Social media that doesn’t drive revenue doesn’t last. As B2B marketers, focusing on generating leads and revenue is our top priority. Social media can help. It can help reduce cost of customer acquisition and provide sustainable long-term lead flow. As a marketer who is already leveraging social media, how do you supercharge your efforts to make sure that you maximize leads from your social media marketing time investment? Image may be NSFW.
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Their are tons of approaches to help do this, but let’s start with six that can provide an instant boost to your social media lead generation efforts.
6 Instant B2B Social Media Lead Generation Improvements
1. Add a Call-to-action to your Business Blog – One of the biggest mistakes B2B marketers make is forgetting to include a call-to-action on their blog. Have an upcoming webinar that you are using to drive leads? Put a link or image to drive registration in your blog sidebar or at the end of blog posts.
2. Share Lead Generation Offers in Social Media – Social media purists would tell you that tweeting out a landing page to an ebook or product demo shouldn’t happen. They are wrong. Prospects that have opted into your social media content want more information about industry best practices and your business. Sometimes this might be from a blog post or an email. Other times it will be from a more hearty lead generation offer. Go ahead and start sharing these in social media.
3. Test Paid Methods of Building Social Media Reach – Social media advertising is an interesting beast. Beyond doing pay-per-click lead generation, marketers can also use tools like Facebook’s promoted stories to increase the number of likes on a Facebook Page. The benefit to paying for reach is that unlikes of social media accounts is fairly low. So instead of paying per lead, B2B marketers can pay for a fan or follower that has the potential to drive multiple leads over their lifetime as a connection. You will need to do some math to determine how many leads a follower or fan generates for your business over their lifetime, but that is another post for another time.
4. Follow, Friend, and Connect - You have to have social media connections to see and spread your content in order to generate leads. A simple way to get more social media connections is to search for related connections on a social network and then connect with them. Taking the simple action of connecting exposes your social media accounts to new connections and results in reach growth over time.
5. Leverage Email – Email is social. Make sure to include links in your email to make it easy for email list members to connect with your business in social media.
6. Analyze Offers – Marketing without data crunching only results in wasted effort. Look at your lead generation offers and see how they perform in different social media channels. Use this data to promote the best performing offers by channel. This should increase your overall lead flow by channel by making simple changes.
We cover this topic in MUCH more detail in The B2B Social Media Book, but these are a few simple action items to get started. What other lead generation suggestions would you make for B2B companies?
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