077. Getting Started with Social Media for B2B: Paid vs Organic

Foreign. Hello. Welcome back to another episode of Demand Gen Studio. I am Miranda with Boundify and I'm joined by Emilio, also with Boundify on this very cold winter day. How's it going?

I gotta say yes, super, super cold, kind of unexpected. The only great thing is sunny and I'm feeling more and more like truly like a guest at this show. I gotta say that Miranda. So you know, like, I really feel like, oh yeah, I'm gonna join Miranda's show and so that I think that's awesome. So really happy to be here.

Yeah, I'm sure all of our listeners are going to fact check me and realize that we are joining from South Carolina and make fun of the fact that we think it's a cold day off. But hey, from South Carolina, it's cold.

Hey dude.

Awesome. Today we're going to be talking about getting started with social media for B2B and some of the differences between paid social and organic social. So we'll talk through the differences between the strategies for paid versus organic and some expectations for each one and then talk through how to prepare to launch paid social if you don't already have it. You know, pretty obvious. But the difference between the two, organic social is going to be your unpaid content posts, comments, engagement, all of that. And organic social is really focused around like community building, having a presence for your brand online. And then paid social is going to be your sponsored ads boosted posts, retargeting, all that stuff. So to just get us started, let's talk through kind of why this matters for B2B and lay the stage of when to use organic first, when to use paid for B2B.

Yeah, yeah. Such a, such a broad question, I'll say.

Yeah.

If you think about it as, you know, Miranda, I really like to start always with the why. Right? Why would you like to be on social to begin with if you are a B2B brand? And it looks for us that we do this every day. Super obvious. We help clients to be on social on this paid side. So we actually don't question about it, don't question the fact. But I think it's worth asking because first of all, I think one key question is that why will a brand be on the digital world at all versus especially in B2B where you can just have in real life conversations or approaches with your buyers. And I think might be obvious to everyone but it's like more and more of our time is spent digitally, more and more of our awake time is spent especially on phones and a big portion of that time is spent on social media platforms. That's the other key component you if you are a decision maker, that kind of or anyone that is like wondering why just take a look at the most downloaded apps on your favorite app store and the top 10 most of them are a flavor of a social media platform. They're massively consumed. Adoption keeps increasing and more important not only more people is joining them where all of us are spending more and more time on them as well. So I think that portion is super important. You got to be there because more and more humans and ideally your buyers are spending time Now I would even.

Say too going off of that that it's almost a. Maybe not go so far as a red flag but I think you're. If your buyers are looking into you, your brand as a solution, they expect you to be on social media. If I as a consumer not Even thinking about B2B necessarily but if I me as a consumer sometimes the first place I look for a brand is a social media platform instead of Google. And so I think sometimes it can be a little bit of a red flag if you don't have a presence.

I agree, I agree. I love that you're touching that part because it's true. The other big reason why social is so impactful compared to something like a search engine is that you have that social proof aspect of it. Right?

Yeah.

The near present as you're saying matters. If you're not. I do. I'm going to deviate a little bit here and I'll say for example that I do that with prospects that we get from our website. Right. We are in B2B. We're looking for a certain type of company and profile. If I get a lead, the first thing that I do is and go and check out if they their social media presence is important because you can not fake but buy a domain, build a website of sorts. You have very little information about what's going on with that website. But it's very hard to fake social media engagement because it spawns years and it is to see if you have followers and if those followers engage with you and if the brand has some presence among other people. So I do that for. I do that for prospects. If I don't see a strong website, I don't see a strong social media presence. I will approach that lead with a little more caution or less expectations because it might be just Sam or just any bad lead. So yes, that trust element is super important. It used to be now is less so that social meant engaging with family and friends and therefore having that, you know, word of mouth kind of recommendations. It still happens, but I think mostly in groups nowadays. But still, even if most of the reference that you will from the brand will be from strangers, there's power in numbers, right? Even if you don't know the person personally is part of your network, the person that you recommend or talking about a brand, if that person is a person of authority. And social media has a great way of signaling that the number of followers, the number and the engagement of the influencer, we use that as a signal for trust. So I love what you're saying. And yes, the other big reason beyond attention will be trust building. Going specifically to organic versus pay. This is where it gets tricky because the reason I think you want to have presence organically is because connections, authenticities build upon that portion of the engagement. Right? When you connect with your the equivalent of your community or at least you become a thought leadership on the space that you want to be present to. I think that's a need. However, when a social media platform or environment grows large enough because of that organic presence and that organic engagement that happens not just among your buyers, but other peoples and other brands then automatically becomes a place where just the mere fact that everyone is paying attention to it is worth paying for advertising. So this is the part that is hard to separate because people are thinking in terms of one versus the other. And I don't like that idea. It is like comparing if you should travel on the airport or you should advertise on the airport, it has nothing to do, right? Airports exist for a reason, which is getting you to places with planes. But the mere fact that there's so many people doing that, spending time on lounges, looking, walking through aisles, making a place makes it a place where people is paying attention when they're spending time. And the mere fact that they're doing that justifies advertising on those places. So you don't have to be. The thing that I want everyone to think about is that you don't have to be an airplane traveler to advertise on an airport. Kind of like the same idea on organic and pay social. Right? You don't have to be or you don't have to have a great organic presence. It helps, but it doesn't. It's not necessarily requisite to advertise on pay on social media, if that makes sense.

