Many B2B marketers struggle to connect their social media efforts to actual business results, leaving them questioning whether it’s worth the investment at all. What if you’re just doing it wrong? What if there was a way to transform your social media strategy from a resource drain into a powerful lead generation engine?
Katie Street, the founder of Street Agency and host of one of the UK’s leading marketing podcasts, answers those questions and more in this episode of Social Pulse Podcast: B2B Edition, powered by Agorapulse, with our Chief Storyteller Mike Allton.
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What’s the biggest mistake you see B2B companies making with social media strategy for lead generation?
Katie Street: The biggest problem that I see is, in the world of B2B marketing, most businesses are still trying to show up as a business rather than showing up as people.
At the end of the day, people want to buy from people.
Everything that we do is around humanizing people’s marketing content and taking a very human-centered approach to delivering that. So that means putting the team, the staff, your people, your thought leaders front and center when it comes to your content and creating that very human-centered video content.
In fact, my LinkedIn post today was about exactly this. At the end of 2024, LinkedIn launched a video feed. It’s because—as people, consumers, customers, clients, whatever you want to call it—because of TikTok, because of Instagram, we’re so used to this short form of video content.
The biggest problem that I still see businesses doing is trying to show up with long-form content reports that are probably full of value—but people don’t have the time, energy, or attention to consume it. So the biggest problem I see is those old-school ways of delivering marketing content from a marketing team [that is] overly branded, not very human, not very engaging, and still being pushed out. And the biggest opportunity brands have right now is to show up as a person. That is how you’ll get noticed.
It honestly frustrates me. Some of our clients are getting brave with this. Now we’ve got campaigns we’re kicking off. So for some of the world’s biggest tech companies that, yeah, they’re brave enough to take our advice and do this. It’s an exciting place, but it’s taken too long in my opinion. And those that do start to look at their thought leaders and the people within their business. We call it employee-generated content. Is it EGC? I think EGC is the word.
Gone are the days of user-generated content. It’s all about employee-generated content.
Take an employee-first approach to your go-to-market strategy. Put the right people front and center of your campaigns on social media. You can see the stats that any viral post that we’ve done for us or our clients recently has come from someone talking to the camera exactly like we are now. You’re thinking about the hook, developing some content, ideally under 45 seconds, short, snappy, and value-led. That’s what we need to be doing in the world of B2B, as B2B marketers.
If you do that, you’re going to start punching and getting the attention that you need.
Walk us through that approach that helps transform social media activity into something that will generate leads for business.
Katie Street: I’ll start at the beginning of a client campaign and walk you through it.
Essentially, first off, it’s about understanding what’s going on in the market right now.
- What are the things that are keeping your audience, your prospects, up at night?
- What are the things that they’re worrying about that they can’t do?
- What are the challenges that they’re facing in their role in their business?
We always start by doing quite a bit of research when it comes to specifically the markets that we’re working with our clients within, obviously, what’s going on for their prospects.
We work with a lot of technology companies—people you guys will know like Shopify, Commerce Tools, Big Commerce, Contentful—those tend to be the kind of clients that we work with. So we know that space quite well, but we look at what’s going on right now for the sectors that they want to approach and maybe retail or whatever it might be.
Understand the challenges, develop off the back of some key content pillars and some key subjects and things that we know, and get into that messy middle.
It’s not just about, “Okay, we do digital transformation.” It’s about “Oh, isn’t it bloody frustrating when you have to upload a piece of content seven times to get it live on your website?” We know how to help you solve that.
It’s thinking about the day-to-day problems that your prospects are facing that you can help them solve. So that develops some content pillars and maybe some just key subjects and ideas for things we want to talk about.
We’ll then probably brief our clients on that, develop some key things that we want to discuss, and basically sometimes even use some pretty clever AI tools, too.
Once we’ve loaded all of the research, all of the insights, the content pillars into maybe something like ChatGPT (but making sure we’re creating a custom GPT) we will ask it to help us create briefs that we can then give to our clients and scripts that will enable them to talk to camera saying what it is that we need them to say.
And at the beginning of those—this is the absolute killer and probably one of the most important things—you’ve got to have a hook.
Those first three seconds are the most important. What goes on after that isn’t as important, but those first three seconds and that title at the top of your post, that clickbait hook has got to be on the money. It’s got to be challenging, ideally.
You’re also looking at what’s going on when we’re doing this market research. Go and ask ChatGPT, “What are people searching for? What does Google Analytics tell you? Like, what are the things that are trending right now?”
My friend got 4 million impressions on a video she did last week on LinkedIn because she was talking about these kinds of AI influencers, [how] they’re not even real people, 15 grand a week or whatever, because it was current. It was based on what people were thinking and talking about right now. It’s all well and good talking about that, but if there’s no reason for you to talk about it for your business and you can’t sell anything off the back of it in the world of B2B, it’s potentially a little bit pointless.
Essentially, I think that’s the key.
