Use Social Media to Fill in the Gaps

For B2B brands, nothing beats face-to-face customer meetings. Relationships matter when you’re selling big deals, and face time accelerates the sales process.

The challenge B2B brands face is time. As much as getting face-to-face with your clients is ideal, meeting people is time consuming! It’s not like you can multitask when you’re meeting with a client (or at least I hope you don’t). And if you are meeting in person, you’ve got to factor in the windshield time of driving both ways.In a busy city like Toronto, where I live, a single client meeting can knock out half a day. I can easily spend two hours in my car commuting back and forth, plus the hour to meet the client.

Do I complain? No way! Nothing beats meeting my clients. But I don’t get to do very many of these meetings either. There’s only so many hours in the day, and I have to pick my priorities:

• Billable client work
• Prospecting and meeting with clients
• Content creation

Where B2B brands create scale is in social media. Social media creates the opportunity to scale your relationships, because it fills in the gaps between client meetings. It provides the tools to engage, nurture, and maintain relationships in-between phone calls and face-to-face meetings.

Every time you post on social media — whether LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram — your followers see your face. Your brand pops up, and that creates a small moment of awareness.

‍If you post frequently enough, you can create a lot of brand awareness. If someone sees your brand in their feeds daily, they will get to know you. It’s guaranteed.

Will they like you? That’s a bit more complicated.

Posting frequently doesn’t guarantee success. If all you’re posting is generic or irrelevant content, then people will tune you out. It’s like being that annoying person at a cocktail party. People learn quickly who to talk with and who to avoid.Scaling relationships on your social media channels is dependent on two levers:

• Frequency: Post as much as you can. Social media feeds are busy, distracting places. What you posted last week is already forgotten.
• Relevance: Not all content is equal. Retweeting memes, news stories, and generic articles may fill your feed, but they don’t grow your brand. Content has to be relevant for people to notice and engage with it.

A good metaphor is to “turn up the volume on your marketing.” Almost every brand is active and posting on social media. That doesn’t mean everyone is doing it well, but there is a lot of noise. To fill in the gaps between meetings, you’ve got to be heard:

• Post frequently
• Post high quality, relevant content
• Focus on the feed (people are spending more and more of their time reading what’s in their Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn feeds versus clicking on the links)
• Measure, adapt, and get better

Nothing will replace face-to-face meetings, but social media gives you the tools to scale your brand by filling in the gaps between those meetings.