Top 5 B2B Social Media Campaigns & Strategies

Not too long ago, CEOs would have balked at the idea that B2B decision-makers would be sitting around scrolling social media. These days, they’re doing everything they can to get in front of them on LinkedIn, YouTube, and even TikTok.

But the game with social media is always changing, and it can be hard to keep up.

Data from Sprout Social found that 63% of social media marketers don’t have time for high-impact work due to too many manual tasks. Pressure on budgets is high, and in the age of dark social, it can be hard to get the insights you need to justify your budget and find out what works.

To deliver high value social media campaigns on limited resources, the best place for B2B companies to start is to take a closer look at those who are already doing it well.

Learn from expert marketers like Nicolette Konkol of MorningStar, Ashley Faus of Atlassian and Katie Dunn of ThoughtSpot. Register for Donuts and Demand and get practical insights into social selling.

You know social media moves the needle on revenue—90% of social media marketers say they see a direct impact on revenue. But to make it worth the time and effort, you need to stand out.

Let’s take a look at five winning B2B social media campaigns and what they did right.

Salesforce takes their Twitter (aka X) profile to a new level with a clearly defined value prop: ‘News and behind-the-scenes stories from the official Salesforce newsroom’.

Salesforce News currently has roughly 24K followers with content that caters to a range of users across the customer journey, from potential customers to existing fans and brand advocates.

Why it works:

• Goes beyond the ‘basic’ B2B social profile: Rather than blindly posting a stream of random updates, Salesforce shares short-form videos and teaser updates highlighting new partnerships, features, and research.
• Offers multiple opportunities for engagement: By offering the highlights first, Salesforce News gives followers what they want in a zero click experience and also offers a link to access the full story or video for higher intent viewers.
• Unites a variety of formats under one key theme: Salesforce shares video, text and image based content on a range of topics, from product updates to behind-the-scenes stories. If it’s Salesforce-related, you can find it here.

AI Made Me Do It is Drift’s “monthly take on what’s new in AI—personal stories, opinions, and inspiration from AI thought leaders.” Despite having just 10 editions of the newsletter so far, Drift already has over 14,000 subscribers.

Much of that success comes down to the way they use each content marketing format to amplify the other.

Drift’s campaign is effective because it:

• Provides real thought leadership: The LinkedIn newsletter series covers topics like the importance of investing in AI literacy, straight from the desk of Salesloft’s CEO David Obrand, plus a long lineup of AI experts from all walks of B2B life.
• Builds a sense of community: By bringing in expert perspectives from other industries, Drift offers its social media followers a wide range of AI insights and use cases at a time when they really need it.
• Keeps the content flywheel spinning: Drift’s LinkedIn posts tie back to the rest of its AI programs and multichannel campaigns, fueling awareness and engagement for its AI co-pilot feature releases and original research reports.

One thing we love about Wistia is the way it expertly leverages its social media presence to build awareness for their highly anticipated annual benchmark report.

The State of Video report features insights from 2,000 video marketers, 100,000 businesses, and 90 million video uploads. Wistia shares top findings from the report on its LinkedIn and Instagram channels, creating a virtuous cycle where the data fuels the social media engagement, and the social media engagement fuels increased downloads of the report.

This is a great campaign because it:

• Keeps the experience seamless: Social media posts include an image highlighting top stats from the report and a short caption with a link to the report’s landing page for more.
• Uplevels with video: On Instagram, Wistia shares ‘fun fact’ style videos featuring top insights from the report before inviting viewers to download it.
• Includes powerful distribution: Popular sites and newsletters like Marketing Brew, HubSpot, PR Newswire, and Marketing Qualified have all helped spread the news about Wistia’s State of Video report, boosting brand awareness, backlinks and search visibility across social and organic.

Zuora’s Modern Business series is a multimedia campaign that combines rich text, audio, and video to tell the stories of five unique business leaders Zuora has dubbed, “The Accelerators”. These leaders share “a passion for action, a focus on the future, and a dedication to a customer-first approach.”

Who wouldn’t be inspired by a premise like that?