- It’s strategy, subject, script, deliver the hook to camera, crop it in as much as you can.
- There’s lots of little things that you can do, but when we’re doing video content, that’s really how we define what we should be talking about because there are so many ingredients.
- It’s got to be a subject that people care about. It’s got to be valuable. It’s got to be talking directly to the person. There’s no point in just having a chat.
- You want it to be like you’re talking to them. And you’ve got to be doing it in a confident way that people want to engage with.
I was talking about this with an influencer who I had on my podcast last week and your little things that go on in the background that you’ll notice. TikTok has been doing this the most recently, but you can have split screens now where someone will be talking about the value content at the top. And at the bottom, you’ve got someone playing with slime or some kind of kinesthetic type thing happening underneath because it keeps the attention of the audience. Things like that start to happen, or they might be playing with something in their hand. The audience goes, “Oh, what are they playing with? What is that?” Like we did one we’re going to test it the other day with a banana. So people like going like, “What is she doing with that banana? Like what’s going on?”
It’s about testing, trialing, testing different things as well, but creating content that is interesting to watch.
That’s got a hook that is really, really important to get that first three seconds.
Do you see a difference or nuance in that is different for B2B versus a B2C or other kinds of verticals?
Katie Street: I personally think we’ve got to almost stop worrying about B2C or B2B because the same rules apply.
At the end of the day, it’s a person watching the video. So that person [might be] interested in a product because they’re buying something for their home or some beauty products. How you deliver the content doesn’t make any difference because you’ve got to capture their attention.
You’ve got to make it interesting. You’ve got to make it valuable. You’ve got to hook them in with something.
I think the problem that we have is B2B marketers aren’t thinking like B2C marketers.
That’s the difference. They’re thinking we still need to do long-form reports. We still need to create this designed business content. We still need to show up like a business talking to another business. Businesses don’t do business with other businesses.
People in businesses do business with other people in other businesses.
Stop trying to show up like a business. Show up like a person that’s trying to do business with another person. That’s the key to success.
I think it’s the way B2B marketers are still thinking, which is a little bit old school, that is stopping them from moving forward and getting the amount of leads that they could do.
Honestly, this is such a simple change. Put your people first, stop putting your business first. Like, the stats are huge. You get 10 times better engagement for exactly the same content if you post it from a personal profile than you do from a business profile on LinkedIn. So stop posting from your business profile. People want to engage with me. They don’t want to engage with my faceless business page.
Simple, but that’s such a simple change and it makes all the difference.
What role do you think paid plays in social media marketing in lead generation for B2B alongside some of the principles you’ve been talking about so far?
Katie Street: Mike, that is a bloody brilliant question. I’ve literally just interviewed someone on the podcast exactly about that. So traditionally at Street, we’ve taken a very organic approach to social, but we do use some pretty clever AI tools, which I’ll tell you about. We’re actually about to trial doing those thought leader ads in exactly the way that you have talked about.
Now, a few comments on that that I have literally just learned myself: If you as a B2B marketer have access to any data platform or you’ve already got your own data or access to privacy-approved GDPR, whatever you want to call it, data that you’re able to access.
There are some great platforms out there that we use like Cognizant, Apollo, and so many more where you can scrape data.
If you can get that data and load it into LinkedIn, your cost per click is going to be so much lower because you’re specifically giving it the data that you want to target. If you just give it the job titles and the names, it will charge you more to get those clicks or to get those views, whatever, depending on what your aims are with your campaign.
The other thing that we then do, which isn’t paid—we use some pretty sneaky AI tools that enable us to automate and target prospects in the same way that page does, but it’s much cheaper because I don’t know. It’s a plug into LinkedIn, which LinkedIn probably will hate me.
The one that we love and use the most is a platform called Meet Alfred. If you’ve got Sales Navigator, it works brilliantly.
How do we know if short-form video is working for lead generation?
Katie Street: For me, it’s all about the conversations. You obviously need to look at the stats, and there’s so much that you need to track here. It’s all well and good going viral. But sometimes going viral actually can do more damage than good if the content isn’t pointed at your prospects specifically.
If you start to pull loads of people, start engaging with your content, following you, and then don’t engage, you’re actually going to do self-damage, and the algorithm’s not going to like you in the future because they don’t continue to engage with the future content.
Don’t worry so much about the reach. Worry more about the conversations that you start.
The way that we track that, honestly, when you delve down and look into it is: How many conversations have we started? I’m not just talking about conversations in the comments. How many people have responded and inboxed you off the back of that, going “That was really interesting, we want to do that. Can you help us? How many meetings are you booking?”
That’s the real trackability of the success of content. And it’s the same for podcasts and everything. When I think about the podcast doing well, I don’t care how many hundreds, thousands, millions, let’s hope one day, of listeners we have.
What I care about because I’m doing it from a B2B perspective to help us generate leads is “How many conversations and how many meetings have I booked off the back of that content?” You need to look at all the metrics because they all need to work together, but that’s the metric that matters.
