Businesses are always striving to find new ways to generate new business and sales leads. One of the most talked about methods at the moment is via social media. However, this must be done with careful planning in order to achieve your desired business objectives.
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Businesses are using social media to support a number of organizational goals, such as:
Bringing traffic to their website
Increasing brand awareness
Building stronger customer relationships
Lead generation
Decreased Marketing Expense
With hundreds of differing opinions regarding the effectiveness of using social media for lead generation circulating the web, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to provide you with some top tips on how to succeed at it:
Be active on social media: You’ll be surprised at how many companies set up social media accounts but rarely use them. However, it is important to select your social media accounts carefully. Don’t try and jump on every single social platform – be there for the right reasons. For example, Rachel Fershleiser from Tumblr believes that Twitter should be used for conversation rather than as a megaphone. We very much agree, the social web is littered with examples of brands trying to broadcast messages rather than participate.
Always listen to what is being said about your brand on social media and respond accordingly: Knowing that someone is available at the click of a button will, no doubt, give consumers more faith in your company and be a perfect opportunity to build rapport.
Remember that social plays a key role throughout your entire sales pipeline beginning before prospects are even identified, to after they become customers.
Identify strategies that work: There’s nothing wrong with seeing what other people have done right and learn from it.
Use social media as a way of increasing Google rankings: By becoming more well-known through social media, your authority score will increase, therefore boosting your brand’s SEO.
Don’t forget about blogging: Blogs are sometimes forgotten about when discussing social media strategies, but they can be very useful in driving traffic. Blogs can be as broad or as specific as you like, as long as you can relate it back in one way or other to your brand… go for it!
As well as taking up some of these, using a social customer engagement tool such as Sentiment Metrics will allow you to gauge how successful you have been in increasing traffic and potentially sales. You will also be able to easily identify key influencers and customers and have the opportunity to engage with them, thus potentially increasing future sales opportunities.
Directly engaging with an organisation’s customers has been proven to increase customer satisfaction, improve customer retention and generate greatly increased sales leads. Social needs to be integrated across your entire marketing strategy in order to be effective.
