Do you know that you can generate leads online with your social media account? Curious to know how? Let’s find out.
The primary purpose of online or digital marketing is to generate leads online since it helps gain more attention from the target audience, increasing the conversions and ROI simultaneously.
That said, 91.9% of marketers consider social media a powerful tool, and 90% of sellers use it for social selling since it helps generate more leads. And not only that, social selling can turn those leads into possible conversions and increase ROI simultaneously.
Moreover, social selling endorses selling content (i.e., blogs, articles, videos, creative images, and podcasts) and maintaining B2B and B2C relationships. That’s why over 31% of B2B relationships with customers have thrived due to social selling.
So, if you are also intrigued by social selling and want to leverage it, then you’re on the right platform. This article will put together a guide for finding leads online with social selling.
But first, let’s find out what social selling exactly means
What is Social Selling?
Social selling is a sales strategy conducted by marketers to generate more leads online by utilizing various social media platforms as a resource to interact and build interpersonal relationships with potential customers. This technique has been showing more promising results than any other sales strategy. Even though big firms like Nike and Burberry utilize this technique to connect with their target audience and get more leads directly.
Social selling is trending because marketers believe it’s a way to humanize their sales pitch and techniques to approach the target market informally.
So, the prospects might be more inclined to show interest knowing that they are connected to the seller directly. And that way, if any problem arises with the product/service, the customers can have a direct word with the seller.
How Does Social Selling Help in Generating Leads Online?
Social selling helps brands generate leads online since they don’t need to approach a third party for marketing campaigns. The executive marketers of brands can directly post their products and services on social media pages. You can also use one or more of the following methods for generating leads online. For example:
1. Optimize Your Online Presence
Optimizing your online presence, specifically on social media for social selling, is vital for getting more leads online. That’s because when your social media page is optimized with high authority backlinks, your account will pop up as a priority in the search engine when the users type a relevant keyword.
Having said that, currently, salespeople utilize social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter more since they are suitable for brands to post and share their selling strategies and connect with their target audience.
Other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are better off for influencer or affiliate marketing. However, you need a robust online presence on Twitter or Linkedin to attract the target audience, like strong headlines or posts that encourage prospects to notice. Make sure you earn the blue tick as a verified account so that prospects don’t have to think twice when they come across your offerings.
And when you optimize your account, it becomes a primary option for them to entrust your services and become inclined to connect with your brand. You can use more techniques to optimize your social media account like
- Use call-to-action.
- Post with hashtags to make it trending.
- Write a clear and robust bio.
- Write a summary by using primary and secondary keywords.
- Include your address in the profile.
- Post pictures of your products with high authority backlinks.
- Adds your web page link to posts.
- Use eye-catching headlines.
These techniques will help you optimize your social media brand profile, and every time a prospect puts a relevant keyword on the search engines, your profile will come up as a primary option to check out.
2. Connect With Target Audience
Connecting with your target audience is one way to use social selling for generating leads online. And this is essential because your social media marketing campaigns will fail if you are not connected with your potential customers.
Suppose you want high-value and low-effort techniques to spot and connect with prospects. In that case, you need to follow the following tips for leveraging social media platforms for generating leads online:
- Connect vigorously with your potential customers through relevant content. Try to create interpersonal relationships as much as possible, and this way, you will also opt for customer loyalty.
- Post and help your prospects directly. You can become an effective problem solver of your prospects by allowing them to reach out to you with their relevant needs on your social media platform. And you can take those referrals and use them as a way to introduce or update a product that can work as a solution.
- Get and use recommendations from your existing customers.
This way, you can have more good connections with your target audience or existing customers. You don’t have to be their best friend, but maintaining a seller and buyer relationship is essential for maintaining integrity and compliance.
3. Use a Suitable Content Marketing Strategy
Using a suitable content marketing strategy for your social media platform is another way to generate leads online. Although you can use a combination of various content marketing, one appropriate method can help you understand the trends and target audiences’ preferences. Having said that, there are different content marketing types like
- Visual content
- Written content
- Audio content
Now, it’s on you to choose the one that can parallel your social selling tactics. For example, blogs and articles can increase visibility on search engines. And you can optimize them with SEO for more leads that could turn into conversions.