What are some tools that you’re using in your agency or on behalf of clients?
Katie Street: Well, if I’m honest, we’ve used lots over the years, things like NinjaCat. There’s a new one we just started using—and you’re asking the wrong person because my team knows about these tools a lot more than I do because they actually use them.
But I think, from our point of view, in terms of how we manage the content plans, of course, we’re using things that help us schedule the content. A lot of the time our clients will still post the content themselves, but we’re using schedules and planners. We use Monday.com. We use all of those platforms to make sure that the plan is happening. Everyone knows what needs to be posted when and or it posts it automatically.
You’ve got to continually review the different platforms that are available because they’re changing all the bloody time. So in order to get ahead for me, what platforms are going to help us track the best? What platforms are going for us?
Learn from leading B2B experts in every highlight of Social Pulse: B2B Edition.
How do you see B2B companies using AI more in the coming year?
Katie Street: I think it’s opened the door to more people being confident and putting content out. Because I use the platforms, I can see the crap and I know when something’s been written by AI, specifically Chat GPT. We’ve got to get smart if we want to use AI. I am a huge fan of AI tools, but I think you’ve got to use them the right way.
So for me, for video content, I’m authentically recording video content based on my knowledge and my expertise based on the work that we’re delivering for clients, like all of these amazing things that we do, I learn from day in, day out. So I can speak authentically about my opinions on these things and give out helpful, insightful content.
The way that we then tend to use AI is that we’ll have taught you to have developed a custom GPT, will have used set up some different chats, etc, that have learned my tone of voice. Even this morning to get help with my post, I’ll record a voice note to ChatGPT. “Hey, chat, listen to this transcript from a video from my podcast, and write some supporting content in the style that I’ve taught you in this chat.” Then it will give me something and then I’ll look at it and probably still make some changes, change the layout slightly, put it on LinkedIn, then put it back to the chat and go, “Hey, look. So, you know the post ended up.”
[AI] is continually learning. My friend Maryanne says you’ve got to treat your AI tools like a member of staff. Don’t expect it to come in. It’s going to have learned from the world, from everyone that’s using all of these platforms. Most people are using them incorrectly and lazily. It’s going to give you a lazy, lazy piece of content or a lazy strategy or whatever it might be. If you want it to do well, you’ve got to treat them like a member of staff.
You’ve got to teach it who you are. What’s going on with your audience, who your ICP are, what their challenges are. You’ve got to give it the research because if you don’t teach it and you don’t treat it like a person, it’s going to give you average crap back. If you want it to do well, you’ve got to put in.
Who are some influencers, podcasts, or resources you turn to?
Katie Street: So I’ve got, oh gosh, loads. But I’m going to give you three or four of my favorites.
- I’ve just referenced Maryanne Damarzo. She is your marketing mentor on Instagram and TikTok with about 200, 000 followers. I think on TikTok, that’s where she grew her following across the world of marketing, but very specifically AI at the moment, she’s doubling down on being a great person to follow. Not just B2B, she also talks about B2C, but if you’re interested in marketing in general, she is a fantastic resource of content. And also she’s brilliant to see how you should structure your content, because all the things that I’ve just spoken about in terms of having that hook up front and developing really cool, fun, interesting short-form video, she’s brilliant at.
- The next one is a guy called Andy Lambert. I’ve known him for a long, long time when he had a ContentCal, which we used to use, which is how I know him. So ContentCal is a content calendar, which he sold to Adobe. And for years. He’s always done these kinds of social media updates, but very focused on B2B, but the social media updates you need to know every week. I think it might’ve come out today. I think it might’ve come out today. Maybe on a Tuesday he does his update. I can’t remember which day he does it, but I always say it because I subscribed to him. So he is definitely worth subscribing to.
- The other one is Grace Andrews. Grace Andrews is currently the Marketing Director for Flight Studio. The podcast’s rise to fame today was driven by the CEO, Steven Bartlett, but Grace played a key role in its growth. She’s Grace Andrews on LinkedIn, but she also creates fantastic content on Instagram and Tiktok and she’s called the social climber again. She does a lot of updates, things that you need to know, trends, tips, tricks, content, platforms, everything.
- And then the last one last, but not least where you will find a whole load of resources on B2B. If you’re not already part of this, then go and check it out and join the B2B marketing Institute by LinkedIn. I actually interviewed the head of B2B marketing Institute from LinkedIn on the podcast last week, Jennifer Shaw-Sweet. She is amazing, but just going to join their community, following the page, downloading their resources. I think tomorrow, which is timestamping this 22nd of January, so probably would have passed by the time this is live. They released their 2025 trends report.
So what they think B2B marketers should be focusing on in 2025.
Thank you all of you for listening and reading this episode about B2B lead generation. We’ll have all the links and all the resources that we talked about today in the show notes below. And don’t forget to find Social Pulse Podcast: B2B Edition on Apple and drop us a review.