B2B Client Posts: Beating the Content Drought with Creative Solutions
Organic social can be tough these days. If you’re a marketer you’ve heard a lot “you gotta pay to play.”
You probably even say it to your clients.
The worst is when a client doesn’t have a content strategy so you don’t have a whole lot of new social content publishing. Then you struggle to create content, pulling from whatever information they have, asking them questions and curating ideas. Constantly searching for fresh social post ideas.
At that point it’s no longer social media management it’s now a relentless race to scrounge for content ideas.
This is where we start to churn and burn.
Tune out and check boxes.
And also when discouragement pops in to deflate your team’s efforts and drive.
Now, If your client wants to:
- Reach more people
- Grow an engaged audience
- Get more mileage out of content
Without creating consistent content. Then social ads might be their answer.
You can go faster with ads.
If your client doesn’t produce new content regularly, ads can help them appear as if they have more content than they actually do.
It can give them more mileage on the content they do have and your team isn’t burned out creating one off pieces of content for social.
This works especially when a client has been dormant on social, ads can help kickstart their brand exposure.
If your client has great content ads can boost the success of your top performing organic content and amplify their brand exposure.
Ads can have content working for you instead of having to post every day just to keep up appearances.
Ads can also help:
- Grow an email list
- Get more signups on or traffic to their website
- Ads can amplify your social strategy
How I use ads in my client’s social strategy
My most challenging social media clients don’t have a content creation strategy, they create posts for social, rather than using their content to start conversations on social and grow an audience. Much of their posts are filled with “asks” or sharing other people’s content.
So, what are you supposed to do for a client as a social media marketer in this case?
When I have a client who isn’t creating new content like a blog, podcast or videos regularly, my social media content strategy is to start making posts from information I can find on their website and I look for evergreen information in past posts that we can recreate and present in a different way.
Next I use those posts and setup an engagement ad campaign that helps build brand awareness and gets people engaging on their account.
No, this is not the thought provoking content we all love to promote for our clients, but it’s exposure.
When you start here your client can see how a good social strategy can impact their brand exposure.
It also makes it easier to convince your clients about the long-game of content creation and being social on social.
But that topic is for another blog, you’re a marketer who knows the value, but this blog is more about amplifying content with paid social.
The other type of client I have is the client who works together with me on regular content – a blog, podcast, videos.
We create multiple pieces of social content for every piece of regular content and I use a mix of organic and paid social to amplify and test what’s working.
Results you can share
The key performance indicator I point my clients to is engagement rate.
Why? Because this KPI tells us how good the content is. It’s the percentage of how many engaged with your content versus how how many people saw it.
If post 1 gets a 10% engagement rate and post 2 gets a 0.5% engagement rate we can say our audience liked post 1 more and can create more of that content.
When change the overall strategy engagement rate indicates whether more people interacted.
Start by, benchmark your client’s engagement rate before you started working with them or before a strategy change. I track engagement rate each month if you do this is easy to look back historically.
Now you’re able to start with their engagement rate and show them how it fluctuates and pin point content that works best for them.
Impressions and reach are good indicators that the ad is serving, but engagement rate will show how many of those times someone took action.
Convince them to commit a small ad spend budget to their social strategy.
Ok, now for some objection handling.
If you pitch a low enough budget here to get started, you’ll be able to get clients to let you test it out. But also give them some data to chew on.
Check your client’s current analytics – on average how many impressions are they getting on each post?
I had a client who was getting no more than 10 impressions total, that’s terrifying! They had no exposure.
Now, the first month managing their social I was able to organically increase that to 165 impressions with 24 engagements. Still not great.
So I took this information to the client and told them we needed to increase their exposure before we could start to see significant engagement.
In this client’s case they hadn’t been posting regularly and we needed to warm up the algorithm and I knew I could get the ball rolling with an ad. I asked for a very low budget to target the area around their business so we could start to gain some traction.
They ok’ed us testing a few low cost ads for the next 3 months.
Now this is really the fun part.
The first month we were able to increase their reach to 11,000 people, and increase impressions to 38,000 up from TEN!
Great results to report to the client on month one. But I asked for 3 months because my goal was a decent engagement rate.
At this point her engagement went from 24 in our first month of work (organically) to 616 and now we are getting the ball rolling.
My client went from about 4-5% the first two months to 9% the third month. We were able to test a lot of content in this time and find what worked best for them to keep building that engagement rate.
Engagement Rate by Reach Formula: (Interactions / reach) *100
Total interactions (engagements) divided by total reach multiply by 100 to get your percentage.
You can use this formula to calculate the rate for a post or the overall account.
Once you have convinced your client to put a little money behind their efforts, track the results. Then use the results to guide your next steps and inform your future strategies.
Do you want your client to create a content strategy? With the results above I was able to explain that creating one piece of content a month could result in 4 social posts that could be used to engage their audience and subsequently grow the audience on social.
Want your client to increase their budget? Using the client example above when I’m ready for them to increase budget I’ll use the data we got from the ads above, then I’ll use the platform tools to increase the budget and determine how many more people they could reach in their targeted audience. Then we can estimate how many more inquiries she might received based on what she is getting now. I like to start with 20% budget increases, but if your budget is low you might want to do more.
My next steps: Once I reached month 3 with my clients using this strategy, I pitch them to add a separate budget to retarget all the people we reached in their engagement ads, to work on growing their email list.
A little side note: My best clients have regular new content I use for organic social media that I mix with this strategy above.
Organic is not dead it’s just the long-game, but ads can help jumpstart your game.
Lemme know! Has this changed your opinion on how you’ll use ads, or has it helped you justify ads better to your clients?
Whenever you’re ready, here are 2 ways I can help you:
- Download the Asana Starter Kit this is the system I use for my clients and my own business.
- 1:1 Strategy Session to get you unstuck. Whether you need help with the tech, strategy, systems or programs setup – set up a time to work through it with me.
