B2B Social Media for Food Ingredient Marketers Part 3

In parts 1 and 2 of our series, B2B Social Media for Food Ingredient Marketers, we looked at the growth of B2B social media, the importance of utilizing platforms that your audience is using and engaging with those individuals enterprise-wide. To wrap up our series, we’ll look at how to integrate B2B social media into your overall marketing communications plan.

It’s important to look at B2B social media as an additional platform to communicate and connect with your audience. We see food ingredient companies having the most success when they use social media in conjunction with other content marketing platforms. In the integrated content marketing and B2B social media model below, we look at the website as being the hub for content. A best practice we see in the industry is food ingredient marketers utilizing a blog on their website as a source for original content. A blog is a great platform to further engage your target audience by sharing insights, trends and more detailed information around the products and services you offer that would be helpful to new product development and reformulations. What really helps drive your target audience to your products and services, knowledge and expertise is how and where you share that content to push it beyond your website.

Integrated Content Marketing and B2B Social Media Model

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Email marketing is a tactic that provides you a platform to communicate your message and share your content. Combining email marketing with social media increases your message reach and amplifies exposure. As we mentioned in part two of our series, professionals enterprise-wide from your customer audience are engaged in social media beyond personal use. They use it to gather information to help guide them on their purchasing decisions and product development.

We see a lot of companies having great success with this approach. Tyson Food Service is a great example. Tyson Food Service has a website and blog where they share relevant content to their audience. They use email marketing and social media channels such as LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube to further communicate their message, broaden visibility to their brand and engage with their audience.

When you incorporate B2B social media into an integrated content marketing model, similar to how Tyson Food Service has done, you create a feedback loop with your target audience allowing you to engage in discussion with individuals, learn more about what’s important to them and increase your marketplace success.

We would like to hear how you are doing with B2B social media. Write us directly or comment here with your own success stories.