You can use copywriting and add call-to-action CTA with attached links to the products as prices on your social media platform to land prospects on your web page. Moreover, you can increase your CTR click-through rate through this tactic and convert the traffic into selling leads.
You can also use testimonial templates like videos, podcasts, referrals, and blogs on your web page. So that when potential customers visit your landing page, they will have something more that will build their trust to convert them into potential customers.
Apart from that, you can use more types of content for your social media page other than blogs and articles. Visual content also generates good leads since over 73% of people seek video content that will entertainingly deliver a critical message. Along with videos, using creative images with captions and links to relevant blogs can also generate leads with social selling tactics.
Eventually, your selling strategies on social media could help your content marketing work. So, discover your target audience and use an appropriate set of content marketing that will give you beneficial results.
4. Ask for Online Feedbacks
What more can you do to generate leads? Ask for referrals. This may sound tricky, but social media is a platform where dozens of reviews and feedback are given since it’s an open and unbiased forum. Anyone can write and give you referrals that you need.
However, it’s not all about positive referrals sometimes; you have to deal with the negative referrals to make or fix what’s been referred to you. This is the best way to help your brand grow with consistent changes and fixations that you can get from your existing customers so that your potential customers can get better services.
Also, your existing customers can become your promoters to spread the word of mouth that can turn into leads when they address brand upgrades.
Moreover, there are various ways you can ask for feedback on social media platforms, including these:
- Approach the right people.
- Engage with existing customers.
- Set up a template.
- Initiate an online survey.
- Utilize Linkedin or Twitter more.
- Respond to positive feedback.
- Use the Facebook autoresponder tool.
- Send a direct message.
- Set up an online quiz.
- Post stories on Instagram.
These ways will help you get helpful words from your existing customers or prospects. And when you total the most highlighted suggestion, work on it to build a stronger relationship with your target audience.
5. Increase Engagement
Increasing engagement on your social media channel is a lucrative way of generating leads online. That’s because when you lose engagement with your target audience, your profile goes bygone, and the prospects gradually forget about your brand. That’s why you need to stay consistent and active to keep your target audience hooked to your brand. There are various ways you can increase engagement for social selling, for example:
- You can opt for affiliate or influencer marketing.
- Post every day.
- Engage with online networking.
- Use creative images and content.
- Offer packages.
Your online engagement with prospects and existing customers is necessary since consistent activity will sooner or later result in generating free leads. You can also pay for sponsored posts on various platforms.
6. Use Email Marketing
The next option is email marketing to help you generate leads online through social selling. The moment you follow or subscribe to a brand page on social media, it can access your email and send you emails regarding their services or products.
Also, when you buy a product or service from a particular brand online through their social selling tactic, they will ask you to access your email for future posts. And once you accept that, you can get emails from them updating you about more relevant products and services.
For example, you must get hundreds of daily emails from various offering discounts and packages. This is another way of them for lead generation.
7. Approach Other Websites for Guest Posts
You might have underestimated blog posting, but it helps 67% more times in lead generations than any other technique. That’s why you should start penning down your expertise or your brand specialties. You can use other platforms like associate with other high authority web pages to have your blog posted as a guest post.
Or have it posted on your social media like Linkedin. People on Linkedin look at the content more seriously since most of them are business professionals and the ones who are actually seeking something. So, your blog post is opened on Linkedin, there is an 80% chance that it will be read.
Moreover, blog posts highlight a more thorough and clear image of what you offer since you can write descriptively about your products, services, customers, achievements, or your company’s history. Try posting one or two blog posts every week to have the leads wrapped around your finger.
8. Use Live Chatbots
Another way of making your prospects and existing customers hinged to your profile is to have a chatbot as your 24/7 alibi. Using live chatting is trending exceptionally now since it helps your services be available at all times. And having this option on your social media like Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, or your web page will have a way for your potential customers to access your services or clear out their queries.
