When examining social media adoption of B2B companies one of the core hurdles I have discovered is always that B2B marketing professionals are unsure about creating a social media sales funnel. Sure, social media prospecting is way different for every industry and business, however there are a few strategies that are the core life of a sales funnel and we are going to discuss the same in this post.
Produce A Content Marketing Strategy For Your Social Media Sales Funnel
Take advantage from the statistics to determine which type of content, distribution techniques and timing drives the most leads and engagement. In order to accomplish that you must have a skill to produce a content strategy that might be constantly tweaked to operate at the optimum level.
First you should be aware of it from the clients and influencers to begin getting a perception of the type of information they are trying to find online. You need to then overlap the data with content distribution platforms: blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google + , YouTube, forums, etc. Within the first 3 weeks from the content execution you need to produce several types of content: text, audio and video and distribute them at different channels at different occasions.
Social media prospecting begins and finishes with content. Distribution is the undisputed king. That's preached on the web daily, therefore I won’t harp. However, I'll discuss the issue many organizations don't prioritize. When the goal of social media for your small business is to operate and acquire leads, it's critical that there is a content strategy to find out which content drives leads and the best way to distribute it. How will you do this?
Understanding Online Statistics: How people connect to your website.
Google provides great insight into your site's statistics and you will be affected by it even if you don't use their platform. Before beginning a social media prospecting strategy, you ought to have some types of statistics mounted on your website. On the web you will discover both free and paid web analytic tools that might be installed on your site. Google Analytics is regarded as the popular free version, though services like Woopra and Clicky offer different techniques to track web statistics.
Many individuals get taken up in many of the “shiny” areas of the internet and end up failing to remember that it's key advantage is data. Individuals and corporations that best understand online data and rehearse it to optimize their social media funnel will probably be far while watching competition. Not only is understanding data on the web imperative to the development of B2b companies, it is also step one in creating a company to business social media funnel.
We aren’t finished with statistics yet. Searching at statistics is an entire new branch of science alone, and possibly it'll be. But you ought to have statistics across social platforms, even if it is easy data collection tools like Bit.ly for Twitter as well as the built-in Facebook data from fan pages. Data from over the internet let you go to a problem and tweak your approach and efforts if needed.
Developing A Segmentation Technique To Handle Data
Leads don’t matter unless of course your organization will get the information about the right individual that can close the sale. So regarding data, it could go different places, for instance an e-mail list or possibly a database from the CRM system. Beyond getting similar to this established, an important step is segmentation.
If you use a CRM system, then all the leads that can come into the system need to be marked as acquired from social media. This segmentation is a vital element of determining ROI of B2b social media, since it subsequently determines future acquisition of B2b social media prospecting. Though for a number of these data systems appear fundamental, but it is how a data interacts while using system this is the real reason behind value provided by it.
Build An Infrastructure To Gather Leads
Once it's apparent just what the lead is, then you definitely should plan the best way to integrate this process inside the simplest way possible across not only a blog or corporate Site, but across all social outposts on the web. And don't forget to coordinate this with offline distribution channels too. When putting this method into action, make sure you ensure it is really quite simple to change calls to action and texting, as something which will be constantly enhanced throughout the season.
Step one is to find out which a lead is ideal for your items. Content can drive qualified traffic, however when no infrastructure is at place to create apparent calls to action and collect lead information, your posts technique is a lot more of the branding play it's recruiting.
Construct Workflow To Improve Conversion
Social data provides information in real-time oftentimes.
Think about the information you need to see on the web and also the regularity you need to visit it to improve the overall conversions from the strategy. This is about doing the daily and weekly steps needed to create prospecting better. When you are focusing on your articles and recruiting way of using social media you need to plan how a tactics will probably be enhanced.
Learn The Skill Of Follow-up Marketing
To know customer anticipation, sales organizations need to make certain they have a team people who is able to facilitate these social interactions once the B2b social media funnel remains started. Leads are useless without any correctly timed sales follow-up and subsequent feedback, which a company should be careful of. The objective of this inside the B2b social media prospecting funnel is always to realize that customer's anticipation is changing. Once they may want a telephone call to talk about a product, furthermore they might want an problem clarified on platforms like Twitter, Facebook or their personal blog.
