Social Media is often thought of as a place for fun.
Turns out, you can drive leads with it.
Here’s what you need to do:
First, you need to build a presence on relevant social media platforms. From Instagram to Twitter, you need to pitch your product to the right people on the platform. Make sure that the referring social media influencers are sharing your content with their audiences. As much as you can, don’t let your social media presence become too small, that you’re not turning into conversations with your customers.
Second, you need to set up your social media presence in a way that makes it impossible for your customers to forget about you. This means you need to have “user friendly” social media accounts, where customers can easily find you and see the face of your brand. Focus on developing a strong brand voice that people can associate with your brand. The importance of it cannot be understated. For example, Oreo is known for its sweeping humor and wit.
Here’s an example:
During the Superbowl XLVII a power outage caused the lights to go out for 34 minutes, team Oreo jumped in at the opportunity, tweeting this “Power Out? No problem” with an image of a solitary Oreo in the dark followed by the caption that read, “You can still dunk in the dark.” It went viral, attracting 15000 RTs and 20000 likes on Facebook.
The example is old. It’s from 2013. And yet the example sports a place here because of how unnervingly wisecracking it was.
Now, you can finally start thinking about how you can acquire more customers. Here are some tactics that you can start using in order to do that:
Identify what your competitors are doing well and what they’re doing poorly.
If your competitors are posting a lot of great content, then it’s not really too hard for you to start learning from what they’re doing. What you need to do is to track what they’re doing well and what they’re doing poorly. If they’re posting a lot of great content, you need to do the same. Find out what makes them tick. And fuel your lead generation efforts from that place. Once you have the leads schedule appointments with them through Taskeo.
Now, when you’re looking at what the competition is doing poorly, you’ll see some common themes. You’ll be able to see what they’re doing well, what they don’t do, and what they’re doing really right.
To be able to post content, you need a channel that continually spurts out great content. For example prior to posting this comparison article on keyword research tools I spent sometime researching the need for the content on social media. I validated the content idea first. To validate the I searched for and emailed influencers. To that end I used the email finder tool from Contactout. It’s incredibly useful.
What’s that?
Your blog.
Create more blog content.
According to the Hubspot State of Inbound report, the top factors that determine a company’s growth are:
* The quality of the content
* The speed at which the content is being delivered
It’s really simple. But, you could be overlooking a key component of your brand that’s making the company’s business model unsustainable.
What’s the problem?
The problem with content marketing? It’s slow. It’s not scalable. And, it’s challenging to scale because you need to create more content and promote it.
But there’s a way to speed things up.
To make your content marketing fast, create more blog posts. Here’s how you can do that:
* Create a series of blog posts that are high-quality and deliver your message quickly. This sounds difficult, but here’s what you need to do:
o Choose a high-quality topic
o Create a great headline
o Write a great blog post
o Promote the post
To make this easy I often follow these steps:
- Go to HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator.
- Enter a topic in the URL box.
- Click “Give Me Blog Topics” to get options for topics that you can generate content for.
- Click “Continue” to get options for images and video.
- Click “Submit” to get options for social sharing and information about payment.
You can also create a blog post that is low-quality, but that won’t necessarily impact your business.
The quality of the content that you produce will determine how well you can drive leads with social media.
Good quality content is really good quality storytelling. With all these blog posts you have enough content to feed your social media machine to get engagement.
- Tell a story
When you want to connect with someone you’ll start by telling them a story.
There’s no point in telling a story if it doesn’t tie back to your business.
The story you share will be a metaphor for your business. This is part of how social media makes it possible for people to connect with each other.
Let’s say I own a blog where I talk about the hospitality industry.
In that case I will share content and blog posts that helped people market to their guests on my social media channels.
So I might share something like this article from FitSmallBusiness. Except that I will create something similar and then share my creation.
If you use this as your example, you’ll be able to communicate more effectively and build relationships.
There’s no right or wrong answer. Just that you should tell your story in a way that’s easy for people to understand.
- Be real and honest
I’m not going to lie to you here. You’re not going to get a lot of engagement on social media, especially on Twitter, if you’re not honest.
How do people feel about you?
Let’s say you’re a brand that sells car parts. The opinions of your fans are going to be different from how they feel about you.
Here’s an example:
Notice the comments section from Ford. They’re not trying to sell your brand to people. Their fans are trying to share their own thoughts about a certain type of car.
MarketShare, a marketing analytics company measured the direct and indirect effects that Twitter had on auto sales. Their research concluded that Twitter drove $716 million in auto sales.
There were over 5.6 million auto related tweets in the UK in 2018.
83% said Twitter influenced their decision-making process when buying a car.
If you’re going to share things that your customers are saying publicly, then you’ll have to be honest. If not, you’ll be talking down to your customers.
Only share things that you know about your customers. If you’re not sure how to do that, you can always use Twitter’s “Rules” section to know exactly what you should and shouldn’t share.
- Be consistent
When you’re telling a story, it’s easy to forget about the facts, and focus on the emotion. People don’t want to hear what you’re talking about, especially when your narrative is presented in a sound, clear, and convincing manner.
Learn with an example
Spare no doubt about it. Social media can and does play a seminal role in lead generation. It’s inconsequential the kind of business you’re in and the kind of revenue you generate.
Let’s look at the example of Miami Dolphins
They generated $4 million in sales with Facebook videos.
Back in 2017 the Dolphins achieved the rare status of being the number 1 ranked NFL team in terms of video views on Facebook.
Video isn’t simply something Dolphins use to gain better engagement. It’s also one of the better ways they generate leads on the platform.
As with any successful strategy, this too is backed by data. For one of their off-season marketing campaigns, the Dolphins began analyzing their comment data, shares and likes on their videos to understand which of their audience members were most likely to buy season tickets.
They realized that 25% of their new season ticket membership during 2017 was a direct result of leads who came from social media. This realization cemented the foundation for 4 million dollars in ticket sales.
Here’s what they did
Step 1: Created content
Without content you won’t have an engaged audience or leads to speak of.
They created a series of videos called the life which focused on the players, the Miami community and so on. The videos were stories of players and the community at large. They were created in a bid to engage audience members.
Step 2: Build a relationship
They didn’t try and sell on Facebook. The focus was building relationships with people. With lead ads they engaged and reconnected with people who had previously engaged with them through videos.
The most important takeaway
When it comes to framing a winning strategy you need analytics. Create a goal to keep track of leads you’re generating. You can even tie it to your analytics account.
Use UTM parameters to track and organize the traffic you’re generating from social media campaigns.
Source: Say “facebook”, “twitter”, or any other social media channel.
Medium: the kind of content you’re using say video, sponsored or lead ads.
You want to be consistent with communicating your messages. You don’t want to be repeated over and over, and you don’t want to have to be so insensitive that people become annoyed with you.
If you’re consistent, people will be interested in hearing what you’re about. If not, it will be hard to believe your story.
That’s about it folks.
