How Facebook Can Be Used for Building B2B Relationships

How Facebook Can Be Used for Building B2B Relationships

The majority of what’s posted online about using Facebook and other social networks centers around B2C marketing.  It makes sense, after all.  Facebook is chock full of millions of consumers, ready and waiting to see your message.  Or not see it, as the case often is for businesses.

The problem with using Facebook for B2B marketing is how outside the norm it often is.  It’s hard to target other businesses with your messages.  Business marketers often think in terms of getting others to follow their pages, not in following other businesses relevant to their interests.  The prevailing attitude seems to be “B2B?  Go to LinkedIn.”

While LinkedIn is a great tool for B2B, you can use Facebook effectively if you just know what to do.

Step 1: Build a Robust Profile

Just like using Facebook as a marketing tool to reach the public, B2B marketing requires a strong foundation.  Remember, even though you’re marketing towards business entities, they’re still people making judgments about your business and your offering.  You need to be just as convincing as you would if you were a B2C company.

On Facebook, this means attractive and professional cover photos and profile pictures.  It also means compelling bio text, where you make it clear that you’re looking to work with other businesses, not necessarily with standard consumers.  If you do both, make that clear as well, or create separate pages for your B2B and B2C efforts.

The key to remember from all of this is branding.  Consumers are agile in their thinking; brand loyalty must almost be pushed upon them if you want to keep their business.  In the world of B2B, brand loyalty is the norm.  Businesses are much less agile in general, particularly in industries where adopting a new brand or new technology will require a significant investment to retrofit old systems or install new ones.  Play on the strengths of your brand and make sure it’s clear who you are and who you represent.

Step 2: Deep Research

Your customers are businesses, and those businesses have customers.  Just like how those businesses need to understand their customers in order to identify their needs, you need to perform that market research.

The difference is one of depth.  A B2C business needs to understand the needs of their massed audience, in a generalized way that’s useful to their decision making.  You need to understand how your potential business customers operate and what they need.

You can, if you investigate the users who follow your potential customers, retrace their steps.  Your perspective is different, however.  Instead of looking for what those customers need, you’re looking for what the business needs to fill those needs.  It’s a higher level form of analysis, but Facebook provides a wealth of information.

Step 3: Content Marketing

Just like a B2C business uses content marketing to attract users, so too will your company.  The difference is only in the concerns and perspectives you put into your blog posts.

Essentially, the difference is one of scale.  A B2C company can write blog posts targeted at single individuals, with specific needs on a small scale.  For example, a tech company could write a post about installing a home printer successfully.  You, as a B2B printer manufacturer, could then write a similar piece.  The difference would be, yours focuses on how to set up and network half a dozen office printers, as well as the most efficient arrangement in an office.  The same topic; a difference in scale.

All of the basic focuses of content marketing online hold true, regardless of your customers.  You need to writing deep, lengthy posts full of valuable content with an eye for the keywords and subject matter you’re covering.  You need to produce content on a consistent basis, typically at least 2-3 posts per week.  You need to be optimizing those posts within your website, including meta descriptions and headlines.

For Facebook integration, you’re going to want to use their Open Graph attributes to customize how your posts look in preview.  This is important, because you’ll be sharing your posts frequently.

Step 4: Follow Up on Leads

When a user likes your Facebook page, they’re entering a long-term sales funnel.  Business deals take a long time to close, longer than the average customer sale, so you need to be able to commit to the long-term funnel.

This means, primarily, that you can’t abandon Facebook users in the middle of the process, nor can you abandon Facebook when it doesn’t immediately return results.  You might not close a sale that started with Facebook for a year after you started.

Every person or business liking your page is a possible lead.  Don’t disregard a follower because they’re a personal account rather than a business page.  Remember, everyone needs a personal account in order to create a business page.  The person you ignore might be the primary decision maker for a business you’re trying to connect with.

Step 5: Cast a Wide Net

With B2C marketing, you’re talking to one person who has total control over the decision whether to buy.  With B2B, you may be working on an entire suite of executives, attempting to convince them all.

Remember, each person taking part in a decision has their own agenda.  It’s not a cloak and dagger affair, it’s just simple politics; someone in charge of a particular department may want their department to thrive, where a big purchase from your company will set them back months in their own development cycle.

You need to communicate with as many people as possible, working different angles and customizing your message to each.  Publicly, you appeal to the crowd with wide-angle messages broadcast to entire industries.  Each narrower step of the funnel grows more granular, with individuals pulling to the fore as decision influencers.

Finally, remember that you’re building relationships with both people and businesses.  With people, you’re building a relationship of trust and respect, brand recognition and confidence.  You want to get these people on your side on an individual basis, so they help you argue in favor of the transaction within their own business.

On another level, you’re building a relationship with a business as a whole.  You never know when, in the middle of a deal, a key employee advocate leaves their employ and is replaced.  It doesn’t jeopardize your relationship with the brand, but it changes the dynamic.  That’s why you’re focusing on both sides of the coin.

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