That is another part of the funnel where social CRM systems and social media monitoring systems become critical in aiding social actions and delivering the information sales teams need. Insist that your training team must get “social” and interact with existing and potential leads on a regular basis.
That Is All You Need To Build A successful Social Media Sales Funnel
I am confident that you will be able to build your own sales after reading the above tips and convert your social presence into leads for your small business. Have you already implemented any strategy to convert your social traffic into leads yet? Please let me know in the comment section below.
Really informative post. I like your post as well as its presentation, specially the diagram that really helps to understand social media funnel.
I am glad you liked the post and the infographic with it, thanks for dropping by:)
Hi Darren, it’s a little sophisticated for me but I can see you put a lot of work into the post, nice job. I was just reading about a double lead strategy using a Facebook page tab and opt-in form that falls in line with what you are talking about here. It generates FB likes as well as list subscribers.
A marketing strategy for social media is important, both for sales driven sites and generating subscribers/lists. Thanks.
Thank you for the compliments Brian.
The double optin strategy works well only in theory, there is only a limited number of tasks that a ‘HOT’ lead can perform before he goes cold again, if you know what I mean. All sales and actions by the leads are temptation driven, because they have landed on your fanpage/salespage for the first time because they read something about you that lead them on the page. If you make them like>>subscribe>>comment>>verify subscription email and similar array of things then it will negatively impact sales. That is why it is essential to lead all leads directly to one clearly visible call to action and make them do it!
Thanks for sharing this informative article with us. You have explained in a really detailed way.
I am glad you liked it Shree, let me know how it went for you after implementing it 🙂
Hi Darren,
The big problem with social media is that a company can be socializing without a real goal in a short term and long term basis.
Agree analyzing in depth the social stream and analyze which social site generates more leads, is vital.
Finally I like your clear diagram and how important is to funnel and ending in a concrete sale. At the end, after all the publicity, when the prospect comes to the site is essential to have a tempting landing / sales page 🙂
Cheers,
Gera
Conversion tracking is really important for a social media campaign otherwise its like shooting in the dark and it will consume unlimited time investment and generate zero ROI as a result. That is where most companies fail.
Glad you like the infographic 🙂
Just by the diagram alone I can that the content is worked hard aside from the informative content of course.
Thank you for sharing, looking forward for another engaging one
Thanks for the compliments Herbert.
Darren,
Conversion is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. Many people spend a lot of time working on their social presence but do not take the steps needed to turn that social presence into results.
These tips to convert your social presence into leads is an excellent start.
Thanks man!
-Steve
You are welcome Steve 🙂 I am sure you have already implemented these and have some additional tips of your own.
Would you mind sharing them with the people here ? 🙂
Pingback: BizSugar.com
Very informative post, I think it’s really important to check your competitors as well what techniques they’re using for social media connectivity and how successful they’re? This gives your more insight about your niche market and you can achieve better result.
Thanks for chiming in 🙂
Hi Darren and hi, Ileane!
So, I see-we have to understand the online statistics and to build infrastructure so we could gather leads. For me, these two tips seem the most relevant, although they cannot exist without the others.
I hope that knowing these steps will make it easier now to convert the social traffic into leads.
Thanks for revealing this valuable info!
Thank you Kristina, I am glad that it helps you, feel free to let me know if you need any help!
Great Article Darren! I think proper follow up is the most important part to the whol process. all of your hard work can do down the drain if your follow up sucks.
Good post. Understanding how the leads are generated greatly helps to develop new content strategy. I find Google Analytic is excellent in providing lot of information that’s related to the website. Data segmentation it provides helps a lot. Social media holds great potential in terms of quality traffic and quality leads.
Very Informative article. Thanks for sharing your ideas.
This is exactly what I’ve been discussing the other day with my friends and coworkers. It’s not enough simply to be everywhere and to be present at all the social networks. That is just a start of your work and your presence has to be focused and directed. It’s amazing how many people fail to see that. Excellent point here.
Although this may sound odd to some, I would also focus more into the social media sources that works best for your site/product/service.
