Harvesting More Leads from Social Media

 Photo by Tracy Le Blanc from Pexels

By Jim Hingst

One of the biggest challenges that a small business faces is generating enough leads from all of its marketing activities to reach your sales goals.  If you are investing time and money on social media, your efforts need to produce a return on your investment. 

It should be no surprise that social media is the most effective marketing tool.  With nearly half of the 7.9 billion people in the world using these platforms, social media not only can deliver a message to a broader audience at a lower cost. Above all, it can produce a greater volume of sales leads than traditional advertising and communication channels.

 

To effectively reach your target audience and generate acceptable results, your social media strategy should have specific goals that are measurable, relevant and time-bound. See my story on goal setting. The reason to gauge the effectiveness of social media based on the number of leads generated, is to determine if your marketing activities are working.

 

Setting a goal for leads produced is a practical target, because you can easily track your results. An increase in brand awareness, on the other hand, is not so easily measured nor is gauging improvements in attitudes about your business. Using likes or shares or numbers of followers also has little practical application that affects revenue or profit. Leads, on the other hand, are important because you can turn those into cash.

 

Many of these old key performance indicators (KPIs) are a little too squishy for pragmatic marketing, especially for small business that need results that you can turn into sales. See my story on measuring the success of business plans.

 

How relevant are the numbers of followers or likes to your company if they don’t produce sales and profit for your business? What’s most important are how many prospective customers are interested enough in your social media content that they respond either by email or by phone or by filling out a form on your website landing page.

 

Lead Follow Up. Collecting leads is only worthwhile if you and your associates follow up in a timely fashion. In today’s world, timely means following up the same day that you receive the lead.

 

That’s where email marketing is important for small business. It provides immediate follow up of social media leads until you have the time to phone and schedule a face-to-face meeting. Email marketing is also highly effective on its own in lead generation.

 

For each lead, you need to record who responded, when they responded and what were the results. Did the lead result in a quote? Was the value of the quote? Did you get the order? If not, why not?

 

If you are sales oriented, you should track your interactions with prospects through the sales funnel from initial contact to closing the sale. You should also collect key information in your customer relationship management  (CRM) program.

 

The information entered into your database should include the nature of the prospects business, key contacts, size of their fleet, locations of their store outlets, as well as phone numbers and email addresses.

 

Selecting the Best Platform. Another major marketing challenge facing small business is choosing the best social media platforms. Many experts feel that Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter (in that order) generate the highest volume of sales leads. Read Where Social Media Fits into Your Marketing Plan.

 

LinkedIn is especially well suited for building B2B relationships, while Facebook has the largest user base with more than 2.7 billion active users. While Facebook produces the highest volume of traffic and you certainly should have a presence on its platform, it may not be the best choice for B2B marketing.

 

What makes LinkedIn a better choice for B2B marketing and lead generation than Facebook is that its active users are professional people, such as mid-level managers, executives and business owners. Facebook, on the other hand, is more of a platform for personal communication.

When prospects use LinkedIn, they are looking for products or content related to their business. This audience is more likely to have an interest in the products and services that a sign shop offers, such as corporate graphics, signage or large format digital printing. What’s more, LinkedIn users include those who are decision makers or who can influence buying decisions.

Optimizing Your Profile. Review your profile for each of your social media platforms. It should include your contact information including phone number, email and website. In optimizing your profile, make it easy for prospects to find you.

 

Your profile should also include keywords that prospects will likely use when searching for products and services that you offer. A sign shop might use keywords, such as wide-format digital prints, fleet graphics, banners, decals, signage and window graphics.

 

Another important feature of your profile and your company branding is the imagery that you use. People make an immediate judgment about you and your business in an instant.

 

If you are in the graphics business, your graphic design must be outstanding. Not only should the imagery attract the attention of your target audience, it also should be unique enough to differentiate you from your competition.

 

You should also maintain visual consistency across all of your social media channels, website and other forms of business communication. In fact, as part of your marketing strategy, you should create guidelines or a stylebook for all aspects of your visual communication.

