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3 Digital Marketing Must-Haves for Semiconductor Companies

47 million people follow companies in the semiconductor industry online. This means people are seeing content from these brands across platforms like Facebook and Twitter every time they look on their phones or computers. Are you reaching this audience? If not, we want to help you to get your brand in front of them, build a professional online identity and establish a base of interested followers.

Creating a comprehensive digital marketing approach can be difficult and time-consuming. We’ve boiled it down to the three most crucial things you’ll need in today’s digital age.

1. The accounts.

It’s 2018–people are looking at your company online. They need to be able to find you on all the social channels they log into every day so that they can follow you in a way that is easiest for them. This means you need to make sure that you have claimed or set up all the social accounts for your business. It’s not terribly complicated and it shouldn’t take long, and it’ll protect you from other companies swooping up your username, leaving you to use an altered form of your own company name by adding underscores or dashes to differentiate.

There is no reason not to do this right now.

Reserving the pages and usernames doesn’t mean you need to immediately start posting, but it does mean that when the time comes to post you won’t be scrambling to create accounts. If you’re at a loss for the platforms to start on, take into account that the study by Publitek on social media in the semiconductor industry found that Facebook had 65% of the 47 million followers. With 2.2 billion monthly active users, this is the largest social media platform and it’s one you should definitely be taking advantage of.  

Twitter had the second highest number of followers at 15%, and while that number doesn’t come close to Facebook’s followers, it’s the channel that semiconductor companies are most active on. Twitter had 37% of activity, compared to 13% for Facebook. This is a great place to follow what other companies in the industry are posting about because you can follow hashtags that are relevant to your business.

Bottom line–if you don’t currently own the Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts for your company, go and get them–and do it now.

2. A plan. (Otherwise known as a strategy.)

This may seem like an obvious one, but we see aimless posting across all industries and it breaks our social media hearts. Yes, it is relatively easy to post something online. All you need is an internet connection and you can broadcast any message you would like. But we beg you to dig a little bit deeper than that.

It’s always obvious when a company is just posting for the sake of having content. It ends up feeling desperate, disjointed, and unprofessional. Your digital marketing strategy needs to have outlined goals matched with relevant social media metrics so that you know exactly what purpose each piece of content serves and you can keep an eye on your analytics to make sure you’re heading in the right direction.  

From increasing brand awareness to driving traffic to your website, there’s a lot that social media can do for your business. It’s worth taking the time to sit down and decide what you want it to accomplish.  

Your plan should include company specific content related to applications, products and technical information, industry information that is relevant for your target audience, and of course, some fun stuff – content that includes people / faces.  If you do this right, you should be able to construct a content calendar with a rolling 3 – 6 month outlook and a final detailed posting plan with a four week outlook.

3. Someone to manage it.

We will keep repeating this until the end of time: companies need a dedicated person or team to create content and manage social media channels. This is a huge undertaking for anyone and it’s really not something you can just tack onto the job description of someone already working for you. Social media platforms constantly change and add new features, so a knowledgeable social media team that keeps up with the latest trends is essential to maintaining a strong online presence.

Now of course, we’re a little biased in who we would recommend to help you with this undertaking.

At Buzzly Media, we only employ the top experts in digital marketing and hold ourselves to a very high standard.

We are proud of the work we put out and would love to talk to you about growing your online presence.

We provide free consultations, create customized social media strategies, and offer a variety of social media content creation and management packages. Fill out our contact form, email us at info@buzzlymedia.com, or come hunt us down at SEMICON next week–we’d love to see you there.

You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn for updates and our latest advice on digital marketing!

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What Can Social Media Do for my B2B Company?

Leaving a comprehensive social media strategy out of your marketing efforts is a big mistake for B2B businesses. In today’s digital world, the sales process is shifting online for the majority of industries, with one study finding that “most customers are 57 percent through the buying process before the first meeting with a company representative.” The same study found also found that “61 percent of all B2B transactions now start online. And 58 percent use social media as a research channel.”

Consumers across all industries are becoming less responsive to cold-outreach and more independent in their research on companies they might do business with, and products they might purchase. Social media channels like LinkedIn and Facebook, and social media service providers like Buzzly Media offer B2B companies many valuable ways to reach customers online.salesperson shaking hand

Social media virtually eliminates the learning curve and gives your customers an almost immediate idea about your brand and your brand’s values before they even make contact with a sales person. This is valuable in the sales cycle because customers who have some interest in your brand (but not enough to convert) may be searching for your company online to learn more before they commit. Social media will offer them softer, more relatable content to ease them into your company culture and let know what to expect when they do decide to reach out.

