This interview is a part of our series called Brewing B2B Social Media Marketing Strategies, wherein we interview professionals and industry leaders to understand how they’re leveraging the fast-moving social platforms to scale their companies.

Interview on B2B social media marketing for growth 

While these are some of the questions we wanted to ask Dan during our chat, feel free to send us over any follow-up queries you may have. 

Can you tell us a little about yourself, your role and the company you’re working on social media with?

My name is Dan Siepen, and I’m a growth marketing advisor/consultant that’s working with a few B2B brands from sunny Sydney, here in Australia. 

When it comes to B2B growth advisory/consulting, I work across a few key marketing initiatives as part of the mix, with social media being one of the core initiatives that make up the building blocks of any successful demand generation B2B strategy. 

I’ve been developing social media content strategies for B2B brands for a while now (over 6+ years), and it plays a pivotal role across the lifecycle of any B2B brand. It’s certainly one of the top channels when it comes to opportunities for brands to scale organic reach to get in front of new eyes, nurturing existing leads/prospects within the funnel (before they close), and then giving existing customers an opportunity to become advocates and referrers.

In my opinion, whether you want to take social media seriously or not, you’ve got to be on there as a B2B brand now more than ever. It’s one of the more cost-effective channels you have at your disposal (compared to paid channels where CPMs are pretty high in most B2B industries), and from experience, is one of the best initiatives to stay top of mind with prospects.

How do you define B2B social media marketing, and how is it different from B2C?

My personal definition of B2B social media marketing is the process of adopting key social media channels to drive value-driven, educational and actionable content to help communicate the value of a company’s product offering, which in turn helps generate great/high-quality MQLs/SQLs. 

To extend further, the key theme here I’m communicating in this definition is that delivering value-driven content through social media ultimately helps deliver high-quality prospects into the funnel (which is always a challenge with B2B lead generation) whilst also accelerating the decision-making/trust process of prospects who are already in the funnel, but may be distracted by other competitor offers or are simply not sold at that moment in time (i.e. need more convincing/trust). 

How is B2B social media marketing different to B2C:

In its simplest definition, from what you can see in ‘B2B’ and ‘B2C’, B2B is all about business-focused audiences, and B2C is all about consumer-focused audiences. 

When it comes to B2B, audiences are typically a lot more sophisticated when it comes to a decision/purchase-making decision, and it usually takes quite a few touchpoints before prospects/audiences turn into paying customers. 

By ‘sophisticated’ audiences, I’m referring to senior directors/leaders involved in the decision-making process, where they’re naturally more inclined to do further research and require more ‘evidence’ of success before they make a commitment.

On the other hand, with B2C, audiences are typically more ‘impulsive’, and the barrier to entry is not as high when it comes to the decision process. 

What business goal/objective does social media marketing address at your company?

For many of the clients I work with, and from what you can already tell from my answers during this interview, is that it plays a really key role in demand generation. 

Social media is taken seriously as the opportunity we collectively see (collectively meaning the brands I work with) that socials have an impact across the whole lifecycle, regardless of where the subscriber, prospects, or customer is at within the journey with that particular brand. 

When it comes to the objective we’re trying to achieve, overall, it’s the process of accelerating those at the start of the customer journey with a brand, to then cutting the time of getting them through the becoming a paying customer (or at the very least booking a demo for sales to then nurture). 

Of course, that’s the overall objective of socials. However, we always have breakdowns of different objectives based on the exact funnel/lifecycle stage. To keep it simple, I’ll share the three main areas that I take into account when it comes to developing B2B social media strategies – TOF, MOF, and BOF. 

• TOF (Top of Funnel) – the top of the funnel is where audiences are ‘fairly fresh’ to a new brand, and they could arrive from a variety of sources (such as ads, referrals, content marketing/SEO, etc.). At this stage, they could be problem-aware or possibly not problem-aware, but they’re seeking information that you can provide through value and education. 
• MOF (Middle of Funnel) – this is where audiences know about the brand, have probably engaged with a few touchpoints (e.g. through email newsletters, multiple blog visits, etc.), and are looking to solve a specific problem they’re facing within their organisation, and your solution is top of mind as a choice. 
• BOF (Bottom of Funnel) – once they’ve engaged with your brand a few times and are becoming more confident that you’re one of the top solutions to their problem, this is where users reach the ‘final stage’, where they’ll make a bigger commitment, such as becoming a paid user after a trial, or want to proceed with the final stages of closing a new deal. 

