Have you said, ‘social media doesn’t work for my B2B company’ within the last year or two?  Hold it, I think we’ve met as I’ve been hearing the same thing for years.  I have a theory that a lot of people tried social media in small uneven ways a few years ago and found no success and gave it up.  That kind of thing (giving up on something that ‘doesn’t work’ in a shortly period of time) tends to happen a lot in the digital marketing age.  Remember the glory days of people spending advertising budgets as they did on the AMC show Mad Men with no discernible way of knowing whether their ad campaign would work or not?  I’m not proposing going back to those days of knowing absolutely nothing but I am suggesting two alternatives that make sense when thinking of using social media for your B2B company.

Idea 1: Try something again that you haven’t tried in a while

I’ve heard that at any one point, Facebook has thousands of different versions being tested on its billions of users.  Why does this matter?  If you tested Facebook ads or boosting Facebook ads for your company 3 years ago, there have likely been 100,000 different versions of Facebook tested since then.  That is a LOT of potential changes to how things work.  While we don’t run Facebook ads for our clients much at Sharp Guys, some of our agency friends do and they have seen tremendous success.  Often their success is far cheaper than Google Ads and their successes include working with B2B clients.  Just some food for thought.

Idea 2: Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water (I feel like we need an updated idiom for the modern age – though ‘don’t throw the phone out with the old phone case’ doesn’t seem as weighty)

When trying different digital marketing strategies, they should be unique to the platform, and on social media, NOTHING is more important than tone.  Folks on social media are looking to be entertained and your conveyor manufacturing company is likely not entertaining – but the question is, could it be?  I bet you have some funny stories you tell your friends about how companies were doing things before you showed up to save the day with your conveyors – tell those stories, gain folks’ interest, don’t sell!  Or tell them about how your conveyors are so strong they could have been used to bring the stones (no Nile needed) used to build the Pyramids if only King Tut hadn’t outlawed American imports.   Over time, people will come to you not because your selling them hardcore on your awesome wares but will trust you because your personable.  In other words, if you were at a real life networking event, don’t be the person telling everyone to buy your stuff – entertain them, have them ask you what you do and stay in touch – they’ll remember you.

But Cody, you may ask, what if none of that works (are you sure you tried that Pyramids thing)?  Try the same thing on a different platform – LinkedIn has a ton of new options when compared to a few years ago.  I recommend one platform at a time to keep the workload as low as possible.