Social media allows you to connect with prospects, establish a relationship with them and convert them into paying customers.
Simple, right?
It is easy to see how your follower audience is growing by using your social media metrics. But the biggest question will always be: How do I get those followers to become qualified leads for my business?
Social media is a great tool to promote brand awareness. Collecting likes, followers and comments are important to make yourself recognisable, but what is more important than the quantity is the quality of your social media followers.
How do I get my social media followers to become leads?
The real value of social media isn’t necessarily to acquire new prospects. The real value is to deepen your relationship with your prospects so that they can ultimately be driven to your website and converted to customers. Said another way, the real value of a social media campaign is to create brand awareness among your prospects so that when they’re invited to engage with your company, they’re willing to do so.
Therefore, social media requires a lot of work to make it effective and drive your followers to your website.
How do I get social media followers to visit my website?
Promote blog posts, whitepapers or special offers on your social media pages and provide links that will take the prospect to your website for further details. Make sure you keep the content diverse. Not all prospects are interested in the same products or services from your company. In addition, not all prospects are at the same point in the sales cycle.
What happens next?
This is where a marketing automation software such as Act-On comes into play. When they arrive at your website, they should be encouraged to fill out a form in return for something of value to them (such as a free eBook, a white paper, a research report, a video, etc.). Once you’ve captured their email address, you’ll want to start engaging them with a lead nurturing campaign.
What will a lead nurturing campaign do for me?
With marketing automation software, you can tell which of your leads are interested in which products or services based on the signals they give you. Gain further inside into what specific products and/or services they are interested in by tracking which product pages they visit and clicks they make on your website and what areas of interest they specify in forms they fill in.
Marketing automation software will allow you to capture leads and then nurture them through the sales funnel until they ultimately become customers.
The Bottom Line
In the end, there’s no point in running a social media campaign if it’s not designed to drive leads to your business. You can have a Facebook page and you can have a Twitter account and you can even have a marketing automation platform, but they don’t mean a thing until you put them together and launch them into an integrated, cohesive program.
So go out and take action. That’s the first step towards your ultimate goal, which is to drive more leads to your business, convert them to customers and receive a ROI.
