Using social media for lead generation – and, as a result, getting better quality leads into your funnel – will represent a major string to your bow. That is, provided you can make it efficient, consistent, and worth the added investment of time and resources.
If you can manage all that, then mastering B2B social media marketing is going to transform your conversion rates and, as a result, your bottom line. Who said social media couldn’t provide a clear (and, for lead gen campaigns, compelling) ROI to flash in front of the execs?
Not us! Well, provided you’ve got the right social media publishing tools…
Here’s what you need to do if you’re going to improve the quality of your leads, and get a higher conversion rate as a result, through publishing on social media.
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Write for Your Ideal Reader
Know thine audience. It’s the key tenet learn if you want to know how to create engaging social media content or how to write for the New York Times Best-Seller List, but it’s often lost in the hullaballoo of actually creating good content more often than you’d think.
We’re all guilty of getting a little off track – that ‘can’t see the wood for the trees’ feeling. At times, it manifests as writer’s block; at others, it turns itself into a piece of content that we think will perform well with audiences but doesn’t.
At times like these, it’s best to get back to the basics. Who is your ideal reader?
Social media is a big place, and it’s possible to cast a wide net and capture a lot of different demographics and ‘types’ of customers at once. That’s how the very biggest viral trends become viral trends in the first place. Think cat videos, photos of eggs…things everyone (apparently) likes to see.
When it comes to leveraging social media’s unique benefits for B2B marketing, you don’t want to cast a wide net. When it comes to reach, it’s about quality a lot more than quantity. You’re not writing for social media, but for quality leads on social media, and those leads should be relatively easy to describe in terms of buyer persona.
Content needs to be highly targeted to deliver the highest ROI possible. Consider the value of micro B2B influencers. While they don’t have anywhere near the same reach as the Top Voices on LinkedIn, their audiences are hyper-focused and, for that reason alone, hyper-valuable to you.
Plus, if you’re always writing for your ideal reader, then scheduling social media posts doesn’t need to take the zest out of your social publishing strategy.
Score Your Leads
Not all leads are worth following. X always marks the spot, but why waste time digging for acorns when you could be using that time to dig for gold? Countless salespeople have reached that lead-balloon moment when a lead that has absorbed its fair share of time, resources, and effort turns into a dead-end. Such is the heartbreak of lead nurturing in B2B.
There’s no fool-proof defense against leads that turn sour, but there are ways of minimizing the amount of time and work we put into them. Improving lead quality means improving those early filters – catching leads that are simply a bad fit for you, whether because of their size, goals, industry, relevance, or any other combination of factors.
Qualifying leads means automatically reviewing key indicators and attributing a score to each one before you start laying on the spiel. You don’t need a lot of information – it’s possible to overdo lead scoring, so stick to 4 or 5 indicators. Are they the right size business for you? If they’re too small, they won’t have the budget; too big, and their demands may clash with the type of service you provide.
Alongside a key factor like size or industry, use social media insights to improve lead quality. Have they interacted with the business already? In what way? Have they followed your social accounts, commented on a post, or simply clicked through via a targeted ad and only spent a few seconds on your landing page?
A lead scoring system that takes into account a carefully considered combination of traits and behaviors will save you a lot of time on bad leads, and make your sales team all the more available to invest into those qualified leads instead.
How does this help improve lead quality? It means that the best leads – the ones most worthy of your time and attention as they move into and through the sales funnel – will rise to the top of your sales team’s list.
Utilize CTAs
Do CTAs work? Give it a go and find out.
Infusing your social posts with rousing calls to action may seem like a small change, but it can be just the ticket when it comes to pushing leads through that final stretch of the funnel. One of the most valuable lead scoring criteria you can utilize is clicks. Leads who read a post then click through to your website deserve to be scored highly, since very few of those early, top-of-the-funnel behaviors signify interest quite so clearly.
The truth is that CTAs work. In email marketing, CTAs boost conversions by around 3-5%; on-site, even simply moving the CTA to the end of the page can more than triple the rate of conversions.
How does this help improve lead quality? Even the highest quality leads need a push in the right direction, and even the best sales teams need help getting those quality leads on their radar. Utilizing clicks as a key criterion for lead scoring is definitely the way to go.
Do Social Listening in Real-Time
While there’s never a bad thing to start pursuing a quality lead, some moments are certainly better than others. When a lead signifies interest – even if that signal is nothing more than a tweet featuring a keyword your social media marketing team are tracking – you’ll want to act sooner rather than later.
This is never more important than it is on social media, where interest is constantly shifting and it’s all about harnessing it for long enough to make an impression. Tweets are almost instantly buried under new tweets, LinkedIn posts are pushed down the feed from the moment they’re posted…If you want to capture those moments of interest, then you’ll need to be paying close attention round the clock.
How does this help improve lead quality? It means top quality leads don’t pass you by in the flurry of activity that is always taking place on social media. If your competitors are utilizing the best social listening tools to stay on top of that constant churn, then they have the power to intercept quality leads before they even appear on your radar.
Complement Your Efforts with Employee Advocacy
Everything you post will contribute to your thought leadership and share of voice on social media. Bit by bit, it will improve your visibility, prominence and, in more concrete terms, your follower count, clicks, and post reach.
But there are ways to supplement the impact your social posting has on your social media ROI. There will always be audience members you don’t reach with a post, whether as a result of a tricky algorithm, a lack of relevant keywords and hashtags, or simple bad luck.
Employee advocacy takes your quality content beyond your own accounts, and exposes new (still relevant) audiences to it via the business’s strongest talent. This is why it’s worth making it a key part of any social strategy for leads – managing it through your social media publishing platform, and giving anyone who wants to talk-up the company the perfect content with which to do it.
How does this help improve lead quality? For those quality leads that don’t find themselves landing on one of your social accounts, capturing their interest (and making a stellar first impression) through employee advocacy makes it an invaluable part of any social media marketing strategy.
Keep Content Varied, but Tailor it to the Channel’s Strengths
The common thread that runs between one successful content strategy and the next is variation, but not at the cost of relevancy.
What do we mean by that? A delicate balance. Your followers on social media aren’t going to be engaged by the same content, repurposed over and over again. Sooner or later, they’ll start to feel that you’re belaboring the point, turning into a one-trick pony, or, to put it very simply, boring.
Different social media channels suit different types of content, but that’s not to say you shouldn’t shake things up. LinkedIn is perfect for longer-form, written content, but video, infographics, and images will never not be effective at grabbing attention. Instagram is known for its emphasis on images, but reels and stories make it the perfect destination for short-form video – a clip of a longer seminar or promotional clip, say.
Intersperse your internally produced content with user generated content, as social proof is the magic ingredient for any marketing strategy.
How does this help improve lead quality? The more your social publishing strategy hits the nail on the head in terms of relevancy, appeal, and originality, the more effective it will be at establishing a strong, core audience comprising qualified leads worth investing your time and resources into.
Speaking of Tailoring, Invest a Little Extra Time into Content Personalization
Now, we know what you’re thinking…you want us to invest more time into this? How much more time does it need to use up before it’s just not worth it?
Hold your horses. Content personalization for better leads is an invaluable practice, and, with the right B2B social publishing tools for diversifying content and rephrasing it for fresh responses and messages, it doesn’t need to represent a drain on your time. AI is a powerful tool, and this is its raison d’etre – altering content just enough for it to be unique and up to the task of building more meaningful relationships with your leads.
At Oktopost, we like to think we’ve got the best social media publishing tool suite going, so let us show you exactly how you could be running your socials.