Yeah. So kind of talking through some of the differences between the two and, and how to think about using organic for your brand versus using paid for your brand One point that I wanted to bring up that I'm curious your thoughts around it is thinking about organic social as a supporting asset for sales. If you think about it like we were talking about that when you see a prospect come in, the first thing you know you research them on social media channels. If you think about it, your prospective buyers are likely doing the same thing to you. So if they fill out a form and they have a call lined up with a sales salesperson from your team, likely the first thing they're going to be doing is researching your company, looking on the website, looking on the social media channels. So one great use of organic social in my mind is being a supporting asset to your sales team of describing what you do, who you do it for, some of the like solutions, benefits of your product. What are your thoughts around that?

I love what you're saying that because yes, historically companies or brands see social media platforms as something that belongs to marketing only or that should be managed by marketing only. They actually see it just as a marketing channel completely. And that couldn't be, you know, so far from the truth. And it creates some of the greatest disconnects for buyers on social media. Because one, as you said, you should think of those social media channels and we will probably unpack that part later depending on your buyers, right? If your buyers are spending time on a specific social media platform, you need to see that social media platform or that page that you have there, almost like your website. Almost like in the same way, right? Especially now that social media platforms are more and more rewarding, that the user stays in platform instead of getting outside of it. Your page needs, you need to think about it as a website. It needs to have the same branding, it needs to have the same contact information, it needs to be taken care of, it needs to present the company in the same way that a website does with maybe case studies, maybe explaining solutions that you have, how to contact you. But if you continue that idea of social media platform being a channel for your company, then as you said, then your sales reps also need to think about that channel the same way. A place where their preference matches the data of the company. If it's a professional network like LinkedIn and when you can be reached out to and that you promptly answer and more importantly, the one that is almost often ignored, your customer support or social media channel where people spend time as a potential source of both great news and bad news to manage or issues to manage in terms of customer requests or comments about bad experiences. And so if you just think about social media as a marketing channel, you lose the opportunity to leverage it for sales and for customer success.

Yeah. And that's a big. Another big difference between the two is the audience that you're reaching organic. If you think about the audience you're reaching organically on your channels, especially say LinkedIn, it's likely going to be your current customers, people who already know who you are, want to follow your page and get updates. Whereas for paid, you're targeting your ideal client profile, who you want to be your buyers. And so using those two channels with those specific audiences in mind.

Yeah, yeah. And now diving a little bit into the approach, as you said, I think it's important to also separate the incentives of the two ideas. The incentives for brands on the organic side, you need to always think about what the platform wants to accomplish, which is almost the same across all of them, which is capturing and retaining attention of the users so they spend more time on it, so they have a larger audience or crowd that they can rent out advertising to. So that being the case, when you think about organic for your brand, you always have to think about what can I make there that is engaging so it can have larger reach. And a lot of that has to do with being relevant and capturing attention. It doesn't have to be only entertainment.

Right.

Although it always works. It can be educational, it can be intriguing, it can be anything that can capture people's attention and engage helps. But if you are the kind of brand that is capable of producing engaging content, then you will be rewarded with reach and you will be rewarded with a larger audience. That doesn't mean that on pay you can get away with bland content, but the incentives are different because they are you are your ads, the targeting, all of that. You get access to what you want because you are paying for it, versus an organic where you are not exchanging money.

