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by Stuart Cooke
Image source: Pexels
Social media is no longer just a powerful tool for the marketing department; oh no! In fact, using social media for lead generation needs to be an important part of every sales team’s strategy.
This is because collecting leads through your social media channels not only helps to boost sales but will help you find and connect with people interested in your company, boosting the chances of turning them into loyal customers.
The problem is, lots of sales teams are yet to fully embrace this newer marketing method, and this needs to change. If you’re new to the world of social media lead generation, that’s OK. And if you’re not, well then this guide can help to give you some useful tips and refresher points.
Below, we’re going to take a look at five great ways that your team can use social media to improve your sales funnel and generate leads.
Read on to find out more.
Encouraging people to freely share their information with you is a lot easier if you offer them the right incentive. In order to do this, you should create enticing lead magnet offers that people actually want.
This could be anything from a free trial or discount code to a helpful white paper, webinar, or research report. The lead magnet you choose will depend completely on the goods or service you’re offering and your target audience.
But whatever you choose to offer, you need to make sure that it is enticing and captivating and that you promote this via social media to help generate leads. For this reason, it’s also going to be important to get some good images and content created to grab people’s attention – especially with so much going on in their news feed.
This might require the marketing, sales, and design teams (if you have them) to work together to create a great campaign.
Did you know that 92% of consumers read online reviews before buying products or services? What’s more, almost three-quarters (72%) say that positive testimonials and reviews can increase their trust in a business.
These are some pretty impressive statistics, and they make it easy to see why testimonials and reviews are so important to businesses.
But did you also know that sales teams can use these testimonials to their advantage to generate leads through social media?
Well, they can!
By creating images or content using customer testimonials, sales teams can provide the social proof they need to acquire new leads. You could even take it one step further and turn these into videos or have the customer submit a video testimonial if they’re happy to.
Plus, by showcasing how past customers or clients have benefited from your products and services via social media, you can prove brand value. This increases the likelihood of an individual getting in contact or following your company on your social platforms. This can mean more leads generated down the line.
Businesses have increasingly been investing in paid social media ads in recent years – and with good reason. There are a number of benefits to be had by targeting your audience in this way and these include:
Essentially targeted social media ads can help you to coax leads down the sales funnel and can also be very useful for retargeting campaigns too. And these ads can be managed solely by the sales team, or they can work in conjunction with the marketing team depending on the nature of your business.
These campaigns also give you great insights into how customers are engaging with your targeted ads, and you can analyse the data carefully to get a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t. This means that over time you can fine-tune your advertising efforts to ensure you’re getting the best results and driving the most leads.
Video has become the king of content in recent years, with many favouring videos over traditional images or written text. There are a number of reasons for this, but in lots of cases, it’s because it makes the content quicker and easier to digest. But whatever the case, sales teams should be making the most of this medium for generating leads.
From creating helpful webinars and tutorials to hosting live streaming events, there is so much you can do with video. If you think about it, creating a video that showcases your goods or services or perhaps running a live stream where you demonstrate your product in real-time can be very engaging to potential customers.
And if they’re impressed with what you’re offering or they have more questions about it, they’ll be more inclined to reach out or start following your business online.
What’s more, social media is the ideal way to promote these videos, and platforms like Facebook and Instagram also allow you to run live streams for your followers. These can then be saved and shared again later.
And finally, perhaps one of the simplest ways to generate leads through social media is by growing not just the company’s following but any individual company accounts you have as well. Because let’s face it, if someone has decided to follow or engage with you on one or perhaps even multiple social media channels, they must be interested in your offering.
So by sharing engaging and interesting content, little videos, images, or testimonials and by connecting with your target audience through social media, you’ve already got them through the awareness stage of your sales funnel, and you’re beginning to pique their interest.
So by just sharing content and engaging online, it might only take one small nudge to get that lead further down the funnel and turn them into a sale.
About the author