By: Dylan DeRubeis
In today's age, it doesn’t matter if you run a small local shop or a big national company when it comes to the need for a presence on social media. Social media is more than just a trend. It is an essential piece of your marketing strategy for your business.
The fact that we are currently living in a digital age shouldn't be shocking. People who do not embrace being online, whether as consumers, social media users, business owners, or employers, are missing out on potential customers and sale opportunities . Below are tips on how to use social media to drive and capture leads.
Lead Generation for Service Based Businesses
There are three main strategies you want to follow when doing social media marketing: Lead generation, lead nurture, and lead conversion. To start lead generation, you're going to want to find the niche that you want to target. Conducting market and industry research will aid you in finding the perfect niche. Finding the right niche will be crucial because if you choose wrong, your chosen market will be over-saturated and very competitive. You'll want to make sure you find a gap in the market.
Once you’ve found your niche, start creating content that will attract leads, such as: eBooks, templates, reports, how-to guides, videos, case studies, and landing pages.
Make sure to always add a CTA (call to action) when posting these forms of content to capture your lead. An example would be for one to access the how-to guide you offer, they need to opt-in to your company's email list. Once added, you now have a lead to nurture.
Lead Nurture for Service Based Businesses
Lead nurturing is the process of cultivating leads that are not yet ready to buy. Once you've generated a lead, the next step is to nurture the lead to ensure long term loyalty and conversion.
The practice of nurturing leads is actively interacting with your target market by providing relevant information, providing assistance as needed, and maintaining a positive attitude throughout the entire buyer's journey. Ways to nurture your leads include:
Get Personal: Provide content that directly relates to each lead's interests, address each lead by their first name, and make reference to any prior conversation you may have had with them.
Offer Useful Content: Provide valuable and interesting content to your audience through webinars, e-books, blog articles, and case studies.
Utilize Email Marketing: By setting up a series of automated emails that gradually deliver tailored content such as using a variety of educational resources, success stories, testimonials, and freebie offers it will build a sense of trust between the customer and seller and possibly increase brand awareness through word of mouth of the satisfied customer. Overall this will help increase/maintain leads' attention and engagement.
Adopt Social Media: Be sure to interact with leads on social media by posting interesting information, answering questions, and taking part in conversations within your industry and target market’s interests. Relationships will be forged as a result, and your brand will become one that can be trusted as a thought leader.
Master Customer Service: When nurturing leads, providing outstanding customer service is essential. Do this by providing timely responses to questions they may have, as well as specialized guidance and support throughout the whole buying process.
Analyze and Adjust: Consistently track and examine data to learn how leads are responding to your marketing initiatives. Improve your lead nurturing methods and optimize conversions by making decisions based on your data. If a certain method is out performing other methods push out the successful one until improvements are made to the poor ones. Try and see what went well in the successful one and follow a similar path
Lead Conversion for Service Based Businesses
Lead conversion is the event of turning a lead into a customer, which is the final step in the process. By now we hope that all the content, information, freebies, etc. were enough for the lead to buy or start a service/product we offer, turning that lead into a customer!
But that’s not really the final step, once you’ve captured that lead there are some extra steps to ensure they stay a customer.
1. Say Thank you! Reach out to the customer by sending an email or through social media and express how happy you are and that you appreciate them. This will build a great customer relationship.
2. Categorize them. Make sure to take them off your lead nurture list and don't send them those tailored emails. Instead put them in a category you think best fits them. If they come through on social media, give them more social media content instead of emails.
3. Give rewards. Offer the customer a piece of content or discount after they become one as a sign of appreciation, and as a result this will Increase brand loyalty and trust.
80/20 Rule for Service Based Businesses
To satisfy both the loyal customer and new one on social media you’ll want to follow the 80/20 rule which is the idea of 80% storytelling and 20% CTA. Storytelling is a great form of content used on social media to make a customer loyal. By telling your own personal story you allow the customer to get a sense of what the company really values. People love character development and by hearing your story each week they will want to get to know your brand more personally and see where it will go.
However, you can't just tell a story because then you will never make any more customers. That's why you add a call to action (CTA). By only drawing attention to your company with a CTA 20% of the time the current customer won't even notice, yet the new lead will be heavily intrigued. The call to action for them is new and will stick out. By having this split it allows for both the new lead and old customer to have a positive experience with the content.
To learn more about the 80/20 rule and other ways its applied you can check out “The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less" by Richard Koch.
Conclusion
Lead generation, lead nurture, and lead conversion are very important to remember when you are using social media. Creating content for each is the key to converting a lead into a customer. Some key takeaways to remember are
Provide valuable and relatable content on social media
Tell a story when creating content to form a good customer relationship and awareness
Use call to actions strategically when forming a lead
If you're interested in learning more about how to use social media to drive and capture leads and how we can help, schedule a complimentary 15 minute discovery call with us.
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