It takes a lot of time and energy to build a valuable brand. Your brand is more than a logo or a tagline. A good brand creates emotions and feelings, and it helps you define the moments and create the connections that lead to satisfied customers.
Think about everything that goes into your brand: Your products and services, your company culture, your voice and your messages. And then look at how quickly all of that was disrupted in a few weeks in 2020. Suddenly your brand was dealing with a global pandemic and issues of racial injustice. You probably didn’t see that coming.
Today, social media is the place where brands go to engage with customers, develop connections, and start conversations. Social media is also the place where B2B marketers can establish their own brand and share the knowledge they’ve accumulated in the field.
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Chantelle Marcelle, a marketing consultant with more than a decade of experience in marketing, branding, public relations, and communications, about what it takes to build your personal and corporate brand on social media. You can learn more about Chantelle’s work on her website: http://chantellemarcelle.com/.
Podcast Highlights
3:07
Chantelle Marcelle: So something that B2B marketers and really everyone in general gets wrong about social media use is that it’s only something you want to pay attention to and invest in when you’re looking for a job. And by the time that you actually start looking, it’s a bit too late to rev things up. By keeping things going and investing time and resources into content creation over time, you’ll be receiving opportunities pretty consistently.
You’ll also be in a better place to represent whatever brand you’re currently working with, just because you’ll already actively be a part of conversations, you’ll have an engaged audience, you’ll have tested out different methods of delivering content and using your personal social media to figure out what works. And you can translate that pretty successfully into what you do for your company.
So I would say if there are lurkers, you definitely want to just jump right in and just start testing things out. There really isn’t a tried and true formula for success. I found that just by being consistent and showing up every day and trying to deliver high-quality content, rather than engaging in any sort of gimmicks or trying to game the systems or game the algorithms and go viral or whatever, I’ve been able to have a steady growth, not only in my presence, but in my followers, and the number of likes and followers.
10:46
Chantelle Marcelle: It’s so much easier to point out bad content than good content, just because there’s so much more — not necessarily bad content — but just boring, very the same, like there’s a formulaic approach people think they should be taking. That may have worked years ago, but now I think we’ve moved beyond that to where people need to really be much more creative and innovative in their approach. The lines can definitely be blurred between B2B and B2C. There’s a lot of fun things you can do to catch people’s attention that won’t necessarily be seen as super controversial. I think something important that B2B brands need to be doing is social monitoring and listening much better.
13:40
Mike Pastore: Something else you were talking about on social media recently was this idea that interns run the social media at every company. But that’s not true. There’s a strategy. There’s an investment… It’s become an essential part of a corporate marketing team.
Chantelle Marcelle: I don’t even know if I was that aware of how much investment brands were making into their social media teams at this point. I remember years ago when all of these platforms were much more new, yeah, people were passing off the reins to young people because they were the ones who were using it. Like, when Facebook first came out, it was only open to college students, so they had so much more of a lead on everybody else, as far as using it and engaging with it… Yeah, maybe they were the experts on how to use Facebook at that point.
But Facebook has grown up. All of the social media platforms are so much more advanced now. There’s so much opportunity for brands to really have an impact using social media, not just generating awareness, but also generating opportunities that could lead to revenue. So it just doesn’t make sense to have someone who doesn’t have familiarity with your brand and your voice and your tone and your strategy to just take over and try to run things and just post a bunch of memes or a bunch of whatever. Because that’s not… what works. It’s not the memes, using cool lingo or whatever, or just posting a bunch of hashtags. That’s not really going to move the needle, so you’re just going to be justifying your lack of investment when you don’t see the results, because you’re not investing in it. It’s just a vicious cycle.