As we enter a new phase in the digital world, social media trends and techniques have become more diverse and innovative, and it is getting harder to catch up with the latest SEO tricks. A question that is often asked is how B2B marketers can transform themselves and get ahead of the growing competition?
There is an ongoing debate about whether optimizing your site for search engines (SEO) or focusing on your social media marketing efforts (SMM) is more important for digital marketing. Let's explore how both SEO and SMM impact B2B businesses, why they need either or both and how they can benefit from it.
What is SMM?
Social Media Marketing is a subset of digital marketing services that involves leveraging social media channels for brand promotion, target audience growth, driving website traffic, and increasing sales. Since social platforms are vital for SMM, it is the easiest way to reach a vast audience. Half the global population uses some form of social media, and this number is constantly growing. In the B2B community, social media helps bridge the gap between buyers and suppliers and improve your digital business strategy.
Why should B2B companies use SMM?
Customers are on social media: While B2B companies don't offer products or services directly to customers, it is important to engage with them to increase sales. Retailers alone aren't solely responsible for sales; B2B companies can have a strong presence on social media to increase awareness, generate leads, etc.
Customers need support: Customers often turn to social media to voice their grievances and complain about a brand. This is where B2B companies can step in to offer support, even if it was a user error.
Business partners are on social media: Social media helps B2B companies to reach and collaborate with their business partners. They use social platforms to build social connections, develop trust, and coordinate activities that support strong, collaborative relationships.
Direct customers to your website: By helping brands to establish themselves as thought leaders, social media helps raise brand awareness, which brings more customers to your website where they can learn more about your products (conversions in B2B marketing generally doesn't take place online, but through a sales force).
What are the merits of SMM?
Inexpensive form of marketing.
Access to a larger audience; more convenient.
Creates brand loyalty with higher engagement.
Ideal for conversions
What are the demerits of SMM?
Social media accounts are vulnerable to risks and threats.
Judging potential traffic can give inaccurate results.
Content marketing is all it requires.
What is B2B SEO?
Business-to-Business (B2B) SEO is a strategy that aims to increase organic search engine traffic and rankings. A successful B2B SEO strategy increases a website’s visibility to those actively looking to engage the services that a business offers or buy the products they sell. SEO strategy is required to improve the ranking of your company website and its pages in search results for targeted queries to drive better quality and higher quantity traffic targeted to attract professionals to your web page from search engines.
Why do B2B companies use SEO?
SEO increases targeted traffic which is necessary to generate leads and convert them into buying customers.
High SERP rankings are the primary source of web traffic and provide a constant flow of it.
Good SEO practices simplify the sales process since you are already engaging with prospects through search results.
People rely on search engines, and a better ranking builds trust and credibility.
Top ranking on SERP assures consumers about their purchase decisions.
A properly implemented SEO strategy can provide a better user experience.
Optimizing for local areas can boost traffic and conversions for B2B businesses.
Combined with other digital marketing solutions, SEO can help you stay ahead of the competition.
Organic SEO is more cost-effective than paid advertising, which has a short-term impact.
Well developed and maintained SEO strategy offers better long-term results.
What are the merits of SEO?
Guarantees organic results if executed properly.
Optimizes the search for a target audience.
Generates potential leads for conversions.
More effective in enhancing credibility.
What are the demerits of SEO?
Time-consuming process.
Frequently fluctuating results.
Unfair methods increase the risk of penalization.
It takes time to get an ROI.
If you implement SEO without any SMM, you're missing out on a huge potential opportunity to connect with your customers outside of your website. You can use SMM to redirect people to your website, which helps boost rankings through additional traffic and social signals.
But if you do SMM without SEO, it will be difficult for people to find you organically outside of social media and most of them rely on search results to do so. There is no one right way to combine the two to form a winning strategy for your business. If you want to hire a digital marketing agencyto develop the perfect marketing strategy for your business, get in touch with us.