CREATING OPPORTUNITIES FOR SOCIAL LEADS & SOCIAL SELLING
How do you create opportunities for leads on your social media? In marketing terms, a “lead” is a person who has expressed some sort of interest in a business. So, a “social lead” is a person who has expressed some sort of interest in a business via a social network.
To generate the social lead, you must vie for consumer attention on social media. From sharing blog posts and engaging with your followers on Facebook, to participating in Twitter chats, LinkedIn Group discussions, and creating how-to videos on YouTube, to using targeting tools like Facebook Audience Optimization, and answering consumer questions as they are raised across the various networks. All of this (and more) is the process that generates consumer interest in your business, and raises awareness about your brand. This is social lead generation, and the interested consumers are what’s known as social leads.
CREATING AN ENVIRONMENT FOR SOCIAL SELLING
You have a moving and diverse audience on social media, you need to catch their attention quickly, then keep their interest and bring them back. This takes consistent, strategic and targeted content. You will want to engage others and create an ongoing conversation by sharing information that pertains to your industry and your business. And when using social media for your business, by all means then align your social content to your business goals and teach your team how to engage in the sales process using “social selling“.
Social selling is what you do with the social leads – i.e. sell them on your services, a product or subscription to a service, send them to your website, capture their personal information via social media, etc.
It’s important in today’s world of the empowered consumer that social leads are generated before any hard efforts at social selling take place. In the past, there was only a very limited amount of product or service information that a potential buyer had access to. Marketers created newspaper ads and TV commercials, conducted cold-calling marathons and email blasts, all with the purpose of dazzling consumers with inherently biased product information that painted the brand in a favorable light.
However, today the consumer has access to a plethora of information via search engines. Your potential customer will research you and your business details via Google, and then use social media for more research on you (what will they find?), and to consult their peers about the quality of your services. Put simply, the modern consumer doesn’t want to hear a sales pitch any longer – if they want to buy something, they’ll do the research themselves.
With so many conversations taking place on social media, with brand names being mentioned and products being muddied and praised on a minute-by-minute basis, the marketer now must be focused on providing stand-out content across all networks.
I work with a lot of clients to help them create and implement their social media strategies, and I see a consistent pattern with them all. When we begin to work on developing their social media program, I find that the client is usually very heavy on one side or the other – they are either only posting personal photos or they are far too promotional – in both cases they are missing opportunities for sales! Getting the social lead and making the social sell requires a strategic approach to your content writing and attention spent on the networks to build relationships that will develop into social leads. All of this takes a commitment of time, a well thought out strategy, and rethinking your sales and business goals to include social media.
Happy marketing!
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Contact Sandy today to discuss your social media marketing strategy and business marketing needs. Sandy and her team provide services from graphic design to social media management, all with the purpose to take your business to the next level, increase brand awareness, and generate more leads.
