In 2021, we connected with B2Gold, a Canadian mining company looking for help developing and executing a social media marketing strategy. The company was using social media without a dedicated team at the time. The channels were in need of polish and planning to increase engagement and achieve the goals of building brand affinity and cultivating positive perception—ultimately toward growing business, and share value.
The Work
To kick things off, we put our heads together with B2Gold’s team in a series of collaborative workshops, beginning with a full audit of the brand’s content and social media. Plus, a competitive audit that looked at other mining companies and worthy rivals in the gold-mining and resource sector.
Within this process, we heard—loud and clear—that the B2Gold team felt they weren’t taking full advantage of anecdotes, stories, and visual assets curated as part of their annual Responsible Mining Report. Though published within the 140-odd-page report, these stories—touching on topics that range from rhino conservation in Namibia and women’s empowerment in Mali to decades of coral reef and mangrove restoration off the coast of Masbate, Philippines—weren’t being shared in an accessible way, publicly. A quick peruse of the back-catalog and we were blown away by the depth and potential. Not to mention the stunning photography!
As part of our workshop series, we also worked through the brand’s OKRs—defining their overarching business goals, and looking at how content could help achieve them.
After defining their content objectives and key results, we set to work considering the target audiences that the brand most needed to reach and engage to achieve those results. Though B2Gold is a publicly traded company whose ultimate call to action is “buy our stock,” their team had a fundamental (and very much appreciated!) belief in the intrinsic value of content marketing.
Together, we set our sights on increasing social-post engagement, along with follower counts, click-throughs, and newsletter subscriptions—plus identifying overall awareness, recruitment, and positive perception generally as key goals.
Our discovery work further included some deep thinking to define their priority segments of the audience, and identify their pain points and motivations. We pinpointed three main target audiences for B2Gold’s content, broadly including investors, community and government stakeholders, and employees and potential employees. Once we understood the needs of these target audiences, the brand’s main story pillars flowed from there.
Between the target audiences and story pillars, it became clear what the brand’s main channels, and content types needed to be, which we captured for the team—along with a summary of their OKRs, audience segments, story pillars, overall channel and operational plan–in a Social Media Roadmap, setting out the next steps toward kicking off content operations, reporting, and approvals.
Next, we quickly got to work developing a set of versatile visual templates and sample content for the brand, picking up the B2Gold logos and colour palette for a cohesive and powerfully branded feel across platforms.
Having the roadmap and operational plan in place allowed us to swiftly and efficiently move into producing monthly content batches, working to balance the content mix across our three identified story pillars—while also supporting the brand’s in-house communications director with special events and other timely needs. All with a clean and effective review and approval process.
Expanding the partnership
After a six-month engagement creating monthly social-content batches and refining our templates, it was becoming clear that B2Gold wanted extra support with one story pillar in particular: responsible mining and sustainability.
So, with monthly social content production firing on all cylinders, we proposed switching gears to focus on bimonthly story packages—anchored by blogs on the company’s website—and drawing even more deeply on the wealth of stories, photography and video contained in the B2Gold Responsible Mining Report vault.
This work is ongoing, and we continue to be amazed by the stories we’re surfacing about this Canadian company delivering on its commitments—to share benefits with the communities where it operates and protect the natural environment.
The Results
Since we began working with B2Gold in 2022, we have helped the brand to grow its audience on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter by more than 48,000 new followers (as of September 2023). We have also helped double its average engagement rate, and consistently meet targets for engagement, and social referrals to its website.
Perhaps more significantly, we have helped the brand clarify its key story pillars, and consistently deliver premium, rich storytelling about its inspiring work and teams—stories that resonate powerfully with the company’s partners, people, and investors.
Why We Love Them
Just look at those images—it’s been SUCH an education to learn about the tangible good a company like B2Gold can, and does, deliver in the world through its sustainable development goals and commitments. And it’s not just talk, either: we’ve learned that not every mining company has these stories to tell. A few B2Gold pieces that have inspired us lately? Fostering community farming cooperatives in rural Namibia and Mali. Building community drinking-water infrastructure around Masbate, Philippines. Providing training and up-skilling for locals, especially women at mine sites around the world. Partnering with Vancouver-based organizations that provide complex social services to the most vulnerable and at-risk people in the company’s home-base city.
Check out more of our projects here—and reach out for a free call to discuss how we might solve your own content challenges.
