Monthly Archives: November 2011

Seven Reasons You’re not Using Social Media Correctly to Generate Leads

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Social media is a great inbound marketing tool that allows businesses and marketing teams to interact with prospects, cater to customers, promote their content, and yes, generate leads. When a business uses social media right, prospective customers have the opportunity to access great content and information via a platform they already populate and actually want to gather said content and information.

Additionally, when prospects do “bite,” many of them are willing to provide their contact information, click to obtain more valuable content, and then come back for more, illustrating the concept of effective use of social media for lead generation beautifully. And a good chunk of B2B marketers are on top of this: According to BtoB Magazine, 48.9% of B2B marketers who use social media say use it for lead generation, making lead generation one of the top applications for the use of social media. Unfortunately for some brands, they don’t always realize there are true tactics in order to use social media effectively for lead gen, and they approach their social media presence blindly.

To make sure you’re business is appropriately using social media to boost its lead gen efforts, check out the following list to ensure you’re not making any of these rookie mistakes.

7 Ineffective Ways to Generate Leads From Social Media

1. Not being where your target customers are. It’s not important to maintain a presence on just any social media network in order to engage with potential and current consumers; you have to be where they actually are. If you are posting content and updates blindly to Twitter, but members of your target market aren’t present there, what’s the point? The first step in effective use of social media for lead generation is to research and determine which social media sites your target audience is active on a regular basis. That way when you do share content and information, you can know you’re working to build awareness for your blog, product, service, and other types of content you offer on a regular basis. Awareness is a key preliminary stepping stone for lead generation, since prospects likely go through a period of learning more about your business and deciding whether or not they should research your company further.

2. Not providing valuable content. If you’re just pushing out content about your product and why it’s so “awesome,” more than likely, people will not want to share or engage with it. If someone is following your brand on Facebook, it’s probably to see what valuable content and offers you can offer them. Rather than product-focused content, focus on content rich with tips and tricks which can help to relieve your target customers’ pain points. When you target the content you’re offering to the different marketing personas you have defined for your business, then your prospects will be much more likely to engage with your brand and therefore, more likely to complete a lead-capture form for a piece of your content. In short, providing targeted, useful content will help you generate more qualified leads who may genuinely be interested in what you have to offer.

 

This post was originally written for Hubspot. To continue reading on the 5 other areas that are ineffective for lead gen through social media, please read my full post here: https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/29111/7-Reasons-You-re-Not-Generating-Leads-From-Social-Media.aspx#ixzz1exWAVlTg

Implementing an Efficient Lead Management Process in Six Steps

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Lead management bridges the gap between marketing and sales. It’s a customer acquisition process which identifies potential buyers (leads), educates them, engages with them, and when the leads are considered qualified, get passed from marketing to sales.

Is your business following an organized and effective lead management process? Doing so can improve the results of your lead generation efforts and ultimately contribute to more sales. If your business is lacking a solid system for managing leads, the following five steps will help you create and implement a successful and efficient lead management process from start to finish.

Step 1: Identify and Understand Your Leads

This initial step is crucial to the success of each of the others. You need to determine first and foremost who your potential buyers are to develop a process that will enable you to identify in which part of the sales process these prospects stand.

First, your marketing team should identify buyer types and what their personas are. This will help you identify your ideal lead picture for your product or service. This persona can be carved out by identifying the following:

  • Demographics: Where do your ideal customers live? What’s the size of the company they work for? What industry market are they in? What are their problems, wants, and needs?
  • Behavior: Are they reading blogs, whitepapers, or just searching via Google to find the information they’re looking for?
  • Lead Source: How do your best leads typically find you? Do they come from direct traffic to your website, did they read an article mentioning you, did they see one of your tweets?

You should also dig deeper by trying to understand the mindset of your ideal customer. Is he/she the business owner, the VP, the tech guy? Determine where he or she lives, what he or she reads, and how he or she visited your site.

Step 2: Generate & Collect Intelligence About Your Leads

The sales cycle has been extended because the lead process begins in marketing where the marketing team figures out where the first point of contact was with the potential lead. The key to generating leads and knowing their source is to create and track content.

  • Place your premium content offers like whitepapers and webinars behind a lead-capture form to generate leads and gather critical lead intelligence information about them that can be used during the lead management process.
  • Add a tracking token to links you share in social media and through email marketing to help you identify leads’ behavior and interaction with your content.
  • Use your marketing analytics to determine how people are coming to your website or blog and where they are clicking. This will inform you which types of content leads are looking at and help you understand what their interests, needs, and wants are.

Capturing this information about your leads is critical for step four, lead nurturing.

To read about the other 4 steps on how to be effective with lead management, read my full post on the Hubspot blog here: https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/28889/6-Steps-to-Implementing-an-Effective-Lead-Management-Process.aspx#ixzz1eOI8ScIh

How To Use Social Media to Generate and Nurture Leads

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Generating and nurturing leads is a key part of campaigns and the sales cycle for a business looking to kick butt and make a good profit. But did you think social media would be a great way to nurture those leads? Social media is the key to inbound lead nurturing because it allows people to come to your brand on their own accord. I am not saying you shouldn’t utilize email marketing and other forms, but social media can be a great additional source, and also to use in conjunction with your other avenues for lead generation.

