier to analyze and improve.

3. Leverage Social Media Targeting

Ever wondered why you see sponsored brands and promoters you have not explicitly connected with in the past in your social media feed? This is due to powerful social media targeting that allows marketers to tailor their ads to reach you. They aim for a specific audience based on things like your browsing history, social network activity, and general interests. By targeting both advertisements and boosted posts, you can reach the right audience that is most likely to interact with your content and potentially convert in the future.

4. Engage Your Audience

Marketers sometimes forget that social media is a form of two-way communication. Rather than talking at your audience, start a conversation with them. Plan and execute a unique Facebook competition to generate buzz. Run a Twitter poll and learn more about user opinion on your product or service. Start a group on LinkedIn where you can talk with industry members and potential clients. With a strong strategy and innovative content, you can influence your audience to organically build brand awareness.

5. Optimize Social Performance

Most social media platforms include tools for analyzing new followers, interactions, and audience activity. Like any successful B2B marketing tactic, benchmarks should be set for social media marketing at which time the entire campaign is reviewed and improved. Creative should be updated at least every other week and calls-to-action should be rewritten based on the timeline of the campaign (month-long sale starts today vs. last day to buy discounted items). One of the most common ways social media marketing plans fail is the “set and forget” approach. This is when you activate a campaign and check back at the end to see how it did. Odds are, you missed out on several opportunities to better reach and engage your audience.

B2B social media marketing best practices are complex and are constantly evolving and adapting to how clients utilize their platforms. If you are struggling to keep up, or need holistic social media tips, contact Linda Fanaras at Millennium Agency.

About Millennium Agency 

Millennium Agency is a national, award-winning branding, content/messaging and marketing strategy firm dedicated to the B2B technology and advanced manufacturing sectors. With offices in Boston and New Hampshire, our team unites creative branding, storytelling and data analytics to accelerate your business growth. We unite your vision with our marketing expertise, and focus on increasing your sales opportunities and driving brand success. From strategic thinking to brand development, and concise messaging, Millennium Agency will optimize your marketing efforts every step of the way. Contact the professionals at Millennium Agency to schedule a call.  

The very first step to starting your brand is knowing your audience. You should start by asking yourself: “who is my target audience? What challenges are they facing? And how will they benefit from this service I’m providing?” By grasping who your audience is, you can customize the content towards their needs, provide the services they’re seeking, and ensure that your service will help resolve the challenges they may be facing. All of this will improve your customer loyalty, boost conversions, and resonate with your target audience in the future. It may not be a simple process, but it’s a necessary one. Let’s explore a few ways to get to know your target audience.

Create Buyer Personas

HubSpot defines a buyer persona as a “semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” Essentially a buyer persona allows you to understand what your customers need, how they think, behave, and how you can address them accordingly. The more details you can outline, the more successful the persona will be. The utilization of a buyer persona will help your entire business in the long run. It will allow you to stay focused on the audience you want to target and give you a better chance of reaching and connecting with that audience. Buyer personas will help you build your brand because they help provide structure and insight for your future launch and success. Once familiar with your buyer persona, you can create a brand that reflects their core values and beliefs, and translate that into your content, messaging, product development, and services.

Conduct Surveys

Once you’ve identified your target audience, you can conduct surveys to connect with them on a deeper level. Surveys allow you to get concrete answers to some curiosities you make have about your customers, services, or products in a very effective way. Whether you’re trying to reach a small or large audience, you can enable your customers to express their wants and need through a survey. One of the great things about conducting a survey is the ability to make them anonymous. An anonymous survey often allows people to be more honest, meaning you get more accurate and meaningful results. Nowadays, using online surveys is the most beneficial method for gathering data from target participants from anywhere around the world. Surveys are an efficient way to broaden your knowledge on your target audience because they allow you to ask direct questions while gathering important information from a large group. Through your surveys, you’re able to unlock data through preferences relating to gender, income, demographic, hobbies, and more. Once you’ve received some answers directly from your target audience, you’ll be one step closer to making sure your brand is ready to produce relevant and engaging content.

Don’t Underestimate the Power of Emotion

If there’s one thing people love, it’s being seen. You want your target audience to be able to relate to a situation, so don’t be afraid to use emotion when trying to connect with your audience. The power of emotion should never be underestimated. If you’ve picked up on a specific issue or challenge your audience may be facing, like converting leads on a particular campaign, don’t be afraid to reference it and explain different ways to resolve it. When you can evoke some sort of emotion from someone, whether it be a smile, laugh, or tear, you’ll be able to form a trusting bond with them, which could result in a long-term partnership down the line. Brands that provide an emotional component to their target audience are more likely to be viewed favorably, unlike some competitors that can feel like soulless corporations, and 89% of their consumers lacking a personal connection. In order to build your brand and have it in a good place for launch, try evoking emotion and reap the benefits that will come with it.

