Generate Lead And Sales Opportunities For Your Sales Reps

Social media isn’t just about fun photos, vacation pics and recipes. If you’re a business leader, CEO, VP of marketing or director of demand generation, social media can be an integral part of your lead generation and revenue growth plan.

Here are 10 tips to turn your social media efforts into revenue generation:

1 Be Strategic

Nothing in marketing truly works without a strategy and plan behind it. If you start posting content to your social pages without knowing what story you’re trying to tell, what type of audience you want to attract and most importantly, what action you want your followers to take, you’ll be hard pressed to see any actual results from social media.

Being strategic also means selecting the right social platform for your business. No one ever said you have to be on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube. In most cases, it makes more sense to pick one or two platforms, blow those experiences out with amazing content and then move on to your next major platform.

2 Be Authentic

It’s easy to get lazy and let automated posts rule your social media marketing plan. The result of an overly automated social experience is a brand that’s flat, diluted and without an authentic voice. It’s important to put in the amount of effort required to deliver your brand’s value and voice while developing a relationship with your audience.

This typically means starting conversations as opposed to simply posting content. It means asking for their opinion and sharing your opinion. It means taking a stand and having a perspective instead of simply sharing other people’s perspectives. The more you share your perspective, the more social engagement you’ll have on your sites and the more leads you’ll generate.

3 Be Engaging

To get all of the benefits of social media, you have to engage with your audience. It isn’t enough to simply post your own content. This engagement might take the form of a personal “thank you” to a new high-profile follower on Twitter. It might mean adding thought leadership to a LinkedIn Group thread, or starting a discussion on a Reddit.

People are looking for engagement and respond well to others who directly educate them and engage with them thoughtfully on a personal level. Create a social media strategy that includes active engagement and you’ll see your audience reach numbers increasing, activity increasing and that key metric (leads) increasing too.

4 Be Consistent

People are going to visit your social pages while they’re visiting your website. Make sure your brand guidelines, messages, story and marketing assets are consistent across all of your social sites and website pages. People get nervous when they arrive at a site that looks, sounds or feels different than they expected.

5 Be A Content Promoter

If you’re executing your marketing correctly, you’ll be publishing a ton of content. Use your social sites to strategically promote that content and extend its life beyond your website. Make sure you have the right content for the right channel. For example, infographics and slide decks do better on Pinterest or Instagram while whitepapers and e-books do better on LinkedIn.

6 Be Visual

Research increasingly shows that people would rather consume visual content (video, pictures, designed images) while browsing online. By leaning into this trend you give the audience and your prospects what they want. This allows you to deliver a tailored experience for each persona visiting your social sites, and this almost always produces more leads and a better-quality lead.

7 Be Brief

Don’t ask for too much from your audience, at least in the beginning. Early on they’ll be skeptical of your intentions. They know you want to sell them something. Over time, if you treat them right and provide value, they’ll be more than happy to share their contact information with you. The more authentic you are and the more insightful content you deliver, the more likely they’ll be to participate and share back with you.

8 Be Advertising

Many of the social sites offer tremendous opportunities to reach highly targeted persona groups with very targeted ads. Consider taking advantage of this capability. Social ads can be targeted down to specific companies or specific types of people at specific companies. Social ads can be targeted to individuals with specific behaviors, and the targeting criteria is extensive and highly customizable. This produces a targeted ad campaign, with equally targeted messaging and offers. Our testing has produced very positive results.

9 Be Selling

Sales reps need to be on all of the social sites. They need to be using social monitoring and social listening tools to identify people talking about their business, their competitors’ businesses and any keywords even remotely related to their business, products or services. The ability to reach out to individuals who are engaged in conversations on social sites is unmatched and a highly effective sales practice.

10 Be Analyzing And Optimizing

Never before have marketers had access to so much data. The key is to know what to look at when to look at it and then what to do about it. Set goals for your social media marketing program performance. Measure actual, real-time performance against those goals and then act accordingly. If you’re missing your goals, adjust today as opposed to next quarter. If you’re hitting your goals, make sure you understand why and know how to leverage that success in other areas of your marketing. Social media provides an incredible opportunity to test messaging, content offers, website pages, and other marketing assets in real-time with real prospects or customers. Take advantage of that.‍