What more you can do is share your website link to your sponsored post, which will lead the prospects to your landing page, where the chatbot will be available to assist them at all times. Having said that, UPQODE Pip assists you in real-time. You can start by accepting a free quote directly by mentioning your name and your company’s name.
And right after you put in the necessary information, you will be followed up with their web designing team member. You can use these chatbots for generating leads and managing them through your preferred CRM program. Slack is one of the conversational tools you can access from a mobile app and follow up effective assistance to the prospects.
9. Select Your Desired Social Media Channel
Choosing a suitable social media channel for social selling is also helpful for generating leads. That’s because different social media channels have different audiences, and you should settle for the one that matches your target audience proforma.
Facebook is mainly for the Gen Z age group since 69% of adults between ages 24 to 35 use Facebook. If your products or services are relevant to them, you should utilize the platform. For example, if you promote your Diapers and Household essentials brand, then Facebook might be the appropriate platform for you.
In this sense, Instagram is used by 17% of teenagers and almost 60% of the age group between 18-29. So, if you want to promote your clothing or makeup brand, you can utilize this platform for substantive lead generation.
In short, having a social media market analysis before you opt for any of the social media channels will help you finalize what channel requires more attention.
10. Arrange an Online Seminar
You might think who will be interested in your seminar or workshop on social media, but it makes a difference in a helpful way to generate leads if you are social selling something useful. By that, we mean software, feature, update, or an online tool or web services.
Especially business professionals seek any convenience they can receive through various tools. And if you offer what they need, then they will likely land on your workshop and seminars to gauge the depth of how your offerings work.
Linkedin would be more suitable for arranging workshops and seminars to showcase your expertise and attract more prospects into watching them. You can record and post the videos with the product description like a software tool for UX web designing.
11. Use SEO Content on Domain
As mentioned earlier, approaching other web pages or social media platforms for guest posting your blogs is a profitable way of generating more leads since it helps you reach a different set of audiences. However, blog posting, specifically SEO content on your domain, will help you earn more visibility for your domain. Although you may not be jumbled up with leads with a single SEO blog post, it will indeed list you in the search engines.
And to begin with that, you need to use the relevant primary and secondary keywords to optimize your content to make it search engine-friendly. Moreover, you can use SEO tools like Surferseo or Ubersuggest to optimize your written content to the fullest extent. Also, to avoid having duplicate content on your web page, you can leverage plagiarism checker tools like Grammarly. This tool will also help you to set your tone, fix grammatical errors and make your content more engaging.
So, when you have optimized, engaging, original, and professional content published on your brand’s domain, you can link them to your social media and increase visibility and readability and generate leads simultaneously.
12. Associate to Cross-Promote
The Association of brands is an innovative and lucrative strategy to promote and balance the growth of each brand. Both brands can work like a pulley for each other. Having said that, if you are opting to utilize another brand’s social media platform to promote your product/ services, then you should keep the following things in your mind before proceeding:
- Does the brand serve a relevant target audience?
- How many leads are you seeking to vet?
- What’s the give and take of this partnership?
- Identify the set boundaries.
- The previous reputation of the brand you are willing to partner with.
- Does the brand you are eager to partner with offer the exact product/service line?
You need to know these factors before proceeding with the partnership. That’s because if the brand you are planning on associating with does not have the relevant target audience, then you are unlikely going to generate leads with possible conversions. Furthermore, you need to settle for a particular lead goal with your partner since the partnerships are mainly temporary for social selling and lead generation. That’s why you should define the plans beforehand.
Next up, setting a give and take is necessary for partnership because no brand will uplift or endorse your brand for generating leads without seeking any benefit. And acknowledging the fact that the brand you are willing to partner with does not offer the same product/service as you is necessary since it can turn out to be your competitor, and associating with a competitor is always risky.
13. Offer Giveaways
Brands often use the giveaway strategy to generate leads online, and you can also leverage this tactic for social selling. You can start by initiating a campaign on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to share and win. For example, you can ask your followers to share your page or any product on their profile with a hashtag to win something. This way, your brand can trend on with a hashtag, and you will get more leads through customer referrals.
