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How Consultancies Should Do Social Media Marketing in 2023
Discover the powerful combination of a simple tool and expert coaching with Willow.
Book a free demoConsultancies are businesses built on trust, strong connections with clients, and expertise in a core area; things, often not associated with Social Media from the onset. Often lawyers and technical consultants will stay away from all kinds of social media, relying on word of mouth or their phone directories if they’re not meeting face-to-face.
However, B2B businesses alike have ben successfully using social media to get the attention of their prospects and nurture leads. Some platforms are more trusted than others and there is a correct social media strategy to be employed for every kind of business based on what they seek from it.
We’ll start by clearing the air and letting you know that social media marketing does take time. But this investment pays off in full and then some. That said, here are a few ways you should be investing your time and/or money in social marketing.
Know your audience
If you know your audience offline, it will not be difficult to find them online, on one of the many social networks available. Know them better by figuring out what times they are online, what kind of content they interact most with, and what kind of value they’re looking for. If you manage to figure these three things out, you can then figure out your content strategy. If you do this, you will attract more and especially the right type of clients. Discover more about determining your persona and how to create a winning social media strategy to reach them.
Know thyself
What is your brand? What do people say about you when you leave the room? What are the qualities of the person people see as the characterization of your company? It can be an air of trust or the helpfulness that you show to your clients or your sheer expertise and sureness of your self. Figure out your brand persona and then be that in all your communication on social media. Going out of your way to woo your audience online can affect you negatively. Your consultancy might need to appear as the voice of logic and reason even with light-hearted pieces of content.
Post frequently
Social media users have short attention spans. Posting frequently keeps you on their radar - at the very least, they know you exist. But you’ve got to be mindful of not posting too frequently to come across as a spammer. To find the right balance, see which channel you’re on; Other than Twitter, it’s not a great idea to be posting more than twice a day. On Linkedin for example, posting more than once a day harms the reach on your social media posts. So for Linkedin, Facebook, and Instagram, one post a day is where you should draw the line.
Provide some value
People are usually not online to be bombarded with ads. They either want to be entertained, need inspiration, or education. Your challenge then is to provide equal amounts of those things. The same kind of content can bore audiences. Whether you like it or not, people do not want to read an academic article on social media (unless of course, you’re targeting researchers). Even if they’re researchers, an article that presents the findings of research in a more palatable way, such as in the form of an infographic, makes it a lot more valuable. Research also shows that diversifying your content formats maximizes your reach. Experiment with long text formats, blogs, videos, polls and documents to see what works best.
Establish yourself on Linkedin
As a B2B company, your place is on Linkedin. 80% of all B2B business leads that are generated come from Linkedin, which says a lot. Linkedin is also the most trusted social platform which should make consultancy businesses feel right at home. Though to get the most out of Linkedin Business, you will need to set up your business account in the right way. Once you’re done with that, you’ll have a range of Linkedin Content posting and Analytics tools at your disposal. Linkedin has also recently included Content Suggestions, which allow you to share your opinion with trending articles related to your industry - a feature that gives you more visibility and can help you grow on Linkedin. Establishing yourself on Linkedin starts with building out your personal brand; more on that here.
Schedule content in advance
There are a lot of platforms that allow you to plan your content in advance and schedule them to be posted automatically at a set level of frequency so you don’t have to bother about it. It generally helps to plan ahead, have a good amount of content ready, and then schedule it for a whole month beforehand, and then not have to worry about it posting regularly. Contents like Buffer, Hootsuite, and Hubspot allow you to schedule content, often in bulk to their platforms to be posted. But if finding good content is difficult, Willow allows you to discover and schedule good articles and videos straight from its platform.
Community Management
As experts in your industry for businesses, once you establish your presence online, people will engage with you in the form of comments, reactions, and shares. Time spent in community management can serve to establish your brand and reinvigorate the trust people have in your brand as a consultancy, or in the best case create business leads. Community Management here refers to replying to people’s comments on your content or in your inbox. Going further in community management requires you to take an active interest in discussions online, and express your opinion about them, as an influencer and thought-leader of an industry.
These are comprehensive things to take care of in their own right, however, if you take care of one thing at a time and then try to nail them, it might bear fruits for your Consulting business in time.
If your consultancy business requires personalized guidance to make an impact through your digital channels, see what Willow can do for you.