Here’s why we love this campaign:

• Showcases their value organically: By keeping customer storytelling at the core of the campaign, Zuora effectively positions itself as the Yoda to the customer’s Luke without using well-trodden formats like case studies and testimonials. The customer is the real hero. Zuora’s role is to support them with technology, expertise, and new opportunities.
• Uses video to connect emotionally: Zuora spotlights its Accelerators using a beautifully designed editorial style landing page for each, including a 4-minute video featuring insights into their guiding beliefs around topics like innovation, collaboration, and the importance of staying future-fit.
• Engages its employees: It’s common to see engagement with customers and partners on social media, but hitting that employee advocacy target is usually a harder nut to crack. By offering team members the opportunity to share organic content straight from the customers they serve, even members of Zuora’s tech team feel comfortable sharing Modern Business content on social.

Strong educational content has always been a cornerstone of HubSpot’s success—and it’s taking the same value-led approach to its video marketing. Because the way target audiences consume B2B content has fundamentally changed.

Today, B2B content doesn’t just have to be informative and persuasive, it also has to be engaging. And that means a heavy focus on videos. HubSpot currently has 120,000 subscribers with dedicated playlists on how to do everything from navigating HubSpot’s marketing hub to creating content using HubSpot’s content hub and CMS.

We like this strategy because it:

• Harnesses the timeless power of the tutorial: By making their how-tos available via video in addition to text-based channels, HubSpot’s not only reaching a wider audience, it’s also making content available to customers in the formats they care most about.
• Caters to viewers across the customer journey: HubSpot’s YouTube videos are powerful resources for new customers and current users alike.
• Goal focused: Leaning into its how-to format, HubSpot’s video tutorials show viewers exactly how to achieve their marketing and business goals using HubSpot’s tools.

You know social media works. According to HubSpot’s Social Trends Report, 78% of B2B marketers felt social media marketing was an effective channel for their brand last year.

To achieve real results, you need to know what brands like Salesforce, Drift, and Zuora are doing right. Here are some of the latest social media marketing best practices every B2B marketer should know.

When it comes to social selling: “Whoever gets closest to the customer will win.”

That’s the opinion Zsuzsanna Blau, Global Head of Digital Demand at Nokia shared with us in a recent episode of Donuts and Demand. Her advice?

“Before you start creating a hundred pieces meant to influence your audience's behavior, make sure that you do 100 hours of market or audience research as well.”

That may mean taking time to follow, listen, and engage before diving in with your own marketing campaign.

From your user-generated content to your high design infographics, success on social media is all about sharing relevant content. Once you know who your audience is and what they want, you need to take the time to tailor your social media content and make sure that each and every type of content delivers.

“In terms of cultural differences, the way cultures consume content differs as well,” said marketing consultant Susan Moore in a recent discussion on leveraging social media. “For example, certain regions really want that eight-page case story. Others say, ‘Not so much. I'm fine with just who are your top customers you're serving in the life sciences industry, for example, or in oil and gas. And so that goes back to the sensitivities of, ‘how do you consume information?’”

Lean on your regional sales teams for localized insights into how to effectively reach different subsets of your audience.

Folks like to pit them against each other, but the truth is, paid and organic are two sides of the same coin. The real question is knowing when to bet on one, the other, or both.

Let’s take a quick example from Nicolette Konkol, Global Head of Demand Generation at Morningstar. When the world went remote in 2020, Nicolette knew she needed to step it up for her target audience of field sales teams.

“We basically created a toolkit using our own product to help sellers upskill and figure out how they can still deliver a really high quality buying experience and engage with buyers in a meaningful way when they weren't able to engage with them in person,” explained Nicolette.

She and her team leveraged paid and organic content to promote the toolkit far and wide. “Not only were we promoting through typical channels, email and paid ads and this kind of thing, but we actually had our own employees and our own internal subject matter experts developing content and putting that out on social channels and then we were able to boost that content,” said Nicolette.

Her investment in both paid and organic made sense, not only because the content was incredibly timely for customers, but also because the entire team was galvanized to help make the most of it.

The truth is, there’s a time to go for reach—for example, to promote a major new content or feature release. And there’s a time to go for engagement via organic social content that prioritizes a unique p.o.v. and a handful of carefully chosen hashtags. With the right approach, both can be great strategies for lead generation.

The pace of content has exploded since the pandemic and keeping up isn’t easy. Fortunately, experts like Senior Demand Gen Manager & Head of Integrated Campaigns at ThoughtSpot Katie Dunn are already getting ahead.

