Let’s begin by quickly looking at fool-proven ways not to generate leads:
- Aimlessly drifting through social media platforms is a guaranteed fail.
- Putting round pegs in square holes. Putting an accounts payable staffer with no experience using social media in charge of the company Twitter page because he or she has extra time will cause even the best social strategy to implode.
- If you are not willing to spend time and money on social media marketing, you’re better off spending that time and money elsewhere. [Tweet “via @bradshorr learn “The Foolproof Way to Gain Leads Through Social Media””]
By flipping these losing approaches over, we can quickly see the path to foolproof social lead generation:
- Develop a sound strategy.
- Get the right people executing it.
- Support them with an adequate budget.
This recipe is pretty simple (though surprisingly few organizations follow it) – so let’s dig a little deeper. I’ll focus on two elements of social media marketing that cannot fail – if they are executed systematically over time.
Create Sharable Content
(Photo credit: http://www.jeffbullas.com/2014/01/13/50-epic-jargon-solutions-for-better-writing/)
Millions of people share content 24/7/365 on social media sites. Why should anybody bother to share yours? If you can’t answer that question, you have no chance of getting noticed on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube or any other site you prioritize.
For content to be highly sharable, it must be highly useful, relevant and authoritative to your target audience. These three criteria should drive every topic and inform every sentence of every blog post, article, infographic, video, and slide presentation you create.
- Useful content solves a problem or describes a new opportunity. It relieves pain or enables gain.
- Relevant content solves problems or introduces opportunities that matter, that speak to core issues within the target audience’s business or personal quality of life.
- Authoritative content conveys knowledge, experience and expertise. These are the attributes that ultimately generate leads. Few people will want your help unless they believe you and you alone can help them.
With this in mind,
- Spend as much time as it takes to develop topics that are useful and relevant. Involve your sales and customer service teams – they engage your customers in the trenches and know what makes them tick.
- Stick to your knitting. Don’t create content only to capitalize on “hot” keywords or pull in new audience segments. Create beneficial and targeted content that reflects the value of your products or services. Focus on what you do best and you will become known for that. Focus on everything and you will be unknown to everyone.
Present Meaningful Calls to Action
Suppose you succeed in creating useful, relevant and authoritative content. You are still only halfway home. When social media users start sharing your content, readers/viewers must be given something to do with it. For content to generate leads, it must lay out a conversion path for the audience.
Effective calls to action encourage readers/viewers to take a reasonable next step in developing a business relationship. Nobody is going to read one of your blog posts and seriously consider a call to action such as, “Give us all of your business forever, right now!” It’s not reasonable.
The best call-to-action strategies employ calls to action that are not only reasonable but also appeal to readers/viewers at different stages in the buying cycle. “Tire kickers,” people in research mode, are usually more inclined to download an informative brochure than to call a sales representative. In contrast, people in the about-to-run-out-of-product mode are more inclined to do the opposite.
If your blog does not lay out meaningful calls to action, you will never get leads when the social media shares start driving traffic to your content. Readers/viewers need to be nudged — so make your calls to action not only meaningful, but also easy to say “yes” to and easy to execute.
For offsite content, publishers may prevent you from inserting calls to action in your content; they have their own rules about links and self-promotion. But this is OK because outside publishers often have large social media followings – perhaps significantly larger than your own. When people share your offsite content on social media, some of the people who read it will click through to your website, where they will see your calls to action.
Bottom Line: Create great content, and give readers something to do with it. If you do this well enough, often enough and over a great enough period of time, you will stand out from the crowd in social media. Simple — yes. Easy – no. This is why so few companies stand out. Are you ready to take up the challenge?
Brad Shorr
Latest posts by Brad Shorr (see all)
- The Foolproof Way to Gain Leads Through Social Media - November 14, 2014