Research, Research, Research

No brand is ready for launch until some sort of research is conducted. When conducting research, not only are you able to connect with your target audience on a deeper level, it also helps your company grow once you’re able to recognize the motivations that factor into your audiences’ buying behaviors. Through audience research, you’re able to prioritize the best ways to meet their needs, who or what you need to focus on, and what exactly it is that you can offer them. You’ll find ways of adapting a speech that piques their interest while forming a level of understanding or their attitudes and beliefs. Once your research is complete, you can then apply your target audience research to help build your brands mission and vision.

It’s nearly impossible to reach everyone at once. When having an understanding on who your audience is and how to connect with them, you’ll be able to produce the right marketing message towards the people who are most likely to do work with you while generating leads efficiently.

This blog lists critical elements for your brand’s identity and assurance for a successful launch. If you are looking for fully custom branding, our team at Millennium can help you succeed.

About Millennium Agency 

Millennium Agency is a national, award-winning branding, content/messaging and strategy firm specifically dedicated to the technology and advanced robotics sectors. With offices in Boston and New Hampshire, our team unites creative branding and data analytics to accelerate your business growth. While combining our clients’ vision with our marketing expertise, we are focused on increasing your sales opportunities and driving brand success. From strategic thinking to brand development and concise messaging, Millennium Agency will guide your marketing efforts every step of the way. Contact the professionals at Millennium Agency to schedule a call. 

When a company develops their visual brand, a major consideration is creating a unique look and feel. A brand’s look and feel is crucial because it conveys your brand’s image. When establishing a look and feel for your brand, it means that you’re creating standards regarding your brand’s logo, colors, fonts, photography, and website. Whether you’re building a look and feel for your own personal brand or a client’s, consistency is the key to success. Your brand needs to look professional and visually pleasing, with consistency throughout all the visual aspects. Let’s start by breaking down the critical elements of a brand’s look and feel.

Logos

A logo should determine the visual direction for your overall brand. As you build or rebrand your business, focus on your logo first and then use it to strategically build out the rest of your visual identity. When you are making creative decisions for your logo, think beyond what looks best, and focus on developing a design that is aligned with your business’s core messaging and values. Your brand’s logo plays a vital part of your look and feel because it serves as an identifier of your brand. An effective brand logo will do three things: 1) build trust and brand recognition, 2) make your company or brand stand out from the competition, and 3) visually represent your brand in the most basic form. Your logo should be designed in black and white initially to avoid any distractions. Once you have solidified your design, you can begin exploring colors.

Colors

Color plays a critical role in your brand’s look and feel. Different colors evoke different emotions, and often serves as a first impression for the customer. Take time to review the psychology of color and choose a color palette that will speak to your core demographic. Color is a great way to contribute your brand’s look and feel while adding versatility to your designs. Take advantage of the color palette that you choose – it is a chance to visually communicate with your customers. Also, it is important to note that the colors you choose for your brand’s look and feel can increase recognition up to 80 percent and end up being the biggest reason consumers decide to buy!

Fonts

Similar to a photo or icon, fonts are a great way to elevate your designs and content. Your font choice is an effective way to express your brand’s personality and the atmosphere you’d like to create when presenting your name and tagline in your logo. Be careful not to choose too many fonts – remember you want to stay consistent. You should choose fonts each with a specific purpose – some for print and some for the web. To determine the best font for your brand’s look and feel, make sure that they read well, are visually pleasing, and use them throughout all your branding assets.

Photography

Investing in quality photography for your brand’s look and feel can boost your business. When a brand prioritizes professional photographs to showcase themselves, they’re more likely to stand out among their competitors in the industry. Photography elevates a brand’s look and feel by helping customers better understand the benefits of the products or services that you provide. It can make a potential client feel more trusting of a provider. Use photography as a tool to elevate your design elements and create consistency across all your social media platforms, flyers, website design, and collateral. A good tip is to find a set of photos that you love and use those exclusively across all of your brand assets. This will give your designs visual cohesiveness.

Website

Once you’ve finalized all your design elements, it’s time to build out your most important brand look and feel asset and promotional tool – your website. Often entrepreneurs make the mistake of prioritizing their website design and treating the logo as an afterthought. Having your logo ready first, allows you to incorporate your branding colors and fonts into a website in addition to the photos that you have chosen. To ensure your website and logo work in tandem, implement your core logo colors throughout the web pages as accent colors. Consider also using your logo’s secondary colors to establish an even stronger connection. Make sure to take advantage of your website because it serves as your online store and often replaces print publications. Your website plays a key role in supporting your brand, facilitating sales, and generating leads. A website is a perfect way to display your brand’s look and feel because it delivers your marketing message all day, every day.

These critical elements of your visual identity will help you develop the ideal look and feel for your brand. If you are looking for fully custom branding, our team at Millennium can help you succeed.

About Millennium Agency

Millennium Agency is a national, award-winning branding, content/messaging and strategy firm specifically dedicated to the technology and advanced robotics sectors. With offices in Boston and New Hampshire, our team unites creative branding and data analytics to accelerate your business growth. While combining our clients’ vision with our marketing expertise, we are focused on increasing your sales opportunities and driving brand success. From strategic thinking, to brand development, and concise messaging, Millennium Agency will guide your marketing efforts every step of the way. Contact the professionals at Millennium Agency to schedule a call.