3 key methods to lead generation and nurturing

1. Participate in the Convo

More than likely there is already chatter about your brand on the Internet. The key is to find it, listen often, and participate in it.

Find and Listen: You can utilize a tool as simple as Google Reader (or Feedly) in order to hear what your consumers, competition, and others are saying regarding your brand, product, or service. For example you can take RSS feeds from Topsy, Twitter, Facebook and have them all set up in your Reader. Additionally you can set up keyword alerts for your industry. Way simpler than checking every day on what’s out there or getting a billion email alerts.

Listen more: The key is to find out what the key themes are that your consumers and competitors are talking about on these social platforms and across the web. What are the pain points? Then you have an avenue to talk to them about and engage on a level that they want to be engaged on.

Engage: Don’t talk to, but talk with your consumers. Are the majority wishing they had a service that helped them do X better? Or had tips on how to do Y in a shorter amount of time? Perhaps you already have content on how they can do just that. Provide a link to a source of content to help them, rather than just selling your service right away. In short, this will help build awareness, start a conversation, and lead them through the funnel.

2. Share some Content

From part one you have begun to listen to your consumers regarding what they have to say, what they want, what they don’t want, and what information they could use more of. Now what?

Create Valuable Content: Focus on their pain points and offer content on what will help relieve those pain points. For example, if your brand is a software service and your potential consumers are having a hard time with efficiency, perhaps write some whitepapers, blog posts, or record some webinars which give them tips and tricks to increase efficiency (and of course you can throw in a little plug about how your product is the key to that efficiency).

Provide Valuable Content: So now you have this content, now what?

  1. Join the groups where your target consumers are in Facebook or LinkedIn.
  2. Use the hashtags they are using on Twitter.
  3. Share your content in these groups, on your Facebook Page, through your Twitter stream, and on your LinkedIn group.
  4. Make sure there is a link that leads these consumers directly to this content on your website.
  5. If they keep clicking, and look for more info regarding XYZ, now you know what more to provide these specific consumers. You can nurture these leads further all because you listened first, and engaged second – and on the social media platforms where they like to speak and engage (not where you think they should).

3.  Measure, Measure, and Measure some more

Did someone say the word “measure”? You may be tweeting, commenting, sharing, and chatting online with your consumers, but how much are they engaging with you? How often are they clicking on your links? Are they converting? Key areas to measure to see if you are utilizing social media to truly generate and nurture leads include:

Measure the visitors

  • Analyze how they got to your website or blog. Was it through a bit.ly link used on Twitter? Was it through a Facebook group post? Track your links and see where the majority of your consumers came from.

When did you see the most / least traffic

  • You can see which campaigns on social worked the best or least and repeat and further the better ones, and perhaps drop the lesser ones.

Conversion

  1. How many just perused (and what did they look at)?
  2. How many clicked, and converted? What did they look at and view before they converted. Was it the awesome webinars you record each week? Now you know what works and what doesn’t for your target audience.

Although social media is not going to get your lead to convert by itself every time, it is a great bonus tool to use in your nurturing process. Combine it with your email efforts, and make sure your emails and newsletters all have your social buttons on them for potential and current customers to follow and fan when they wish.

And….don’t forget to also keep in touch after you have converted those leads into customers. There is the after sale process part that is very important. Customers want more information on training, tips and tricks, and more. And if they are avid social media geeks, they may be subscribing to your Facebook feed in order to keep up with the latest and greatest from your company.

 

 

Five Google Plus Tips and Tricks for your Personal Brand

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Like many people I was definitely hesitant at first about whether or not to utilize Google Plus? Another social platform? Another place to have to keep up with? But since I am a Google Fanatic with my Gmail, Docs, Calendar and more…and not to mention a complete digital geek…I had to join. Here are a few tips I’ve learned along the way from my own ventures and others who have shared…

1. Profile Picture

As we all know not all social networks make it easy for you to upload your avatar pics. Google Plus can have issues with resolution when uploading. Suggestion: make sure the picture you choose has higher resolution so it’s more clear.

2. Manage your Contacts

So many people, so much to share, so much hassle? Google Plus allows you to make it simpler so you can share with whom you want to share, when you want to share. For example, you can make one group for family, one for close friends, one for coworkers, and another for industry experts. Therefore you can share pictures of your dog with friends, while your blog post with others in your industry. Or whatever suits your fancy.

3. Sharing with Relevant Contacts

As stated above you can decide how you group your contacts so its easier to share what you want to share. Here I am emphasizing that this is great so you don’t share irrelevant content to all groups. For example your close friends may not care about a post related to your job, or vice versa. If you want the right exposure for that cool “tip post”….share with those who will actually respond and comment and be excited to read it. Share and share relevantly.

4.  Cutting Through the Noise

Too many items in your feed? Tired of seeing certain people post about the same old thing? Turn down the “volume” and cut through the chatter. Mute a post from the notification window. Simple, and way more manageable.

5. Take it on the Road

Want to keep up with your Google Plus circles but not at your computer as often?There’s an App for that! You can also get notifications via text on notifications.

Bonus!

Want to know how it measures up against Facebook? Check out this sweet Infographic…

Who are you? A google plus fan? Still an Avid Facebooker? Or both?

Note: This post was originally written for Socialnomics.