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Social distancing has propelled social media into the boardroom. If you’re one of the many B2B organisations that found your social media lacking in lockdown, what do you need to understand when investing in this area? We offer our thoughts on the five most important things B2B stakeholders need to know about social media.
Content marketing is already well understood in B2B as a key way to warm up web traffic and other contacts by sharing knowledge, demonstrating expertise and addressing the questions that prospects have.
Social media marketing extends this, effectively presenting your content, organisation, brand, culture and offerings in a way that inspires engagement. It’s one of the best ways to amplify your messages, both to your target audiences, and to wider audiences who may have an influence. It can help you achieve thought leader status in your industry, enhance understanding, build brand reputation and keep you front of mind among potential prospects. Plus, you can specifically target and analyse the results.
All this from social media? Yes – but only if it’s strategically planned, joined up to support sales and executed to be thumb-stopping.
Social selling and social marketing both support sales, and although closely connected, are not the same.
a) Social selling is the sales job of building one-on-one connections with target influencers, prospects and decision-makers on social channels – networking, listening, gathering intelligence and keeping up a direct dialogue. It involves answering questions and sharing observations, useful references and insights, nurturing contacts through to a sales lead. Once you have an interested lead, it’s best to continue the conversation offline in order to share more detail.
LinkedIn is the most obvious social network in the B2B space for social selling. For many sales people, it’s replaced the dreaded practice of cold calling and proved highly successful – 78% of sales people who use social selling outperform peers who don’t.
When engaging in social selling, it can be useful to:
b) Social marketing is about presenting content to a wider audience through your corporate social feeds and employee sharing activity. It extends reach and influence, humanising your company’s image and generally building brand awareness. It also supports your salespeople’s efforts, providing the all-important helpful content that sales people need to reinforce their conversations and share with contacts.
We recommend you:
To grab attention, social media posts have to be succinct, yet powerful. This is not as simple as it sounds. Visuals need to be eye-catching and capable of telling a story in an instance. Headlines must be compelling with copy that immediately engages. We strongly recommend using professional creative visual and copy experts for best effect. This will reduce wasted effort and make every post count.
Settling for less is unlikely to give you the results you’re looking for. You may think that it’s just a moment in feed, but those enjoying greatest success from social media invest in the creative thought and production of each and every one of these moments.
We recommend you:
Working out what content works best for your particular audiences will require some trial and analysis. But you should quickly be able to identify some key differences. Generally speaking, for our B2B clients, we find that:
You have to be patient. Social media doesn’t bring overnight success although you should soon start to see what’s working and be able to adjust your social media accordingly.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking only about likes and numbers of followers as their value is hard to prove. Instead, get to know who is following you and look mostly for engagement – i.e. click throughs, shares, and comments. Review what’s working and try to continuously improve.
Remember that social media can also be very helpful in building potential for recruitment and enhancing employee loyalty and advocacy, so include activity that make these work for you too.
Most importantly, keep an eye on how well sales and marketing are co-ordinating their efforts and create some ways to measure this. When they are working effectively together, social marketing and social selling have the potential to deliver significant revenue gains so it’s important to give this proper attention and investment.
Contact us to learn more about how we can help and see examples of our award-winning social media campaigns here.
In this article we’ll dive into the booming world of smart construction technology, exploring the innovations driving the change and what the future looks like for the industry.
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