Social Media is a great way to generate traffic and brand awareness but it is not so easy for instant conversions or lead generation.
Inherently, social media platforms are tough for marketing because people use social media to get entertained and distracted from work. They may not be too willing to think about their business, even if they are decision-makers.
Here are a few ways to drive traffic and convert it into conversions, sales, and leads from your social media channels.
Step 1: Set Up Your Social Media Profiles
This is a fundamental step a surprising number of businesses are missing: Make sure your social media profile provides a clear way to learn more about your company, differentiate you from your competitors, read clients’ testimonials, and easily contact you.
TIP: Be sure to add analytics campaign tracking to each of your profiles so that you can view which social media platforms are driving the most traffic, engagement, and conversions in Google Analytics.
Instagram bio allows a single clickable link, so it is a bit limiting, especially if you want to highlight several products or link to your other social media channels. Yet, there are tools that allow you to easily create social-media-friendly landing pages that are well branded and engaging, for free.
Link In Bio by Lightricks is a free tool that helps you maximize your bio by letting you create a beautiful, easily customized, and mobile-friendly landing page to promote whatever links make the most sense at a given moment – campaign-specific content, seasonal offers, more social profiles, newsletter signup, etc.
When it comes to business-to-business (B2B), Linkedin is one of the best social media platforms to utilize. Yet, while most businesses have at least some Linkedin presence, they take surprisingly little care about what their profiles look like there.
For company profiles
- Set up your custom URL
- Add a detailed description
- Add your logo and header image
- Create a custom button (i.e. your CTA to direct people to your lead generation form)
For employees’ profiles
Those of your customer-facing employees (like salespeople, customer support team, and outreach agents) should have:
- A real and professional profile picture
- Job description
- A business email address for people to be able to get in touch
Here’s Douglas Karr’s Linkedin bio where he provides a great headshot and includes a beautiful header image that promotes his company, Highbridge:
Like Instagram, Twitter doesn’t give a ton of options as to modifying your business or personal profile page. You can add a profile picture, a header image, a short description, and a link. You can use the same Link In Bio link here as you use on Instagram to allow your prospects to choose how they want to engage back with your business or its representatives.
Step 2: Foster Brand Recognition
A recognizable brand is a long-term asset that will make any aspect of your brand easier, from organic rankings to lead generation, and social media is one of the most effective tools to build your brand.
They say one needs to see something at least 8 times to remember it, so make sure you do a lot on social media, across multiple channels, to pop up in your target customers’ feeds again and again, until they remember you.
If you are still planning to launch your platform and working on creating a digital marketing strategy, make sure to find a brand name that is available across several social media channels. Namify is a tool that will help you with that step:
From there, make sure your social media profiles match your brand identity, and your content has some brand-driven elements.
For visuals, Venngage offers My Brand Kit where you can save all your brand identity visual elements to easily apply them to the image content you create. Invideo offers an online video editor that offers some solid options to brand your videos, including logo reveal and branded watermark.
With tools like these, every piece of content that gets published on your social media profiles will remind people of your brand building awareness and recognition. It takes time to build your brand but focusing on engaging your social media audience will soon start making a difference.
Creating a recognizable brand benefits both search and sales, and social media is one of the best tools to do that.
Step 3: Identify People Behind Companies
B2B is all about businesses selling to businesses but in reality, those are still decisions and transactions made by real people. The best way to sell your product to a company is to reach out to the people behind that company.
When working on your lead list, make sure to keep a record of:
- Company’s official social media profiles
- People who work for that company and their roles
Both Linkedin and Twitter can help you with the latter: You can find real people who may be decision-makers (or may influence decision-makers) and connect to those making either or both of the platforms.
On Linkedin
Navigate to your target company’s page and find your common connections with that page. If you or your sales reps have well-connected Instagram accounts, you are likely to have some second-tier connections:
On Twitter
Create an account at Followerwonk and search for your target company’s handle. Make sure you select the Search Twitter bios only option. This will filter all the results to those profiles that mention that business name in the bio (so they are likely to be working there or have been working there in the past).
Reaching out to those people…
Once you know the people behind your target company, follow them and identify additional ways to reach out. Most of those people will link to their personal websites where you can find contact forms. Hunter’s email finder and email verifier tools will help you locate and verify that alternative contact info pretty quickly.
Connecting on a personal level will help you get to know your target company and its decision makers more, and get a better response rate.
Step 4: Invest In Retargeting Ads
Finally, social media ads may not work that well in B2B, but using those social media ads to retarget to those prospects who already visited your site is a great way to get those prospects converted into leads.
Installing Facebook’s tracking pixel is pretty easy and you will start accumulating your data right away. Likewise, Linkedin offers a retargeting option as well.
When investing in retargeting ads, make sure to segment your audience to better personalize their experience. You can remarket to people who visited a certain page or performed a certain action (e.g. abandoned their cart).
This way you can match your ad to their previous engagement with the site and personalize their on-site experience. Remarketing is more effective if you:
- Shorten your sales funnel (to eliminate any barriers)
- Set up additional conversion funnels (e.g. free demo or a free download).
Look for ways to experiment and diversify your call-to-action and lead generation process. There may already be a lot of opportunities in your niche. For example, in SEO you can generate leads via giving away a free report (and pretty much scale the process):
Conclusion
Social media can be a great lead generation channel that can drive direct conversions as well as act as a supplemental tool for your lead generation efforts. It takes time to find the best working tools and tactics but with enough consistency, you will see it work. Good luck!
Disclosure: Martech Zone has inserted affiliate links for some partners in this article. Douglas Karr is the founder of Martech Zone and co-founder of Highbridge.
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