Yeah, definitely. That's a big. I feel like that's just a huge incentive for B2B companies to look into paid social is just the how much targeting you can get with building out your audiences, you know, for your campaigns, especially on LinkedIn, being able to target specific job titles and specific industries and all of that is huge for B2B.

Now if we think about how do I get started on the organic side and how is that different from the pay side? They look very similar, but on the organic side, because you don't have budgets, the way that you organize content based on the possible sizes of your audiences is what gives you the recipe. Right. And what I mean by that and we have discussed this many times is that almost for every brand their non buyers will be distributed across three big categories and the first one being the largest, right? The unaware or the not recently aware and then the aware or the consideration set and finally the vision one. And because it's very probable that whatever, whoever is spending time on your social media platform of choice is distributed in the same way your, your posts, your videos, the content that you distribute to follow a similar distribution, most of the time you are creating content for the unaware. It can be unaware of your brain. Usually there's a combination of unaware about the problems you solve or the solutions that you offer and a smaller fraction, but it's still significant of content that build trust, case studies, collaboration, support, awards, things that in improve social proof and from time to time just sprinkle call to actions right to the products and services that you offer. So in organic you use the frequency or the amount of post to distribute across those three aspects, if that makes sense versus in pay where you use budget to accomplish the same distribution. Right. Ideally you want to invest a lot of your budget on awareness and less so on consideration and even less so on decision because that will be your smallest crowd.

One of our listeners is a B2B company who hasn't started really focusing on organic social and wants to get started. How would you recommend they go about deciding which channel to start? Start with which channel to prioritize?

Yeah, that's a fantastic question. It's very similar to how you decide to create content and how to pick where to have presence in any kind of channel. I will always start either surveying or evaluating the potential buyers that represent, you know, your consumers for your brand. And it will be highly unlikely that they spend most of their time in just one social media platform. But ideally you pick the number one, the one that is where everyone's spending the most time within your buying category. And it's very important than it within your buying category because overall the population of a country you will follow a very predictable pattern, right? The most popular social media platform will be where most people is spending time. But your specific audience will have it will skew towards some of them. There's a great tool that we use from time to time, it's called SparkToro that can give you reference if you share with it something that allows it to describe your audiences in terms of what they search for or who they follow or what they spend time on. And so figure out what is the number one network that makes sense for you after you knew that obviously you have to craft what is your positioning, what makes you different in the marketplace? And why not take a look at what works on that platform? Right. More and more each of them are really making changes to look very similar, to be honest, in the type of content that works. Nowadays more often than not that means four vertical videos, reels or talks. But. But there's still opportunities in some of them to find for your particular industry what really works. And so if you take a look at some of the content that engages people and some of the competition on your on the platform that you selected of the companies that are doing great with it, learn from it and start experimenting with it. I we have discussed this many times is I believe strongly that it's more important to get started with consistency at a small number of posts or publications that you stick to it that going wild and kind of like super heavy on doing a lot at the beginning and then dwindling down because you cannot sustain the effort.

Definitely. And also creating a simple and kind of repeatable content system. We're big fans of the pillar content idea where you choose a, you know, pillar content piece and then you can break in, break that piece up into different formats for different distribution channels. You mentioned earlier that a company doesn't necessarily have to have an organic presence to to get started with paid social. What so now kind of going from the paid social angle, what are the signs for you for a B2B company for when you think they should get started with paid social? Yeah.