 

Hashtags. Another important addition to your profile are hashtags. They are a way for you to label your content. It is also a great way for your target audience to easily search for and find that content. In that sense, hashtags facilitate the search process just as keywords do. When you create a hashtag that is specific to your industry or niche within that industry, it also helps to promote your shop and your products and services.

With a more convincing profile prospects are more likely to engage with you content. Content that provides value helps boost awareness of your shop and encourages responses. What’s more, it helps build relationships that lead to sales.

Crafting Your Posts.  Write your social media posts using an economy of well-chosen words. The copy should contain a key benefit that would appeal to your target audience. Photography should be attention-getting, sharp and memorable. Finally, your post should have a call to action. Give the prospect a reason to contact you.

 

When you deliver value in your content, you stimulate interest in your product offerings. That influences those in your target audience to respond to your calls to action and can ultimately sway attitudes that impact buying decisions.

Ideally, social media posts should include a link to a landing page on your website. A landing page is not the same as your home page. Instead, the page includes a form designed to collect leads.

 

Social Media Content. When you post on your social media platforms, your content should be relevant to your business. More importantly, it should relate to the interests and unmet needs of your target market.

Useful information on your social media platforms helps form those positive first impressions which become lasting impressions. Those good impressions set the stage for your sales meetings. It also reinforces your messaging and branding.

Remember that quality of content trumps quantity. You don’t want to annoy your followers with spam. Nothing is more obnoxious that shameless, chest-pounding self-promotion. Prospects don’t want to read advertising. They don’t want to be sold. Instead, they want you to help them buy. They want information that they can use in their businesses.

Posting examples of your best work or providing news that prospects can use helps increase visibility, builds a following and generates more leads.

A great way to deliver your message is to tell a story. One effective type of storyline is based on the problem-solution format. For example, in a social media posting you could report how a retailer revamped the appearance of his store interior with new wall graphics. That change in décor resulted in a higher volume of traffic and higher sales. The post could link to landing page where the prospect could fill out a form and download the definitive white paper on store identity programs.

Social Media Contest. To generate more sales leads, you could run a social media contest in which participants complete a simple form. You could also base a contest around a discount. The goal of the contest might be to build your database of contacts for your email campaigns and sales efforts.

 

One popular way to generate leads is to run a Twitter contest. It’s also a great way to build your company’s brand. The goal of your contest could be to drive traffic to a landing page on your website, where prospects could enter the contest by filling out a form.

 

So that you don’t discourage people from filling out a form, keep it simple. All you need for a lead is the contact’s name, company name, location, phone and email. With that information, you have everything you need for to measure the success of your campaign.

 

Of course, a contest always needs a prize. The contest does not necessarily need to be expensive. It does need to be relevant to the prospect and have some value. For example, in prospecting for fleet graphics or store graphics, you could offer a copy of an authoritative and comprehensive book on the subject, such as Vinyl Sign Techniques.

 

The type of contest suitable for the corporate graphics field could be a photo contest in which prospects would submit a picture of their company vehicle, store sign or window display.

When you try a tactic, such as a contest, measure your results to determine what worked and what didn’t. This will provide you with an insight when planning future social media strategies and tactics.

Posting Frequency. To get noticed, read and remembered, you should post regularly. A best practice is to schedule posts on specific days, two to three times during the week. Some experts suggest only posting later in the afternoon, when the workday is winding down and businessmen have more time to read your posts.  

The key to a successful social media strategy is to consistently post content that is informative and valuable to your prospects. Nearly 80% of B2B buyers research a prospective vendor online before agreeing to a sales interview.

Repetition of your messaging on social media is critical to eliciting a response. Just as it takes five to seven sales contacts before a prospect makes a buying decision, it takes just as many times before an interested prospect contacts you.

Creating original content takes time which, for most people, is in limited supply. When you are pressed for time, you can always recycle information from old blog posts or you can share industry information and new of events.

