B2B Social Media Marketing – KPI, Content and Execution

The Key Metrics for B2B Social Media Marketing

Despite that many companies are gradually changing to collecting convertible sales leads from social media, the most effective metric for measuring B2B social media marketing success remains content views, or impressions. This is primarily due to 2 reasons:

1. There are difficulties to track lead conversions currently.
2. Most companies still positions social media in a transitional phase from brand promotion to lead generation.

Nevertheless, KPIs measuring only follower growth and content impressions or reach of their social media pages are no longer sufficient to meet the needs of B2B businesses.

What type of content is most likely to attract better engagement, and performs best on social media?

According to our experience, apart from company or product updates, engaging with trendy social topics or industry headlines and addressing the practical concerns of customers, are the most effective strategies for creating engaging content in social media.

However, trendy social topics or industry headlines are unpredictable. And to understand the technical issues that other businesses in the industry are discussing is also one big challenges for marketers.

Moreover, the exploration of customer pain points and needs is also the blindspot for many social media marketers. Since they rarely have the opportunity to directly interact with customers, some B2B companies have already started to create chances for the marketing team to get in touch with their real users, to accumulate some first-hand insights about their work habits and content preferences.

Good Content Requires Cross-functional Team Collaboration

Good content is what keeps the audience engaged, and also the engine for generating leads.

Nevertheless, in order to keep producing quality social media marketing content, it often requires cross-functional collaboration, although the marketing team should be driving the direction.

The first step towards cross-functional collaboration on content making is to identify the co-workers from different departments who are eager to contribute content. And understanding their areas of expertise and strengths is another key.

When collaboration is needed, these co-workers can work together. This process not only promotes the company’s brand but also enhances the personal expertise and know-how of cross-functional team members. But of course, this type of collaboration requires lots of communication and sound relationship between teams or departments.

Moreover, when non-marketing teams participate in the content creation process, there are bigger challenges in the internal collaboration processes within the organization.

Cross-functional collaboration on content making is not as easy as you think

On one hand, social media is full of rapidly changing and time sensitive information. Therefore, to keep the audience engaged, timely content creation and quick responses to current trend and hot topics in social platforms is significant. However, this expectation on efficiency posts a crucial challenge when cross-functional collaboration is involved, simply because every team has their own task priority and milestones. So a clear vision of the value of collaboration, instructions, responsibilities and touchpoint in the process can greatly enhance the efficiency, also helping to ensure the brand’s consistent presence through collaborative efforts across multiple departments.

On the other hand, although cross-functional collaboration contributes to more creative ideas and more engaging content , team members from different departments carry over their own knowledges, experience, personal tastes, and style preferences. They may also represent different values. For example, marketing team are specilised in articulating technical content in a more straightforward way using simple language, while technical or engineering teams can address the specific questions from users when they have a technology related problem. But when it comes to videos and live streams, the diverse personal styles might result in inconsistent experiences for the target audience.

Finally, social media performance data interpretation is another pillar not to be ignored. It is very important to provide insight to measure the success of cross-functional collaboration. Through reading and analysing the data and insights of social media campaigns, teams involved in the content creating process will gain valuable feedback on what is working or not working, and even in-depth knowledge about its company’s products, technology, services, marketing, and sales cycles, therefore, formulating a continuously improving process.