Reaching the right decision maker!

Team buy-in of it’s importance.

Connecting with our audience! I work for a B2B SaaS company, and it can often be difficult to create content that resonates with our audience when it comes to very specific areas of our brand.

Generating high-quality leads!

Trying to talk to a technical audience while staying understandable and “marketing” friendly!

Buy in & also, that it is not the same as B2C when your company does both!

Knowing how to speak to businesses of all different levels and reaching the correct decision makers within those businesses.

For me, in a B2B finserv, it’s difficult to dive into our audience’s psychographics and get to know their interests outside of an immediate customer focus with our product in mind. They’re typically shy about their preferences in a public or online setting, so we really have to dig and lean on our sales team and I sometimes feel like I’m stalking a few people just to get a high-level piece of content out that might perform a little bit better. But I appreciate the challenge in some ways. Social truly does prepare you for many things!

One of our biggest pain points is the long customer buying journey. Since we sell a service, a large portion of this service is a relationship and trust within that relationship. Our service isn’t a quick purchase or one off purchase. 

With a long customer journey, we struggle to generate strong leads that can turn into sales. We don’t sell products someone needs all the time, but they need it just when they have a particular project they’re working on. 

Getting clients to agree to creating fun and timely content on social. 

Helping our clients understand they should not be all things to all people, they need to let us help them boil down the key message for their key audience and do it clean, creatively and effectively. 

Tracking ROI (leads) on our B2B content as the sales cycle for our business is longer than that of product marketing. So, often our B2B content’s immediate ROI is heavy brand awareness vs. leads. 

When it comes to B2B marketing, my biggest pain point is how to differentiate the copy between B2B and B2C social channels. I work with both, and when it comes to the B2B channels, I sometimes struggle with how casual vs professional to keep the content. I am learning as I go, and attending events like today’s B2B webinar has helped get the gears rolling on how I should adjust my future strategies.

The ability to research “where Your clients are” to reach them.

Optimizing social media profiles. Making sure content shows up correctly on profiles and sized correctly. It makes such a difference to the look and feel of a brand. 

My biggest pain point is showcasing the abstract and direct impact organic social media has on pipeline. It’s not that my org doesn’t see the value, but they can’t put a dollar amount on the value and that makes them struggle to prioritize growth of the team - as a team of one running a program that’s rapidly scaling, it’s constant treading water. 

Knowing what social platforms to use based on our business goals. Sometimes it’s hard to know where to focus most of your time and if we need to adjust/cater the content to our audience if we are marketing for example on LinkedIn vs Instagram.  Right now X/Twitter has been very tricky. 

As a government agency (health department), B2B marketing isn’t easy. We are limited on what we can and cannot post. Sometimes, the things we have to post, such as respiratory diseases, instantly turn people off because of COVID fatigue.

Here are my top 3 biggest pain points as the manager of Riskonnect, Inc.’s (B2B SaaS) Global Social Program:
#1 In the B2B space, we social marketers have to find ways to make content new and interesting without dragging and dropping the latest meme or social media trend onto our brand’s social platforms. 

By this, I mean that B2B Social Teams are often watched much more closely by Legal, Content, and Compliance teams in terms of the content they create, how it hits with followers on the brand’s page, and the implications that a particular post may have. Most B2B SMMs would never think of leveraging an ‘unhinged social’ trend for their brand just for the sake of better engagement. We have to think much more long-term when it comes to the content that we choose to create and share and how they may be seen by our social audience. 

Just to provide an example, my brand has rules about being able to use things like memes, as we don’t feel that our target audience of risk and compliance managers would find this content worthwhile. Instead, we focus on creating educational resources that serve our B2B personas. 

Recently, I’ve seen some B2B SaaS brands in the Marketing/Sales space recently do some ‘unhinged’ social post content which had some not-so-great consequences. With our B2B brand being in the risk management space, I’m always asking myself ‘what will the long-term impacts of this particular post potentially be.’ We live in the long-term over in B2B...so it’s not about just getting ‘a’ reaction, instead it’s about creating content that creates a positive, memorable feeling about your brand from prospects, customers, and beyond. 

#2 Our SaaS solution isn’t something that just ‘anyone’ on social would be interested in. 
So, this means that it’s incredibly important for myself and my Social Team to have a strong understanding of the exact personas that we’re looking to target with our social post copy, so that we can speak to those people. I spend a lot of time speaking with our Product Marketing team to make sure that I understand how to speak to the challenges, pain points, and overall place that our target personas come from for each of our B2B SaaS solutions.

#3 B2B industries tend to have a lot more restrictions on doing things like customer giveaways on social.
Since Riskonnect, Inc. is in the risk management and compliance software space, we’re limited in terms of giveaway promos that we’re able to launch in order to help certain campaigns get more traction on social media. I would say that in general, B2C social marketers spend much more time on creating giveaways to pair with campaigns vs. B2B marketers, based on regulatory challenges like the ones we face. 

Figuring out what content is actually useful for our audience and then delivering that content in a way that doesn’t seem too market-y or pandering. Businesses are such big, amorphous blobs of diverse (often discrete) needs and it is hard to capture the attention of an entity and get it to engage with you in some way. 

I am in legal marketing in Canada and the legal profession does have rules and regulations with how things are marketed. My law firm, like many, doesn’t really have a documented business strategy or goals--it is something that evolves organically from the the partners work; it is ephemeral. This can make it tricky to confidently develop content that speaks to our business and USP. 

For us, it can be hard to find the right balance for each content pillar that we have. Our Product and Sales team love to have us do more product-focused or promotional posts, but too much of that can detract followers and engagement because it feels like we’re trying to “sell” too much. I do find that when I make time to try the other content ideas I call “social-first” can really help drive engagement & positive sentiment. 

A few examples of content we try:

• Trending memes with a relevance to our primary customers (the Olympics were great, as a global company)
• Highlighting new employees that join the team, it brings their network into the engagement, congratulating them and adding lots of comments with positive sentiment. 
• Polls are being prioritized in LinkedIn’s algorithm (more impressions) and those can be a very simple way of starting a discussion. 

I added a few examples below for inspo to anyone (I work for Duda, a website building platform for agencies):

I hope this helps! 

One of our biggest pain points in B2B marketing is balancing lead generation with meaningful engagement. We're always striving to connect with the right audience while ensuring that our efforts translate into measurable ROI.

Finding leads and growing an audience

In my opinion, creating B2B marketing content that’s relevant, valuable, and engaging for an often diverse and elusive audience of decision-makers is a definite challenge. The stakes are high — finding that audience can be tough, and capturing and holding their interest can be tougher still. That’s a pain point, for sure.