Now I have said that you don't necessarily need to have a social media presence organically on a platform to get started with paid. And I still believe that's true. However, usually that's not the case. Usually you want to dabble your feed a little bit into the platform organically at least to get a sense of the land and definitely to have that consistent presence that we talked about your assets. Right. Even on paid, you still need to tie your ads to your page and that page is your social media page, not your website. So it has to be prepared for the engagement that will come from advertising. But yeah, true, you don't need, you don't need necessarily organic. However, the thinking doesn't change. Even when in advertising you don't necessarily lead with content and top leadership. You don't have to. But it's becoming more and more a great way to get started. You still need to think about great things for the buckets that you're going to create. Right. So sometimes that top of the funnel block it the default is awareness Right. Presenting the brand and connecting in with three or four ideas about what you do. You can consider that pillars of the brand, but if you don't want to go that route or you want to compliment it, you can complement that promoting content that you have created organically, not necessarily for that social media platform. It can be content that you have created for your blog and become and transform some of those campaigns into campaigns that actually share that content for brand awareness. Right. Again, just keep always thinking that while you are sharing content and educating or entertaining, it's very important you tie the brand to the content so people can make the connection. That's the whole point has always been then think about your consideration. Set the people that already know about you but need to learn more. So you there you need pieces of content that explain your offer, what makes it different, what problems you solve, who else have, who has used that success stories. And finally the part that is very different that is usually associated with advertising, that social organic doesn't have quite much is the decision set those you need to have concrete offers, you need to present urgency, exclusivity, scarcity so people can take action if they haven't get acquainted with your brand and they're just, they're just missing a nudge to take action. So that's the big way that I will consider for pay social. However, the big caveat here is that for advertising ideally have a great analytic foundation. That's the part that I believe sometimes we miss. Right. You need to have a great analytic foundation so you can measure and answer these concrete questions from the beginning, who am I targeting? Right on the advertising, you might think you're targeting a certain group of people, but analytics will help you to make sure that there's no gap or that the gap is smaller between what you want and the actual target, the actual people they are targeting with your advertising. After that, you need to have a great way to measure engagement. People engage in what they are creating. And engagement can mean so many things. It can mean just seeing the ad, clicking on it, saving it, sharing it, visiting your website, spending time on the pages that you created. And this is in multiple of them coming multiple times. That's another measurement of engagement. So you want to create a system that allows you to measure in multiple ways that not only are you being seen, but the actually people is retaining that because the whole goal is to have your brain in your mind. And finally, because at the end of the day we're doing this to increase the revenue of the company. You need to have a way of measuring conversions. In this case for B2B usually it's commercial inquiry, someone filling out a form or starting a chat conversation or picking up the phone. So I think if you have that foundation and you create content for these three big buckets, you are off to a great start.

Yeah, definitely. It's interesting too that you bring up that about, you know, having a basics for basis for analytics because we definitely don't think of paid social and especially non organic social as a quick win play for B2B companies. It's definitely a slower build, but it is a channel that compounds. The more you are on it, the more you're posting, the more you're doing, the more you're promoting the impact of it compounds.

Yeah, I don't know. One day maybe I will ask ChatGPT to create a visual that relays this, but I imagine it this way and maybe you, Miranda after shared this today can come up with a visual. Dental related is the reason why marketing is so challenging to measure and why you feel that it takes so long is because imagine that you have a big block or a big heavy thing and a person pushes, I don't know, 10ft and so it's very clear that they move that person and then they move to the next block and pushes another 5, 10ft, 20ft, whatever the amount distance is. And so it's very clear, it's just that they have to do 1v1. And so you can see the impact concentrating one thing that you are doing that for me, sales. You have a conversation with someone, you last 30 minutes, one hour, there's no way that person is going to forget you. And it's very clear you have moved that person along the path because they will move on to ask for, you know, a proposal or not. The impression has been made and when you're doing marketing, you are doing the same thing. But it's not just one person at a time, it's hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands. But you're just moving them inches. And when you look at the whole marketplace, nothing has moved right. And the only sad thing is that there are some of those lines or objects that were already ahead. They were already 10ft forward and that little effort from marking those extra 5 inches just were enough for them to fill out the form and you say wow, we did it. So that's definitely benefit and the course of the effort. Then it will get attribution for things that were really unette and they just needed a notch. But it will get almost no recognition for the tens of thousands of boulders that were moved a handful of inches. So that's the patience part, because until you get that in the mind of the buyer, in the mind of the cfo, nothing had changed. So maybe one day we come up with a good image for that.

Yeah. Which with the B2B buying process, that could be two months down the road. That could be months down the road when the need arises.

Yeah. Yeah.

Awesome. All right. I hope this has been helpful for our listeners. Any last kind of closing thoughts or insights?

No, I think that I will say at this moment in time, for those of you who are still thinking about social, organic or paid for, B2B gotta be there. There's no question about it. It is now present in almost all platforms. The current ones, the old ones, and the ones that are coming start small, start focused, experimenting. And as we were saying, give it time. Right. It takes time. Even pay takes time, even when it's more targeted. But if you are patient and have the right measurement from the beginning, you will be able to see the impact little by little and reap the benefits down the road. So swing my closing thoughts there.

Awesome. All right, till next time. Bye, everyone.

Until next time around. Bye. Bye.