Further below, I’ll share some further specific metrics based on these key funnel stages that I keep track of to measure the success of any social media marketing strategy. 

Which social media platforms do you believe are most effective for B2B SaaS marketing and why?

I get asked this question personally quite a bit, and it is a hard question to answer truly as there are a few factors involved – for example, the nature of your product, your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), your industry, and a few others. 

However, there are three key channels I believe in B2B socials that underpin any successful social strategy, and they are – LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter. 

• LinkedIn is a hot channel right now, especially when it comes to demand generation and content creation. Some creators, influencers, and B2B brands are seeing amazing organic growth results. 
• YouTube – video is the top-performing content format that audiences love to engage with (like we all do, right?). It’s a resource/budget-intensive channel as part of a social strategy, but the content repurposing and distribution opportunities that can be amplified across other channels are what makes it worthwhile. 
• Twitter is, in many ways, a channel that I find a lot of brands overlook to invest in, but the opportunities in B2B are huge. Just the nature of the platform itself helps content get a lot of impressions (which other channels make you play for – i.e. pay to play), and some of the people who are actively on the channel in the B2B space is pretty impressive. From my experience, I’ve had a lot of success on Twitter as a channel for demand generation and new leads. 

How do you typically create a social media marketing strategy? 

Having developed quite a few B2B social media strategies over the years, I have a particular process that has proven to be effective for companies I’ve worked with.

I’ll share the key steps below that I follow that’s worked time and time again for me as a growth marketing consultant. 

• Understand current performance landscape and key goals/objectives – before engaging with any strategy, I need to understand the expectations of results the company wants to try and achieve. More than anything, I want to understand the ‘why’ behind the expected goals/objectives and how they can impact the company’s growth. 
• Do an audit of current performance – regardless of a smaller or larger B2B brand, I usually do an existing audit of their key channels, where I dive deep into the analytics of how content is performing. I love digging into the weeds 🙂 
• Competitor audit & analysis (direct and indirect) – In my opinion, this is a crucial step in the process, as it helps set benchmarks around content strategy, development/creation, and performance expectations. Many companies that I’ve engaged with have done a decent level of research around competitors, but I always like to go deeper and reverse-engineer what’s worked/what hasn’t. 
• Share best practices & strategies by top brands – In conjunction with the competitor audit and audit of the existing strategy that the B2B brand has been adopting, I often like to share what other top brands are doing on respective channels to help educate clients of what’s possible, and also show where my head is at. Often this is a fun exercise as it gets the client excited and opens up their minds to what’s possible. 
• Diving further into the audience persona(s) & industry – Before defining goals and what’s best for the strategy, I need to understand the audience further, including attributes, demographics, and other areas. Additionally, any other relevant industry information is critical to know before getting into strategy development. 
• Run a mini-workshop with the team for initial brainstorming ideas – One thing I like to do is ensure everyone’s thoughts/ideas are heard before I go deep into creating a social media strategy. Whilst I don’t take on board everyone’s idea (I ultimately decide/dictate what should be in the strategy), it’s important as part of the process that people have their say/are heard. Sometimes, the best ideas come from these workshop strategy sessions (plus, they’re good fun when everyone as part of the marketing team gets involved). 
• Defining the goals and objectives (while keeping resources available in mind) – The next key step in the process is understanding the budgetary and resourcing that is available to help execute some sort of strategy. Once I know these details, this then helps form what content formats are available to produce (i.e. images, videos, gifs, etc), as well as the cadence of content production. Ultimately, the budget and resources available will then determine what’s realistic when it comes to defining the goals. More budget/resources available typically means a faster route to success. 
• Now, it’s time to develop the strategy (which includes the proposed content calendar and resource plan) – As by this point, I dive deep into creating a strategy for the company, which includes the likes of a content calendar, resource/budget management plan, details into how we track performance, process into how we split-test posts, comms plans, and more. 
• Get straight into posting – once I present and have the marketing team on board with the strategy and plan, it’s time to get into the content creation process. Usually, this would have started ahead of the strategy being presented to get the ball rolling, but once the strategy is clear, we simply scale up content production. 
• Measurement and optimisation through analytics – social media creation and optimisation never stops (which is why I love it so much). Different posts, content, and formats will perform better than others, and it’s about understanding why this may be the case – then, we refine the strategy and focus as we go with analytics to ensure we maximise our chances of hitting our goals and objectives. 

