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Six Ways to Lead Prospects to Your Website Via Social Media
July 14, 2014 |Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
If there's one thing every company wants more of, it is sales leads. Social media is the perfect place to find and funnel your prospects into your sales lead generation machine. To use social media and your website to generate sales leads:
- Use social media to drive traffic to your website.
- Have something of value that your website visitor is willing to trade his or her e-mail address for a how-to document, a webinar, a list of best practice--something that will help the visitor in their job.
- Create a landing page on your website to capture e-mail addresses.
Concerning the first facet, using social media to drive traffic to your website, here are five rules that will put you on the path to more traffic on your website.
Use the Social Networks Your Customers Use
If your customers use LinkedIn, use Linkedin. If they use Facebook, use Facebook. Just go to the different social networks and look for your customers. To get a more comprehensive idea, talk to your customers and find out which social networks they use as individuals.
Use the 15-1 Rule
The 15-1 rule says that for every 15 pieces of content you publish on social media, you can make a soft pitch or offer. In other words, you provide 15 pieces of useful content to the reader and in return you “earn” the right to make an offer. So, if you are publishing to your social networks every day, you earn the right to make a subtle offer every three weeks.
Publish More Often to Pitch More Often
No one wants to pitch only every three weeks, so start publishing three times a day and make a pitch every week. This is why you see a lot of content from some companies over their social networks.
Get Content by Collating It
It would be best if all of your content was original and written by you, but there are very few people who have the time for that. What you do instead is collate it. Collating is just the process of finding a good article, column, post, or other piece of content and linking to it via your social media. You can add your own comments or introduction to give the article some context. Remember, the idea of content is to offer something that a prospective customer will value. So, articles about his or her industry, or job related content will be appreciated.
Make Your Pitching Opportunities Count
The goal of your one in 16 pitching opportunities is to send your reader to your website where you can make him the proverbial offer he can’t refuse. That means you have to make the pitch reader focused and talk about the benefits he will get from going to your website to see your offer.
Avoid the Mistake Almost Everyone Makes
Almost everyone makes the same mistake and that is why their efforts at lead generation fail. Instead of the 15-1 rule, they use the 0-1 rule. Every piece of content is a sales pitch, every social media post is the company talking about how great they are, or trying to get the reader to go to the website to see more information about how great the company is. Fail, fail, fail. The reader does not care how great you are, the reader cares about solving his problems. Which of these do you think someone would want to click on: “Ten design tips that will lower your manufacturing costs by 5%” or “Check out our new plating line!” The former gets sales leads, the latter gets visits from friends and family.
Let me wrap this one up with a couple of words on ROI. Let’s look at your costs for doing this: A couple hundred dollars to build a landing page on your website. A couple hours of your time to write something your prospective customers would sign up to get, and 15 or 20 minutes every day from someone at your company to find an article or two from somewhere like iConnect007.com to share with your prospective customers. Could you get 10 leads from this idea? Could you close one of them? What’s one new customer worth over, say, three years? People I work with find the return on using social media to generate sales leads is around 95-1; that is for each dollar they invest in social media they get $95 in sales. And that is why people use social media. It pays. As Guy Kawasaki says “traditional marketing is for people with money but no brains. Social media is for people with brains but no money.”Bruce Johnston is a sales consultant specializing in social media and especially LinkedIn. He has over 25 years experience in high-tech sales and management. He can be reached at brucej@practicalsmm.com or through his profile on LinkedIn.