Social Media generates more Qualified Leads

It’s difficult to ignore or to do without social media: it’s everywhere. From Facebook to Instagram, not forgetting Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn, social media is a great communication tool for building and developing a community. However, social media can do more than just provide information. If it’s well-used, social media is also a business tool for managing qualified leads, and potential customers. Between inbound marketing, lead generation and lead nurturing, find out how social media can boost your business.

Personas and social media: wanting to be everywhere means being nowhere

You’ve heard about Facebook, of course; but what about Twitter and Snapchat too? When it comes to social media, it’s tempting to want to be everywhere, which can lead to your brand being spread too thin. It’s impossible to be on all social media without a dedicated team and adapted, differentiated content for each platform. Creating an account just for the sake of having a presence which then becomes an inactive account is worse than having no account at all. Communicating well on social media, therefore, requires an appropriate strategy. Before getting started, you need to know which social media to focus on.

To do so, you need to establish your personas. These are profiles of your typical customers. Virtual characters with a real identity, brought to life using information and the experiences of your marketing and sales team, along with data collected by customer support. 4 or 5 personas should be enough to cover 80% of your customers.

These personas are multi-layered: you know their backgrounds, their experiences, what they do, what they buy, what drives them and, by extension, which social media they’re likely to use.

Your personas are also very useful for coming up with a specific content strategy: what do they read? What problems do they have? How can you help them? The answers to these questions will create your online social strategy to generate qualified leads.

Use the right tools and the right strategies

Marketing managers and community managers want to use more than the native tools provided by major social media platforms. These tools have been created primarily for personal use and lack of precision when it comes to professional use. That’s why there are many tools which can be used in addition. A few examples of tools and best practices to ensure a flawless online presence and help you to become a lead generation expert:

Automation

These are software programs which connect to your online accounts to publish and interact, depending on triggers. For example, as soon as you publish an article on your blog, it’s shared straightaway on Facebook and Twitter, and a few hours later on LinkedIn. Automation also makes it easy to create marketing emails and score potential customers, depending on their actions (opening an email, social media engagement, etc.).

URL tracking

When content is published, you can create a unique link to measure and track the impact of your campaigns and shares. Your KPIs will be always up-to-date and relevant.

Sharing cold content

Your publications can’t be recycled indefinitely. That’s the difference between hot content (related to the news and which quickly becomes outdated) and cold content, which is easily shareable. You can develop thematic lists of cold content which will then be automatically republished without any additional intervention at a predefined time and date of your choice.

Competitive intelligence

To monitor trends, hot topics and find out what your competitors are doing. With a few social media accounts and hashtags, you can create a dashboard for proactive and efficient monitoring.

Content marketing: be organized

Social media is nothing more than a communication channel. What counts is what you put on social media. That’s what content marketing is all about: organizing, producing and publishing varied and relevant content to boost your social presence.

An editorial calendar is essential for a relevant content marketing strategy. You can use it to work out the article and the topic to be published on each social media platform, based on a particular persona. It’s a good way to plan ahead and ensure that your resources are well balanced.

Creating varied content is also important. Articles, infographics, photo albums, competitions, videos: diversity creates additional momentum in terms of communications. Similarly, you can also test different formats of live videos: AMA (ask me anything – a live video during which you answer every question sent in by viewers), FAQ (the same principle, but the questions are chosen and organized in advance), unboxing, product launch (an evening event or a VIP presentation, in advance), various other events, etc.

Social media is a strategic marketing tool for branding. It can be used to convey key messages, share strong values, accelerate sales and help customers to connect to a brand. It’s also a way of experimenting with targeted advertising to reach people beyond your immediate community and generate qualified leads.

Our team of experts in lead generation can help you. Contact them to find out more!