The Power of Social: A No Brainer to Social media Lead Generation

How to Leverage Social Media for B2B Lead Generation

Introduction

In the past decade, Social media channels have gone from just networking sites to actual business marketplaces, where transactions happen and strong brands emerge.

While B2C companies enjoy the popularity of connecting with a large audience base on social media, B2B service providers are still skeptical of their efforts and strategy to make use of these platforms. After all, ROI is what matters, and in the absence of a long-term strategy, steps on social media are simply like throwing darts in the darkness.

As a B2B marketer, social media is not the first place you’d look to find revenue-generating leads and paying customers. In this post, we’ll tell you why you’re wrong and how social media, if used strategically, can dramatically increase high-quality leads for your business.

When generating leads online, social media can be a great place to start. Most critical decision-makers will likely hang out on social media, ready to be influenced.

LinkedIn and Twitter can be great for growing your professional contacts and getting your business in front of the right people. A recent study by Hub spot revealed that Linked In is 277% more effective at generating leads than Facebook.

So what does this statistic mean for businesses?

, businesses need to spend an extra hour of time and resources to juice out leads from their social media pages. Here are seven different tactics you can include in your social media strategy to land more clients:

Publish Gated content

Gated content is any reliable, well-researched educational resource that can help your potential customers grow their business. For example, if you are an SEO agency, you can publish an EBook on ‘How to stay on top of Google and rank better.’ Use this E-book to lure interested leads as they surrender their personal information in exchange for the material. You can further convert these leads using a sales approach.

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Gated content is one of the finest and wisest ways to get an interested audience. It could be anything from premium podcasts to whitepapers, E-books to Journals, or even a sample version of your product.

Make sure your content is reliable and of top quality. Good content establishes your credibility and authority. Even if the conversions are low, good content is what differentiates your efforts from those of your competitors.

Target leads based on buyer personas.

When you create campaigns on social media, it is easier for you to fine-tune your prospect based on specific criteria. With advanced targeting functionalities, Facebook, Twitter, and Linked-in allow you to narrow your ad audience. By creating buyer personas, you can target potential clients more likely to buy from you or use your services.

When targeted, the ad for your product is shown only to people who would be genuinely interested in buying. Apart from the generic demographics, it is essential to use geo-targeting to get leads based on your audience’s geographical location.

Your business may have several clients, so you must create more than one buyer persona. For example, if you are a courier and logistics company, your services will be employed by high-end MNCs, governmental organizations, and local businesses.

You will have to craft your social media ads/ campaigns accordingly for each of these clients. These ads must target their pain points, preferences, and spending habits separately for each.

Run contests

Contests and sweepstakes are a common way of having an interested audience participate in a giveaway and, for businesses, in return, get some warm leads. The first thing you should know about hosting contests is that: your prize should be worth eyeing.

That means it has to be relevant to the winners, and especially the audience whom you are targeting. If you are thinking about gifting a smartphone or a flight ticket, chances are the entrant pool will be full of uninterested applicants who are simply in for the prize.

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Instead, offering something of value, like a chance to use your service for 90 days for FREE, or a sample product (in case of tangible items), could get you more interested applicants.

While running contests, specify the rules before holding contests and mention the steps participants must follow.

Social selling: Take the help of your sales team

You will miss out if you do not have your sales team on your social media. Agreed that it is the responsibility of your marketing team to handle your social media pages, but the insights of the sales team and their responses can come in very handy when closing a lead and making conversions on social media.

Your sales team has more to do than just fieldwork. Get your team involved in responding to your Facebook messenger queries, listen in on social conversations on other discussion forums, and reply & engage with prospective-looking customers on social media.

Also, you can take inputs from your sales team when writing social media pitches. It is essential to consider their insights into account when writing posts, blogs, or creating a lead generation form.

Social selling helps you to build and establish long-term relationships with future clients.

Offer free trials of your product.

Often, a client is skeptical about committing to your product and feels the price he’s paying for your product or service is very high. To help him overcome this fear and establish trust in your product, you can offer him a freemium that is a limited free version of your product.

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Advertise the freemium on your social media channels. Once people click the CTA and ask to sign up, you can take them to a lead form where they will enter their contact information in exchange for the free product.

If your product has many features, it is best to offer limited functionality in the freemium version. You can pique the users’ interest and make them buy the original product.

Invest in social listening

Social listening is more than just a tool or tactic. It is an art. Social listening lets you hear all the online chatter and conversation about your product, your competitors, and the industry.

How you make use of this information is what can get you high-quality paying leads. Set up google alerts and monitor your brand mentions online. With exemplary efforts, this tactic can help you find your way to authorities and ultimately close some sales.

Optimize your social profiles

Your bios, about sections, and display pictures are vital to establishing your brand on social media. What your social media bio says about you can help bring the right leads to your website, those interested in making a sale.

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Ensure that your bio and about sections are updated whenever you introduce new products. And also, they have all the keywords your clients are looking for.

Key takeaways

It may seem a daunting task for businesses to take up lead generation through social media when other favorable mediums are available. However, it is imperative that leads that trickle in through social media channels are much more genuine and in need of your services. With a little effort and time, you can devise a strategy to milk more cash out of your social channels.

Comment below to let us know what tactic you will implement.

Author’s Bio: Yash Chawlani is a Digital Marketing Strategist with UnboundB2B who specializes in SEO, Social Media Optimization (SMO), and Content Marketing.