Social media is one of the best tools available to strengthen your brand’s status as a thought leader in your industry. By connecting with influencers, posting timely industry news updates and weighing in on relevant issues, your brand’s credibility will rise dramatically over time. Brand-building, however, is just one element of a social media campaign and should reflect that customers like to see educational content that is more informational than it is brand / sales-centric.This builds trust and will help them remember your company when they are ready to make a purchase.

You would also be strongly advised to consider social media marketing if you are trying to drive valuable traffic to your website and landing pages. Buzzly Media clients have had great success in generating leads through the careful development of laser-focused landing pages. It’s a great way for someone to engage with your brand without committing much time. The easier you make it for people to hop in your sales funnel, the more leads you’ll have overall.

customer doing online searchSocial media will also help your website’s ranking by increasing the number of sites linking in, otherwise known as “backlinks.” These tell search engines that your website must have valuable information on it if others are spending time putting your links in their content, and it’s great for boosting search engine optimization. Remember, “94 percent of business buyers do some form of online research” when looking over their options.

And finally, the best part of social media is that it’s social! Having digital presences for your brand and its executives will allow you to connect with valuable industry contacts and start building relationships online. We know that “more than 90 percent of decision makers never respond to cold outreach.” A great way to move right past the cold outreach part of the sales cycle is to network online and give your potential customers a face to your brand. This will make you and your company seem more familiar when the time comes to sell.

The most important thing about establishing a digital presence for your brand is having the right information available to people at the right time. You never know how or when customers are searching. If it’s on Google (which is quite likely), then you want to make sure you are ranking high for generic industry keywords and have the social media profiles to back it up. If it’s late at night (or in a different timezone) when a potential customer can’t make contact with a human salesperson, you want them to get that same personalized experience through your social media.

A comprehensive social media strategy is the way to take your B2B business to the next level in today’s digital world. When you decide it’s time for a thoughtful and effective dive into social media marketing, let the fabulous people at Buzzly Media know! We’re always ready to help and will respond to your request with surprising speed.

Already have a social media presence and want help to improve it? Sign up for a free audit with Buzzly Media on our site and our experts will deliver their recommendations. 

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Are your Social Media Efforts Paying Off?

One of the most common questions we receive about social media marketing is, “How can I tell if it’s working?” It can be hard to measure the success of social media because it can be a challenge to track goals like brand awareness and credibility. We offer our clients complimentary analytics reports every month to show them exactly what their social media efforts are accomplishing for them and how they can quantify the return on their investment–but if you don’t have an awesome team like ours measuring your success, how can you be sure you’re doing the right thing? 

There are several things you should take into account when doing an audit of your social media marketing efforts. They will, of course, depend on your goals as a business, but there are many standards that apply across industries.

The first thing you should think about: is my audience hearing from me frequently and consistently? This is an important thing to take into consideration whether you are trying to establish yourself as a thought leader in a certain field or attract customers to your diner. If people are following you on social media it’s because they want to hear from you. Providing regular updates is a big part of keeping your following happy and informed.

The next thing to check out is your branding across platforms. We see brands having major troubles with consistent branding. If you are on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, your users should be able to identify you by a username pretty close to your business name and a logo that looks the same (but hopefully cropped and resized according to different platform requirements) across all your accounts. This helps users quickly identify that they are looking at the correct person/business/organization and cannot be understated in importance.

Another aspect of social media posting that we focus on is post appearance. All social media is visually-driven and there really isn’t room for silly mistakes like bad formatting and incorrect grammar. Formatting posts across platforms is not something that comes naturally to anyone–it’s a matter of knowing the intricacies of each platform and tailoring the posts to look as visually appealing as possible. Contact us if you need formatting help, we have a beginner’s guide that will show you everything you need to know!

The last element we’ll cover in this blog is engagement. Many people think that as long as they reply to comments and messages on social media then they are doing their part in engaging with their audience. But really, engagement encompasses a lot more than that.

The power of social media is its social aspect. Just posting to your profile is usually not enough to spark high levels of interaction with your customers, and for good reason! People like profiles they follow to chime in on conversations they care about, not just promote themselves all day long. This means joining in on relevant Facebook groups, Twitter chats, LinkedIn groups, trending Instagram hashtags, etc etc. If you aren’t interacting on social media then it’s unlikely that people will be interacting with you!

Sometimes it can be hard to step back and critically evaluate what you should change about your social media marketing efforts. That’s where we come in! Sign up here for a FREE, full social media audit so that our team of professionals can give you some expert insight into what’s working and what isn’t.

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