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How Social Media Can Be Your Best Source For Leads

This article is more than 8 years old.

We’ve all heard that social media does not work for B2B marketing.

Well, I hate to debunk a myth, but this one has more holes in it than most BigFoot rumors. In fact, social media can very easily be your biggest source of leads for your company. And I’m about to show you how on a network by network basis.

I’ll begin today with LinkedIn and will post a Twitter and Facebook guide over the next few days. And this won’t be some high-level mumbo jumbo that gives weak advice. No ma’am, this will be a deep dive with tactical applications. Also, this isn’t a social selling guide. That’s a different beast than social marketing.

LinkedIn

If we’re talking B2B, then let’s get started with the mother of all business networks, LinkedIn. Its entire premise is to network business people. Thus, it should be the cornerstone of any B2B marketing campaign.

Now, I’ve heard from hundreds of marketers that LinkedIn is terrible because the clicks are so expensive and the conversion rates aren’t great. And they’re right. Sort of.

You see, LinkedIn does not do so hot as a direct response promotion tool. So, if you’re blasting your audience with a “sign up now” or a “take a free demo” offer, then you won’t see the returns you’re hoping for. But where LinkedIn excels is as a content discovery tool.

People aren’t just going on LinkedIn to find jobs and spy on their competitors. They’re spending more time on the network browsing articles and looking for things to read. And that’s how you can reel them in. Instead of asking for a sales commitment, you should be using it to get your content into your audience’s hands.

Banner Blindness

But please, before you hit GO on that ad campaign, don’t select the ads campaign option. You’ll instead want to make a sponsored update.

You’ll do this because of a phenomenon called banner blindness. This means that people on their digital devices actually don’t even recognize banners and ads anymore. They’ve trained their eyes to avoid those areas of the page. And the ads option on LinkedIn puts your message right smack dab in the banner dead zone.

But a sponsored update is akin to a native ad. Users don’t often realize it’s an ad because it’s only marked as an ad by the greyed-out letters in the top left hand corner. And the sponsored update scrolls right down the middle of their screen. That’s exactly where you want to be.

Give Until It Hurts

Next you’ll want to avoid talking about you or your company. Nobody wants to read your brochure… sorry. Instead, you should focus on solving your audience’s problems. And don’t start to solve them, then ask them to fill out a form or talk to a salesperson to learn more. Nope. You need to go whole-hog and help them from start to finish. Exactly like this article is doing.

I suggest writing an eBook, but don’t call it an eBook, eBooks have a dusty connotation nowadays. Instead, call it a handbook, guide, or roadmap. Then, put it behind a form that asks them to give you at least their email address (more on this in the upcoming Facebook and Twitter posts).

“But Mike, they won’t need our service or product if we show them how to fix their problems.”

If your product or service is so easily supplanted by a simple eBook, then you’ve got bigger problems than your customers going around you. This means you have a solution that isn’t worth money, so you should consider changing that ASAP.

What is more commonly the case is that the customers will realize how much work solving their problem is and the guide will help convince them of the value of your service or product. It’s like showing the client how the sausage is made. Most would rather just buy it from the butcher than going through all the messy steps.

By using LinkedIn like this we’ve seen campaigns that have conversion rates over 40%. Which is a phenomenal return on your investment.

Thought Leadership

Another great use of LinkedIn is the “Publish a Post” feature. This lets anyone share their long-form thoughts with their network. But that message doesn’t have to stop at the limit of your network. You see, LinkedIn has a content discovery platform called Pulse. It’s a news aggregator and content curation tool that categorizes articles and allows users to read them on mobile devices or desktop. And one of the main sources of articles for Pulse are the posts that LinkedIn users share.

That means that if Pulse picks up your post, it could potentially be seen by thousands of people. And it’s not that hard to get it picked up. Here are some tips for getting your post picked up:

  1. Make it original content that’s not repurposed from your blog or other website
  2. Don’t make it promotional. Pulse doesn’t like thinly-veiled sales pitches
  3. Make it engaging and fun to read
  4. Choose keywords for your title that help categorize it in one of Pulse’s major sections
  5. Make it more than 500 words long
  6. Pick a great image
  7. Share it right away and ask your network to like, comment, and share it as well. The more traction it can get right away, the better chance it has of being picked up

By using these strategies you’ll have a solid chance of getting a few of your posts picked up by Pulse. When this happens, we’ve seen posts receive up to 500,000 views and thousands of comments.

This type of exposure helps establish you, or a member of your team as a thought leader in the industry. And thought leadership is one of the most effective means of breaking down barriers during the sales process.

A good friend, Jacob Baadsgaard the CEO of Disruptive Advertising, was the one who clued me in on this strategy.

Groups

LinkedIn has some of the most active groups of any social network. And if you’re worried that your target audience is too narrow to have a group dedicated to it, just remember that there is a group completely dedicated to circus performers. Yeah, they probably have a group for your audience.

You’ll want to identify the groups you and members of your organization should join. Some may require approval to join, so just make sure you meet the requirements. Next, you’ll want to actually take part in the discussions in that group. If you were looking for an immediate results strategy, keep on walking.

Active members are more likely to have their posts seen and the discussions you take part in can often times result in great opportunities. So, you’ll need to invest some time into becoming a contributing member of the group.

Once you’re established you can now utilize the message board in the group as a way to drive engagement with your content. Have you and your team members share your blog posts, eBooks, webinars, and other helpful content that the group would likely interact with.

By using this strategy we saw one company grow their webinar attendance from a paltry 5 to 10 attendees to over 300 attendees in the span of six months. Their webinars now serve as their primary source of leads. And the best part, the promotion is free!

Capture All The Traffic

Most of the strategies I’ve outlined drive top and middle of funnel prospects to your site. And that’s great considering these tactics specifically target your desired audience. But once they come to the site, you can’t just expect that one interaction to be enough to seal the deal. Instead, you need to reinforce this first touch with a persistent marketing initiative.

So you need to set up retargeting/remarketing ads. The three networks I recommend for retargeting are AdWords, Twitter and Facebook. I’ll be diving into how Facebook and Twitter play into this process in the upcoming posts.

Once you have your retargeting cookies on your audience’s browsers, you’ll be able to keep you message in front of them for anywhere from 30 to 180 days. But don’t use retargeting only as a means of getting them in front of the sales team. Instead, use it to continue building the relationship. Have ads that promote your latest blog post or eBook. You can also push traffic to your webinar sign up page.

By using retargeting like this, you’ll continue to build the relationship with the site visitor and also establish your expertise in the industry. This will make the sales process much quicker and easier.

But Wait, There’s More

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to social promotion. In this other post I’ll explain how to leverage your email lists on Twitter and Facebook, how to use buyer personas to create effective audiences and how all three social networks play together to form a lead generation machine.