Katie has developed a multichannel content repurposing process that helps her and her team repackage their ebooks, webinars, and even their account based marketing (ABM) campaigns, across several digital marketing channels including social media.

“I always like to base some campaigns on things that happen every year, whether that's Valentine's Day or the start of a new year. So every year, ThoughtSpot releases data analytics and AI trends and predictions,” explained Katie in a recent episode of Donuts and Demand.

She and the team released an ebook and hosted a webinar breaking down each of the trends and predictions.

“This year, we were like, ‘What more can we do?’ and it’s all around content repurposing,” said Katie. “We got industry experts, customers, and even prospects as part of an ABM campaign, and created a landing page that was SEO heavy. We had a pdf to use from a demand perspective, we used content syndicators, we really went all out.”

The expert repurposing didn’t stop there. ThoughtSpot’s executive team also used content from the ebook in their customer event presentations. “It's really about telling that story widely and then fitting it to various different pieces of the funnel,” explained Katie.

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Believe it or not, B2B influencer marketing is a lot more effective than you might think. But only if you know how to approach it.

Let’s take a quick look at the top do’s and don'ts using insights from TopRank’s B2B Influencer Marketing report as a guide.

According to the report, the top three challenges B2B marketers face when working with influencers are:

• Securing the right influencers: 53% said identifying, qualifying and engaging with ideal influencers was their top challenge.
• Understanding ROI: 46% named measuring and reporting results as their top challenge
• Aligning on message: 40% said collaborating with influencers and creating content was a top challenge.

For the ‘highly successful influencer marketers’, the top habits were:

• Partnering with experts: 83% of the top-performers outsource most or all of their influencer program to an expert consultant or agency.
• Implementing robust reporting: 55% measure and track performance and 66% use AI in their performance tracking.
• Prioritizing the best: More than half (54%) of the B2B businesses that are successful with influencer marketing say they work with professional influencers.

It sounds obvious, but you won’t believe how many brands will automate a month’s worth of memes, then walk away.

“A lot of times, brands will just turn out content because they’re used to creating a lot of content, then kind of start forcing existing content into the journey and don't understand why there are only 300 views on a blog or whitepaper. Again, do the research before you start creating content meant to influence your audience's behavior,” warned Zsuzsanna from Nokia.

With the rise of AI and automation tools, the temptation to put your social media marketing strategy on autopilot is very real. Don’t give in.

Social media isn’t worth much if it doesn’t live up to its name. In the age of spammy robo-commenters, take the time to be a brand that actively engages with its audience—social media management tools make it easy to know when it’s time to dive back into the conversation.

Pressure on marketing budgets isn’t just a challenge for the nearly half of social media marketers who say they don’t have enough time to get their work done, it’s also a critical hurdle for event marketers.

According to our Attendee Sentiment Report, 75% of business attendees respondents say large-scale events are becoming less common. We also found that 81% of attendees are more willing to sign up for hybrid and virtual events compared to in-person

If the goal is to create relevant B2B social media campaigns with high ROI potential for, long-form video like webinars and virtual events is a great place to start.

Brands like AspenCore and Qualio use events as one of the key tools in the B2B marketing toolkit. By repurposing the authentic expert advice offered in their events and webinars and transforming them into snackable content for social media, leading B2B marketers are increasing reach and boosting brand affinity, even on traditionally text-based platforms like LinkedIn.

In Content Lab, you can quickly repurpose your event content into social media posts that are already formatted for specific social media channels and customized with your branding.

Just drop a link to your video or upload the file and you’re ready to:

• Create a range of AI-generated clips from any video
• Generate social posts with text and video and tailor it to specific social media platforms
• Create audiograms from podcasts or video using your own branded templates
• Draft search-optimized blog posts that can be shared and repurposed for social

Keep up on social without cutting corners. Try Content Lab today.

At the end of the day, B2B prospects are real people. They get news, ideas, and opinions on social media—just like the rest of us.

Digital events make excellent original source material for social media posts that are relevant, authentic, engaging and non-derivative—even when repurposed for multiple platforms.

With Goldcast’s powerful engagement tools, you can create authentic moments during your webinars and digital events, then quickly repurpose them into short-form videos for social media. And with deep data analytics aligning your engagement metrics with your broader marketing KPIs gives you deeper insight into how your content is performing.