Introduction
Content marketing is the art of creating valuable, shareable content that helps you reach your customers. It can be used to engage with your audience, promote products and services, and drive sales. However, many B2B marketers don’t know how best to use the content for effective social selling.
In this post, we’ll explore how to create a content marketing strategy that will help you grow your business through social media engagement. We’ll also discuss different types of content for different platforms -information graphics (like infographics), ebooks and guides (such as checklists), and videos (such as tutorials) -and give tips on how to get started making them!
Create a content marketing strategy
The first step in creating a content marketing strategy is to define the problem you’re solving. Are you trying to grow your business by getting more leads from social media? Or are you looking for ways to increase sales? This will help guide your decision-making process when it comes to what types of content would be best suited for your audience. For example, if most of your customers are already active on Facebook and Twitter but not LinkedIn or Instagram, then those platforms may be less useful than others in driving traffic back toward their website or landing pages (like blog posts).
Next up: setting goals! You should have some short-term and long-term objectives in mind before starting any kind of project—whether that’s designing an ad campaign or writing an article series on how-tos related specifically to one topic. We’ve found that setting measurable targets helps keep us accountable, so we don’t end up doing anything halfheartedly; it also helps keep things moving along smoothly once they start getting underway because there’s no room for procrastination here!
Understand your audience’s pain points
To understand your audience’s pain points, you must first know the problem before you start. For example: if you’re selling a productivity app for businesses and your target audience is small business owners, then one of their biggest challenges will be time management. If this is true for them, it’s likely that they’ll have other problems as well—like being overwhelmed by all of the information in their inbox or needing some help with managing people. Once you’ve identified what specific issues your customers face in their daily lives, then it’s time to find solutions!
Once again: understanding these problems before starting any kind of content marketing campaign will help ensure that whatever solutions are created are relevant and valuable enough so as not only to attract new leads but also to keep old ones engaged once they learn about them through social channels like Facebook Ads Manager or LinkedIn Pulse Ads (which can be used alongside traditional ad platforms).
Share content across social media platforms
- Share content across social media platforms.
- Share content across social media platforms in a friendly tone.
- Share content across social media platforms in a professional tone.
- Share content across social media platforms in a personal tone.
Get personal – share stories and experiences to relate to customers
There are many ways to share stories, but one of the most effective is through the sharing of experiences. Sharing your own personal experiences with customers and prospects can help you connect on a human level, which will lead to more trust and loyalty in the long run.
Share stories about your Company: What’s it like working here? How do we treat people well? What makes us different from our competition?
Share stories about the industry: How did this technology come into being? How do we use this new technology in our business or product development process (or both!)
Create infographics and ebooks
Infographics are great for sharing on social media, websites, email, and blogs. They’re also great when you want to share your content with prospects that don’t have a lot of time on their hands.
A good infographic can take more than an hour to create, but it will pay off in the end by making your message easy to digest and digestible for readers who may not have time to read long-form content articles or books.
Give away premium content with B2B lead magnets and checklists, and resources
One of the best ways to build trust is by giving away premium content. For example, if you’re selling a product or service in the B2B space, give away some free guides that help your prospects understand how they can use the product.
When you do this, it shows that you’re willing to go above and beyond for customers (and potential customers). This will help increase their perception of your business as trustworthy—and it’s something that every business should strive for!
Creating great content is essential for effective B2B social selling
Content marketing is a great way to get customers to engage with you, share your content with their friends, and even share it with their colleagues.
Content marketing can be used for social selling in many ways:
- You could create informative blog posts that help people solve problems or make decisions. This approach works especially well when there’s an opportunity for the reader to respond by commenting on the blog post or leaving questions at the bottom of it (which will create an opportunity for you).
- You could create videos that explain how-to guides on using your product/service in real-life situations, like cooking dinner or doing laundry. These types of videos are especially effective because they’re engaging enough so that potential customers want them but still casual enough not to come off as too salesy!
Conclusion
Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to grow your business and reach new customers. If you’re ready to get started on this journey, there are many steps that you can take.
First and foremost, create a content strategy that will help guide your efforts over time. Second, find out what types of content resonates with your audience by exploring their pain points and following them on social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, where they might be more likely to share interesting posts about their lives with friends. Thirdly – which we discussed in section 5 above – share stories about yourself so that people feel like they know who they’re following when reading through each post; this is important because it helps build trust between all involved parties: the customer gets reassurance while the brand gets exposure!
Finally (but certainly not least), remember how much value each person brings into social selling engagements; don’t forget how much value they add by sharing their expertise or offering free resources so others might benefit from them as well!