What are some of the metrics you measure to see the impact of social media marketing? 

For the companies I work with and how we define what metrics/KPIs to measure, I like to split it into the three key funnel stages – TOF, MOF, and BOF. 

Just to be clear, though, I don’t view these metrics as silos through only these funnel stages, but rather I measure all of these throughout the customer lifecycle stages, especially as audiences can flow in and out of various funnel stages. 

Plus, I also use a combination of these metrics for certain campaigns we run. 

However, for the purpose of communicating what metrics I keep an eye on (there are many, but these are the main ones I look at often), here they are by the three key stages. 

TOF – Awareness

For Top of Funnel, I focus on these metrics: 

• Reach/Impressions – In the world of B2B, these metrics do matter to me, especially when the targeting and audience are of high quality. It doesn’t matter as much (sort of vanity metric) in the world of B2C, but in B2B, it’s quite important. 
• Engagement – again, many people view it as a vanity metric, but I do take this into account for measurement, especially with a high-quality audience. 
• Unique visitor traffic from posts – a key goal I like to see if new unique visitors we get from TOF content and posts. This is great as collecting this data point from organic socials means we can use for remarketing campaigns, driving newsletter subscribers, and more. 

TOF/MOF – Engagement and consideration

I’ve combined an element of TOF and MOF as both can interchange when it comes to audience engagement. Here are the metrics I keep an eye on:

• Newsletter subscribers – collecting an email address is a key data point for a lot of B2B brands, and it’s for a good reason. We can then share loads of content both via email and social channels. 
• Marketing-Qualified Leads (MQLs) generated – generating good quality MQLs is certainly a priority as part of any B2B social media strategy. It’s important to measure through UTMs what content performs better than others when it comes to sharing B2B content. 
• Returning visitors – once you grab their attention on the top of the funnel, how many times can you bring visitors back? Keeping them warm and your brand top of mind is certainly a success metric, even if they haven’t exchanged some form of data (i.e. email, phone number, etc.) – at least not just yet. 
• Conversion rate – a good measurement I like to view between all types of content that are shared and campaigns is viewing the conversion rates of what content performs better over others in terms of generating leads. 

BOF – showing commitment & prospect nurturing

Then, of course, we’ve got the bottom of the funnel which is all about turning warmer/hotter prospects into becoming paid customers. At this stage, I pay attention to these metrics: 

• Demo bookings – can socials drive warmer leads into booking demo calls with sales teams (as typically, most B2B companies require this). Again, we can track this by using UTMs and ensuring we use different variants per campaign so we can check Google Analytics and other tools around effectiveness. 
• Time to close deals – whilst socials aren’t necessarily responsible for this as a primary metric, this is certainly something to keep an eye on. The great thing about awesome analytics and CRM platforms (such as Hubspot), you can actually track the engagement of how people interact with your content. 
• Sales team support – this is not necessarily a metric, although it does go nicely with the above ‘time to close deals’. It’s important to have a solid feedback loop between the sales/marketing teams to ensure we’re producing and distributing content that helps support nurturing prospects into sales.
• Closing deals/revenue (and even MoM growth rate and tying back to socials) – then, ultimately, closing deals is what it’s all about when it comes to growth. 
• Customer retention – This is something I do like to track, especially with existing customers who keep reading content via socials. 

Is it time for you to get started with social media marketing? 

By adopting a value-driven approach to social media marketing, B2B businesses can effectively engage prospects, nurture relationships, and drive conversions through social media. 

But not many B2B businesses believe this is possible. That’s why we’re going to be interviewing many other professionals and experts in the industry to get their take on B2B social media marketing. 

Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on social media! 
And if you’re looking for someone to help you with a B2B social media marketing strategy, contact us here.