Read about my social media article with the Journal of Brand Strategy

After speaking at the CIM (Chartered Institute of Marketing)’s East of England B2B Conference, I was invited to turn my presentation into a peer-reviewed article for the Journal of Brand Strategy on ‘How to write a B2B social media strategy that will impress your CEO’.

How to write a B2B social media strategy that will impress your CEO

Here is a short extract from the article:

Everyone in your organisation, not just those who work in marketing and communications, must understand the importance of social media. If your stakeholders do not understand why social media matters, then your strategy is not going to work. After all, what is the point of writing a great social media strategy if no one believes in it? A social media culture is required, where everyone accepts that social media is valuable and that it can help to deliver your business’ goals.

Creating a social media culture is crucial to gaining real lift-off within any organisation. A good social media strategy is not a useful manual for your marketing team to refer to; it is a project that will inspire and guide your whole organisation. This is a big task, so, before starting, it is important to select an executive sponsor and speak to them first; with their buy-in, it will be easier to navigate through any reservations that other executives, or anyone else in your business, may have.

For people to come on this journey, your goals must be aligned with the goals of the teams that are being supported. Never start writing a B2B social media strategy by asking: ‘what are my social media objectives?’ If your social media goals are separate from those of the rest of the business, then your strategy is already heading in the wrong direction. Instead, look at your company’s goals and objectives and think about how social media can help to achieve these.

A great way to kick off writing a strategy is to start talking to non-marketing/ communications colleagues face-to-face about their objectives. Set up a meeting with the important stakeholders in every team that might possibly benefit from strong social media (that should be nearly every team). Explain your aim and say that their input would be appreciated. Then start asking questions to help understand the priorities for each team. For example:

● ‘Does your sales team need help with getting more leads, or do they have enough leads but wish that the leads were better informed about the company (making them “warmer” prospects)?’

● ‘Is your customer service team trying to cut down on the number of phone calls they receive? Are they looking to improve their response time on social media?’

● ‘Does your HR [human resources] team have any issues recruiting new staff members? Are they hoping that the business is considered to be an “employer of choice” by the outside world?’

● ‘Is your financial team hoping to make savings by cutting back on inefficient marketing activities? Are they looking to maximise profits by increasing sales revenue?’

The list could go on and on! By speaking to your colleagues face-to-face, buy-in from important stakeholders is more likely, and this is crucial to developing a social media culture. For a large organisation, this might take weeks or months to achieve, but it will result in learning a lot about the organisation, and this will really help to develop a social media strategy that will deliver.

Speaking to colleagues face-to-face will also lead to setting objectives that will be genuinely relevant to their day-to-day jobs. Relevance is crucial. For example, if your CEO is particularly interested in increasing sales, how impressed will they be to be told about increased clicks on a Twitter ad? Probably not very. Clicks can be a useful metric to indicate that messages have piqued someone’s interest, but they are not a strong enough metric to indicate success. The answer to ‘our advert generated 1,000 clicks’ might (quite rightly) be ‘so what?’‘My advert generated 1,000 leads’ is more likely to gain their attention. It will be more impressive if traffic and conversions have been generated on a website, so look at web analytics as well as social media metrics. For advertising, the two should ideally be connected, and social media tracking codes (such as Facebook Pixel or LinkedIn’s Insight Tag) should be used to measure the sales performance of social media.

Request access to the full article by visiting the Journal of Brand Strategy.