How to Use Content for Effective B2B Social Selling?

By thought-horizon | Aug 10, 2019

B2B social selling is intimidating. Many B2B sales reps find themselves terrible at social media. However, in today’s social media-saturated arena, you can’t really afford to stink. Most of them are still under the impression that B2Bs don’t really reside on social media. But, here’s a spoiler: more than half of the world is on social media and B2Bs are no exception.

The only thing is, B2B prospecting is hard as ever, and a significant shortfall lies in the failure to understand B2B buyers’ mentalities. They don’t like the idea of being sold to by a complete stranger, and they don’t necessarily like buying online.

And that’s where content comes to fill in the void. Sharing that piece of content that strikes a chord with your buyers can contribute amazingly to the success of your social selling. This is what makes all the difference.

Here are some amazing techniques to churn that effective content for B2B social selling.

1. Start With the Product’s Place

We need to share fantastic content regularly on social to attract B2B customers. But how to do it? Well, the trick is to analyze your market and get started with that information.

Start with your product’s place in the market. Find the environment that favors your consumers, and begin your quest. Map out the problems that your market faces and how will your product solve them. Take the use cases to create multiple pieces of content that have an analytical edge. Buyers want to know the hard facts in order to engage initially, so give them what they want.

Next, take this down a level and look at the same analytics limited to different market verticals. Buyers want proof that fits their marketplace. Emphasizing these metrics with infographics, memes, and customer testimonials all help to build out your content calendar.

Most importantly, don’t take a break. Be consistent.

2. Don’t Miss Out On the Call-to-Action

Often, a call-to-action (CTA) is overlooked. So the second step to effective B2B content strategy is putting a CTA at the end of the content.

For example, at Thought Horizon, we have three types of free social media audits that we use as a CTA for all our content. In fact, as you can see, we are promoting our USP as you read through our blog, or at the bottom, or in a pop-up, depending on how you got to this page.

Content with no call-to-action may earn you clicks, but it will fall short on generating leads/revenue. It is only going to leave your visitors wondering, “What next?” and that will eventually lead to no leads. Figure out how you can align your specific offerings with the content, and use it as a CTA.

3. Humanize Your Content

For once, step into the shoes of a buyer. Do you like the idea of talking to a bot? We doubt it. And that brings us to the third point on our list of how to use the content for effective B2B social selling: humanizing your content.

You need to find a way to have your sales team distribute the messaging. B2B buyers are especially wary of communicating with vendors’ corporate social media or promoted ads on social. They’ve been burned before. Figure out how to get people to carry on these messages and determine next steps that will delight B2B buyers, and earn you meetings and sales funnel progression.

4. Figure Out an Unboring Angle

Imagine being a brand that sells large vivarium misting systems to zoos, animal theme parks, and research universities.

While that may look like an incredible showcase of your vocabulary, only half of the readers would actually shoot up search engines to find out what the hell vivarium misting systems are, not to mention the other half who choose to scroll on or maybe click the ‘Close Tab’ button. And those who put the effort in to look it up only realized that these are the large artificial environments that enable reptiles (like pythons) to survive harsh environments. Do you see our point?

Not many of us would relate to the weird name for an artificial environment, but we definitely know the species of animals it serves.

The conclusion here is not to go above and beyond to confuse your audience. Instead, invest time in figuring out “What’s that thing that my buyers can relate to?” And once you identify it, you have found the unboring angle. Simply roll forward.

Signing Off

As we reach the end of this article, how about another tip? Well, we simply want you to put your best foot forward, and so, here are power audit tools to analyze your sales teams’ social selling potential. Figure out where you lack with B2B social selling experts at Thought Horizon, and have your critical requirements satisfied.