An efficient way to build your brand, market your business and generate new leads.
The success of a B2B relies on quality lead generation. If your current strategies are not enticing potential buyers, operating your business can become rather challenging. Just focusing on paid traffic alone will not drive the necessary traffic you need in order to be successful. You need something more. You need a social media strategy.
If your company currently lacks a social media plan, you may be missing out on quite a bit of revenue. In order to thrive today, businesses require a social media presence. Not to mention, your social media relevance can have an indirect, yet significant effect on your Google rankings.
Your competitors more than likely already have an actionable strategy, working to build their brand and connect to their respective target audiences, often through a marketing agency. Social media not only simplifies this process, it provides measurable results.
By interacting with your prospective customers on social media, you can better gauge your market, and from that, convince your target audience to buy your product or service.
“Social media will help you build up loyalty of your current customers to the point that they will willingly, and for free, tell others about you,” says Bonnie Sainsbury, a top social media and content marketing guru.
Clearly, social media is important and relevant to your business. But how does one formulate an effective social media marketing strategy that benefits their business?
There are a few methods and opportunities in which you can use social media platforms to create high quality leads, helping to ensure that your business stays out of the red. Before jumping in, however, it is important to understand how social media operates.
So, how does social media work?
The world of marketing has changed. Social media platforms provide marketers information that allows them to get to know potential and current customers with unprecedented information. Social media can provide valuable insight into your customer’s behavior, namely their interests, age brackets, hobbies and most importantly their likes and dislikes. You know the sites they like and visit. With this information you are able to target your audience in the most appropriate and effective manner.
What is lead generation?
Long before the sale occurs, lead generation requires you to get to know and interact with your prospective customers. A customer often needs to be nurtured into buying your products or services. Lead generation brings prospects into your sales funnel. The more you know about the likes, dislikes and sore points of your customers, the higher chance of a sales conversion.
Pre-social media, lead generation was a tedious task. Sending mail outs, piggybacking on newspapers and magazines were required in order to collect vital customer information.
But, the internet has changed things and made the lives of marketers much easier. With all the relevant customer information available online, just keep your target audience interested.
Generating leads through social media
Select the right media platforms for your business. Focus on these social media platforms to generate high quality leads – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.
The formula for success on social media channels requires persistent and consistent time and effort on your part. Strategize, execute and reap the benefits, get regular sales and scale new heights.
Start Using Facebook
With 2 billion monthly users now, Facebook quickly rose to be one of the best social media platforms, for targeting your audiences. It can also generate sales for your business.
Courtesy of Facebook’s newer algorithms, paid advertising takes precedence making it difficult to receive organic reach. The Facebook ads being cost-effective organizations ranging from large, medium and small to sole proprietorship firms all are able to afford ads on this platform.
Hence, when you prepare your Facebook strategy, concentrate on paid ads as this will give your business the desired reach.
Other ways that you can use your Facebook page to generate leads
Start treating your Facebook page as a website or a sales page, and take it seriously. This is where the leads would come from, so pay attention to your Facebook page. Update your news feed on a regular basis, upload high quality videos and professional photographs and ensure that there is a clear cut call to action (CTA).
Organize contests on your Facebook page
People on Facebook just love contests and puzzles. Contests can be a great way to create user engagement, which in turn generates huge amount of traffic for your business. For example, an advertising slogan contest can bring in a lot of leads.
Run special offers and discounts
Everyone loves freebies. Special offers, free gifts and discount coupons are common favorites. Run these promotions on your Facebook page and collect vital customer information. Have a CTA in place where users put in their name, email addresses and hobbies. Also known as– leads that can actually convert into a sale.
Audience polls
Make your prospective and existing customers feel wanted and important. Run a survey or a poll to get user engagement and opinion, people love to hear their own voice. This would allow you to understand what your customers have in mind, their interests and what they expect from you.
Take LinkedIn Seriously
LinkedIn, when utilized properly, can assist in generating top quality leads. Anybody and everybody worth their name or otherwise are on LinkedIn. Professionals from all walks of life and business owners – big, medium, small or sole proprietorship, you would find all of them connecting on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn generates maximum leads for business2business market. You just cannot do without it.
With 500 million users, and most of them professionals and business owners, expect to generate top quality leads if you play it fine on LinkedIn. But, remember that it does not serve any purpose by just signing in, or having a LinkedIn account, you need to connect with others present in order to generate good quality leads.
Put a name to your profile and add a respectable profile picture so that your profile has a genuine look. Update your profile on a regular basis, as this gives credibility to your account and you aren’t considered a spammer.
Connect with people that have like-minded interests. For example, if you have advertising as a service, create a group with professionals from the advertising industry. Now, when you create a group, your responsibility doesn’t end there, you have to keep your group active and alive. Hence, keep adding posts and content on a daily basis. You should also offer free samples to at least those in your group.
You will start getting tons of leads from LinkedIn, but to get high quality prospects for your business start filtering your leads on the basis of industry and location. These are the people you need to connect to, and this could translate into an actual sale.
Don’t forget Slideshare
Slideshare joined forces with LinkedIn, which partnered with Microsoft. Use Slideshare to leverage leads. Create good quality content that offers industry insight to your customers on Slideshare. This would bring in a lot of leads to your sales funnel. Don’t forget to link your Slideshare account with LinkedIn and create a CTA at the bottom of each slide.
Add Twitter to your strategy
With 328 million active users in the first quarter of 2017, Twitter is another social media platform that you have to seriously cover to generate top quality leads.
According to business2community, an average user of Twitter follows a minimum of five businesses, creating a lot of potential leads. Also, your prospective customers very keenly follow the updates on their favorite brands on Twitter, which means you have a real chance to connect and impress your prospects.
Again, according to business2community, about 42% of customers learn of new products and services through Twitter, making it the best place to launch any of your new products or services. The more awareness you generate for your products or services the better it is for your business.
How you should use Twitter to generate top quality leads:
Get going with Twitter cards
A lead generation tool, Twitter card engages your audience pretty effectively, and also captures their attention, so work hard on them. Attach rich media experiences and images to your tweets, which would help you drive more traffic to your site.
Live events
You can conduct live events on Twitter. This helps to connect you with your target audience.
Plan a tweet engagement campaign
Plan a campaign and generate interesting tweets for the same so that people start following you. Offer discount coupons, keep sharing all your latest offers, or you can run an awareness program about your products and services.
Instagram can be used for lead generation as well. Relatively new, but never-the-less it has an active user base of 500 million users. It has started paid advertising, which you can use to generate good quality leads. You can also hold contests and quizzes to generate leads.
Moreover, you can promote the same content on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter by linking up your account.
The bottom line
According to business2community, with social media marketing budgets expected to increase from 11% to 24% in the next five years. The sooner you start your active participation on social media, the better it would be for your organization. As a marketer you need to devise effective social media strategies to generate top quality leads.
Active social medial participation not just gives you sufficient leads, it also improves your search engine rankings.
At a more basic level you can also keep a tab on those who are engaging with your content on a one-on-one basis.
Also, don’t forget to respond to each individual who comments on your posts.
You just can’t ignore the importance of social media anymore, dismissing it as a passing fad.
Why you need a CRM system
With the importance of social media strategy understood completely, you also need to know that a CRM or customer relationship management system can collect all the relevant data for your business, which you can use to dominate these platforms. Also, your CRM system, combined with the efforts of an Orlando SEO company, would help you pick out the content that did well for you on the social media platforms. This allows you to create better content for your target audience, which can send more leads to your sales funnel.
And, with eZnetCRM you actually get a chance of mastering the art of lead generation.
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