I am partnering with a friend in running a site that generates monthly traffic in the range of 2-3M pageviews, and despite the heavy promotion I did on twitter and facebook for that site, Facebook traffic referrers were like 60-80% while twitter was like 2-3% at best. On the other hand, another web site I run gets half of its referrers from twitter alone, about 20% LinkedIn and the rest are from different sources including Facebook and search engines.
My point here is that, in case of time constraints, focus your time and energy in promoting more through the network(s) that work best for your site, sure, shooting for all social network out there are likely to generate more referrers, but it gets to the point of “diminishing returns”, hypothetically, you spend an hour promoting via twitter and get 10k responses versus 2h on Facebook and getting 1k responses. Both social network done together will give you a total of 11k, but 1h on twitter on three different posts/pages (total of 3h) within your site could get you a better performance.. My 2c
Now if you have plenty of time in hand you can spare, that a different story .. yeap, go for ’em all 🙂
Thank you for your insights, I would like to know what promotional strategies you used for those networks? Are you hinting at paid facebook and twitter ads or just normal social interaction ? Also just out of curiosity, which site are you referring to when you say 2-3M PV ?
What you said is right, no one has ‘plenty of time’ we all want to see what works best and concentrate on that.
All normal social interactions within mainly twitter and Facebook. Both networks are of a similar size.
The 2-3M pv site is a game help site, http://www.sororitylifefreegifts.com
I do Google+ also btw, but didn’t mention because of the significantly smaller network size there.
I used twitter and sill learnd how to interact with my followers and this post can gives me an ideas how to do that.
Thanks for this information because not making money from any of my sites is no longer attractive. This guide was very timely.
I would say that this is a very substaintial post that gives a lot of valuable information for business how to work with social media and to create a funnel. Thanks a lot. I ahve understood that i don’t pay enough attention to social media while promoting my business
Hi Darren, I’m Mezzo.
How do you feel about offline B2B strategies and networking, etc? Do you think that Social media is much more effective than having a focused and targeted offline campaign?
This is a great post, it does a good job of laying out the steps for an effective sales funnel. Among others, I missed the segmentation step, but will definitely take the time to implement it for the near future.
Love your ideas in this post. I recently posted some great numbers for brands to see how promoting sharing of their products among fans can lead to more sales.
This is definitely an awesome post on how to effectively use social media in marketing business. Thank you for providing us this information.
Its truly amazing how social media is now affecting the marketing world and how society is now responding. My company’s been using different networks to advertise our business and i must say it has sored because of it. we’ve gone from paper to paperless. Thanks for the additional info.
Darren.
Bingo. That’s what one yells when the dots are connected. You have no idea how much I appreciate this timely post. For months, I have been tilting at the windmills of faux social, while missing the key thrusting point: conversion.
From now on, I’m quoting you and this post, in addition to pointing people to Om Malik’s interview with Twitter co-founder, Evan Williams (http://gigaom.com/2010/12/29/evan-williams-on-web-of-infinite-information/).
Evan Williams noted: “People are obsessed with social but it’s not really “social”. It’s making better decisions because of decisions of other people. It’s algorithms based on other people to help direct your attention another way.”
And you filled in the gap by explaining EXACTLY what those better decisions have to be.
Thank You!
Cheers,
Mitch
Excellent post with well explained points, Its the infographic that captured my attention and made me read the whole post 🙂
Darren, I like your rationale against double-opt-in theory. As others noted, your illustration is great too : ) Going social for the sake of it has always bugged me, but with a strategy that leads to conversions, bingo!
It really takes consistency and solid communication skills to get much out of social media now a days. Take the time to reach out and build new relationships with peers and others in your industry.
Darren:
I just wanted to point out a few things you mentioned that I think is right on, that your readers might have missed.
Social Media is powerful and cannot be ignored. The power it has is a marketers dream. Any marketer that can exploit this power will capitalize handsomely.
But, in order to exploit that power, you have to know what your market responds to. Like you mentioned, knowing what kind of content they want and respond well to is critical, not only from a responsive point of view, but a conversion point of view.
And lastly, segmentation. You cannot segment your prospects enough. The more laser focused you are with your prospects needs, the more you will convert.
I hope your readers picked these points up because I know when I read something the second or third time, I find many “a-ha’s.”
Thanks!
Charlie