As a sign builder or graphics provider, you are in the visual communication business. Exciting visuals, either still photographs or video clips, are especially important in engaging with your target audience.

Using Twitter to Promote Your Content. Repetition reinforces your brand identity and boosts your credibility. To ensure that you sustain the frequency of your postings, you should develop a posting calendar to schedule your tweets.

Formatting Your Tweets. The Twitter format restricts the configuration of your message. To ensure the greatest impact of your tweet, keep your message short and sweet (about 100 characters). That message should suggest some benefit and a call to action to encourage your target audience to respond. In addition, include an attention-getting image, and a couple of hashtags. Most importantly, incorporate a link to drive sales leads to your landing page.

Are Paid Social Media Promotions Worth It? Most small shops have a limited budget to spend on a paid promotion on a social media platform. Be forewarned, this type of advertising on some platforms can be a little pricey. Advertising on LinkedIn, for example, may cost you more than Twitter, but you will likely reach a higher quality B2B prospect.

If you have budgeted for social media ads, your money is best spent on a conversion campaign.  A conversion is defined as a specific action, such as a lead generated. If your goal is to generate sales, you want leads, not brand awareness.

A platform, such as LinkedIn, uses filtering tools so you can target a specific audience. That way, you are not wasting your money communicating with prospects in a geography that you couldn’t possibly serve.

To track the effectiveness of your paid social media promotions you should measure your results against your marketing goals and the outcomes of previous campaigns.

LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator. Regularly posting on your social media platforms and waiting for prospects to call you is not the only way nor is it the best way to use these platforms. A more proactive approach to using social media will likely produce better results.

 

LinkedIn, for example, features their Sales Navigator which allows you to search their database for your ideal sales prospects. This feature employs a number of filters, which excludes sales suspects which are less likely to become paying customers. It not only finds companies with the money for graphics, but uncovers key contacts with the authority to spend that money.

 

Using the Sales Navigator feature requires you to proactively contact the sales lead either through phone prospecting, direct mail, email marketing or a combination of approaches. This feature for finding the best prospects, of course, is not free. The least expensive plan is $79.99 per month. To see if the LinkedIn plan is a good fit with your sales and marketing strategy, you can try it for free for a month.

 

Conclusion. In a small business you can’t do everything alone. To improve your content and results on social media encourage others in your shop to contribute to the creative process. Solicit their suggestions and their stories. When anyone is in the field, remind them to take pictures of the installation process and the finished graphics.

By involving your associates in different aspects of your business you will make them feel as part of a team. In addition to their contributions in your marketing strategy, your team members will be more motivated to perform better at whatever task they are engaged in.

The more involved that your employees become, the more likely it is that you will attain your business goals, whether it is to generate more leads or to improve the quality of your products or to provide better customer service.

Good Luck Selling!

About Jim Hingst: Sign business authority on vehicle wraps, vinyl graphics, screen printing, marketing, sales, gold leaf, woodcarving and painting. 

After fourteen years as Business Development Manager at RTape, Jim Hingst retired. He was involved in many facets of the company’s business, including marketing, sales, product development and technical service.

Hingst began his career 42 years ago in the graphic arts field creating and producing advertising and promotional materials for a large test equipment manufacturer.  Working for offset printers, large format screen printers, vinyl film manufacturers, and application tape companies, his experience included estimating, production planning, purchasing and production art, as well as sales and marketing. In his capacity as a salesman, Hingst was recognized with numerous sales achievement awards.

Drawing on his experience in production and as graphics installation subcontractor, Hingst provided the industry with practical advice, publishing more than 190 articles for  publications, such as  Signs Canada, SignCraft,  Signs of the Times, Screen Printing, Sign and Digital Graphics and  Sign Builder Illustrated. He also posted more than 500 stories on his blog (hingstssignpost.blogspot.com). In 2007 Hingst’s book, Vinyl Sign Techniques, was published.  Vinyl Sign Techniques is available at sign supply distributors and at Amazon. 

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