For the marketing teams behind top B2B enterprises, the TO-DO list is long-lasting ever.
They always seem to be committed towards the goals of the marketing campaigns, like:
- Boosting brand awareness.
- Locating influencers and bringing them on the board
- Driving traffic to landing pages.
- Customer engagement and relatively conversion optimization.
- Removing roadblocks appearing across the sales funnel.
- Attracting new talent.
Many B2B marketers still don’t employ the latest developments like mobile and voice search optimization, educational content creation, and impactful social marketing. As a result, they get more into traditional marketing, making it accessible for their competitors to attract the mobile and social audience.
The past surveys and studies revealed that the lack of social skills, communicating with people on diversified social channels with a unique brand voice brings the fluctuating gap, and that’s a challenge for most of the B2B marketers.
With more than 500 million active users handling the platform daily, Instagram has proven to be a compelling marketing channel for both B2B and B2C companies. Yet, only 29% of marketers adopt Instagram to interact with clients and promote their products, while just 22% of them scale it as an effective social media platform.
Source: 2016 B2B Content Marketing Trends—North America: Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs
For marketers working in the B2B sector, there are some particularly urging issues that, if they can be approached intelligently, will help cultivate qualitative leads.
To be more productive and result-focused, you require more than merely a social presence. Social storytelling is the new trend – one of the most tangible and strategic marketing tactics B2B enterprises can formulate for better engagement with social audiences and reflecting the company’s real value proposition. If visualized in a significant and likable approach, the tale can be more than just a usual story; it enacts like the blueprint for their entire social communication strategy.
Now, the discussion comes to the key question on how to initiate the creation of such social stories strategically? As we see day-in-day-out, top-performing brands are consolidating the engagement motive along with awareness and education goals. That’s a new social lifecycle with-in the digitally driven marketing ecosystem beating down competitors and earn a win-win situation.
- Do you have an advisory team that can show past original stories with all of the real-time hurdles, processes, techniques, and results secured?
- Have you located a visual design team to draft the right message alignment, internal flow of conversation, and organized social communication?
Without a dedicated management team and work distribution flow, the marketing team can be stabbed in putting top-grade social media efforts. Here’s how to plan the team:
- Team members – Pick creative individuals from marketing, communication, product design, customer service, and design departments.
- Critical Roles – Advisory members inspire ideas and targets. Contributors come up with contextual objects. Designers and communication experts put their efforts in message reflection, and testers view it before and after delivery. Everything goes with excellence in this manner.
- The Process – Planning goes coming up with ideas and collaboration. The design includes social context, message text, and social targets. Revisions go after team feedback from unit tests, and this way, the final sequence gets selected by the cumulative decision. That’s a standard lifecycle process epic teams follow.
Now, the dedicated individuals must follow the below strategies while delivering social stories to bring engagement and drive the much-required awareness about your products or services:
1. Identify Your Social Community
Understand your target social audience and connections. Entering into social media for marketing purposes needs to be backed up with the capability to communicate. Thus, social stories offer a steadfast link between your customers and your brand image.
These act like a connecting mode between your brand’s perception and targeted social community. Aligning your employees and your story is the first step to telling it to the world.
2. Authenticity Matters
Marketers tend to connect with people via content (marketers know that their insights and messages are real voices), but people who are seizing the message don’t know that it’s authentic.
Since the followers can detect spuriousity from a mile away, delivering an emotional and impactful story authentically and helpfully, makes pure sense. It shouldn’t be about impressing people but concerned more about engaging them.
Admittedly, authenticity stimulates trust and loyalty, which in turn can push sales, and ROI.
3. Elaborate Your Stories
Each of your stories is just the beginning. Every story opens the door to flow into additional narratives helping your organization’s beliefs and ideas. Every webinar, podcast, success story, or e-cook has many success points or conflicts that can be shared with the audience to better position your sayings. Broadening these points will enhance your overall message.
4. The Right Apps for Your Team
Let’s be fair; your marketing team needs an ad-hoc mix of marketing tools and applications to handle the better creation and delivery of social story posts.
Providing your staff with supportive marketing intuitive apps for planning, component design, publishing, scheduling, and measuring results facilitates your team to empower social stories every day.
Final Words
In content marketing, a great storyline is a strategy alone. This transformation of your usual social strategy to story focused social strategy will become the norm for your organization’s marketing division. This transformation of your usual social strategy to story focused social strategy will become the norm for your organization’s marketing division.
Shyam Bhardwaj is the VP of marketing at Calgary SEO agency. He runs day-to-day operations of content and growth marketing for SMBs. He frequently writes about start-ups marketing, social media and SEO. Follow him on Twitter: @shyam_bhardwaj
Storytelling stock photo by rassco/Shutterstock
