When it comes to B2B marketing, what is your biggest pain point?

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.