14. Set Up Google My Business Account
Having a verified business presence online often encourage prospects to trust your brand. In this sense, setting up Google My Business Account is a free aid for building integrity and generating leads online. Signing up for Google Business Account will prioritize your profile by search engine result page SERP.
Having said that, Google has over five billion searches each day, and with this much traffic, you can use this platform for lead generation since you will likely receive a substantive amount of leads.
How to Start with Social Selling?
Setting up a social selling strategy for your brand needs approval and insight from your peers so that a team can manage social media platforms for higher results. Moreover, you need the following techniques to go smoothly with your social selling.
Get Your Management Support
To begin with social selling, you need to get the management on your dream team since, without the support from the upper management, you will not be authorized to perform social selling strategy for generating leads.
You need to make sure that your management team understands how generating leads online will benefit the brand. And when you get a thumbs up from the management to put the social selling strategy into action, you can go on-board with a backup.
Choose the Suitable Platform
Again, choosing a suitable social media platform is necessary to get more attention from your targeted audience. If you put your time and effort into a platform that is not relevant or gain merely little or no leads, then you are wasting productivity.
So before you settle for any particular social media platform, run a proper social media market analysis to be safe from putting your effort and time in vain.
Train Your Salesforce
Once you get the green light signal from your management and find a suitable social media channel, the next step comes to train your salesforce. Training your sales team to be on the same page is necessary to get more support. For example, setting up their account for social selling is not enough, mainly if you target business-to-business B2B deals.
The salesforce needs more visibility in managing B2B selling on social media since they should deal with professionals. So, you need the following techniques to assist your salesforce for social selling:
- Set the tone.
- Create proposals for sending the prospects.
- Assign them tasks to join authentic online groups.
- Make them attend workshops.
- Use conversational tools like Slack.
Encourage Diffident Sellers
While training your salesforce, you need to ensure that the diffident sellers are also on your side to support the social selling strategy. That’s because it can be troublesome that half of your sales team is resistant to accepting the change of using social selling for generating leads.
However, there are ways to get the reluctant ones on board in buying change if you have the top management as your alibi. You can set up a reward system through gamification so that each seller will have rewards like the benefits or commissions on generating more leads through social selling.
Determine Paratmeters
You may think determining or setting parameters is not crucial for social selling, but it’s a countable factor, especially in B2B, like pharmaceuticals. These businesses cannot go abruptly with social selling, and they need to determine suitable approaches with the set parameters in their mind.
This also implies the above section of training the salesforce to parallel the parameters. You can include the following techniques to prepare the sellers for the social selling your the products or services offered by the brand:
- Dictate the policy to make it comprehensive.
- Use tools to monitor their progress.
- Highlight dos and don’ts.
- Put up a guideline to follow.
- Set up an online sales training program.
Monitor Performance
Lastly, monitoring your overall performance helps you be on track and have an insight for return on investment ROI. This could vary from social media platforms, and their features like Linkedin have a quality of Social selling Index SSI where you can find out various factors related to your brand performance.
For example, the SSI shows the score for connecting with the right prospects, building interpersonal relationships, and overall engagement.
Having said that, you can boost your SSI with an 80+ score by implementing suitable social selling strategies. Moreover, you can monitor your performance on other social media platforms by checking:
- Followers.
- Like & share.
- Engagement.
- Lead generations.
- Conversions.
- ROI from online sales revenue.
Create and organize the records by utilizing tools like Google Sheets to set your records straight and monitor your overall social selling performance. Also, this can help you to gauge if the implemented strategies are promising or not. So, you can update or change them accordingly if needed.
Key Takeaway
Using social selling to generate leads online is a lucrative strategy for getting more conversions and engagement. That’s because social media is a powerful platform where you can directly connect with a substantive audience without having any marketing campaign rooting for you.
However, you need to be compliant and build a robust social media presence for your brand to make your brand look promising to the target audience.
You can also avail yourself of professional lead generation services that will help you to know where to find leads with social selling.
