Lead generation doesn’t need to be complicated or overwhelming.
Instead of getting mired in hit or miss tactics, you can use social media to identify your prospects, generate leads, and pre-warm leads in preparation for sending cold emails.
Here are five ways to make your lead generation efforts less time-consuming and more effective:
1. Identify Your Prospect
Figure out who your prospect is, including age, gender and educational background and use that information to determine which social media sites he’s most likely to use. Find out how frequent and which types of content he shares.
For example, if you’re hoping to generate business-to-business leads, LinkedIn and Twitter can be good choices for generating leads.
2. Develop Your Unique Value Proposition
What is the main reason your prospects should buy from you?
To make your lead generation efforts effective, translate this main reason into a unique value proposition (UVP) statement that clearly explains the best value you offer. Position your UVP prominently in your sales campaigns to ensure your prospects understand how your products and services will benefit them at a glance.
Keep it brief since social media users tend to have shorter attention spans.
3. Prepare Well
It’s not enough to simply set up social media accounts.
You have to be prepared to entice your audience and capture leads. This means developing landing pages, introductory and sales emails and forms for obtaining the information you need. You may also benefit from creating a Skype account or using a similar service to make communicating with your leads easy.
Above all, don’t forget to include calls to action on your social media account profiles, on your blog, on your landing pages and in all of your marketing materials. A well-crafted call to action tells your lead what you want him to do next and spurs him into action.
4. Pay Attention to What and When Your Prospects Post
By paying close attention to your prospects’ posts and tweets, you can learn what interests them so you can post related content that grabs their attention. Likewise, you can engage your prospects by commenting on and sharing their posts.
Additionally, you can determine the time of day your audience most frequently uses social media and time your posts and tweets for when they’re likely to get the most attention.
We like to rely on Twitter and LinkedIn, especially when we’re talking about outbound.
Here are step-by-step way to pre-warm your target using Twitter:
We got 10% conversion rate from a tweet to inbound leads. How?
- We made a list of 100 potential customers active on Twitter and put them on the list – they have to be a really great fit.
- We checked the list everyday and tried to start a conversation/share their blog post, etc. (Focus on commenting on articles they share – it gives the best response rate).
- When they discovered our engagement, they checked our site and asked about the product themselves (keep communication consistent).
5. Project Confidence
Start with a rock-solid offer your prospect will want to accept, and project confidence in all of your marketing materials, through every campaign and in every communication.
Your audience won’t believe you have something valuable to offer unless it’s clear that you do.
