In today’s B2B business environment of inbound and content marketing, you must utilize social selling as a source of high quality leads. According to LinkedIn, social selling leads to 45% increase in lead generation and selling opportunities. However, simply logging onto a social media platform and expecting magic to happen will not suffice.
The following information explains a 9 tips designed to help you optimize your social selling for lead generation.
LinkedIn Group Tips
Don’t use LinkedIn Groups to make sales pitches or spam your company’s marketing content. The key is to establish yourself as someone who’s tuned in to your customers and looking to help them solve problems.
Make LinkedIn Groups part of your daily social selling routine. Sporadic posting and inconsistent monitoring are not going to significantly increase the number of leads you generate each quarter.
When you find a compelling news article or blog post online, use a share widget,like Share-This or Share-a-holic, to share it to any of your LinkedIn Groups, directly from the source.
Join Twitter
Undoubtedly, LinkedIn and Twitter are the most effective social networks. Based on the study by B2BMarketing.net, 74% of B2B marketers have a regularly updated LinkedIn profile and 73% are active on Twitter. This means it’s imperative for you to not only be active on LinkedIn, but you can definitely bolster your marketing efforts by joining Twitter.
Content is King
According to the CMO Council, decision makers consume on average five different pieces of content before they are ready to speak to someone on your sales team. Before you share your content on LinkedIn or Twitter, you must make sure your content is properly optimized and created in a web format for the maximum effect.
Include Personality in Your Content
Even though your B2B audience may be loaded with professionals, they are still human. You should negate standard marketing lingo and try to appeal to your audience with personality. The goal is to demonstrate to your audience there is still a person behind the brand.
Use Buyer Oriented Keywords
One of the most important aspects to social selling is the implementation of buyer oriented keywords. Since your buyer persona may change, you should also monitor buyer oriented keywords and implement the new keywords into your new content. When you learn and use new keywords, you can more effectively communicate your understanding of the buyer’s needs by using these keywords in communications.
Watch Your Competition
One of the best ways to optimize your social selling efforts is to monitor your competitors. You can begin by using applications such as Netvibes, which will allow you to build a social media dashboard to monitor how the competition is using social media. Once you understand how your competition is using social media, you can implement pieces and parts of their strategy into your own.
Know The Best Time To Post
In the business world, timing is everything, and nothing is more true than when it comes to posting to social media. According to Ragan’s PR Daily, the best time to post to LinkedIn is before or after business hours. At the same time, the worst time to post to LinkedIn is from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. ET. On Twitter, the best time to post is from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., and the worst time to post is from 8 – 9 p.m.
Diversify Your Content
If your audience responds best to steak, why would you offer them fish? Instead of aimlessly posting content in a form your prospects wont digest, you should offer your audience the most effective forms of content. According to a report by B2BMarketing.net, videos were the most effective form of content. 55% of the respondents stated videos were effective and 37% rated videos as “somewhat effective.” Close behind videos were photos with 47% of the respondents rating videos as effective.
Generate Incentive Structures
In the consumer market, businesses offer consumers coupons and other incentives to boost engagement. While the B2B world is much less transactional and less immediate, you can still entice your B2B prospects with incentive structures. In the B2B world of social selling, you can offer your audience members incremental access to lucrative, relevant, and value-added content. As a result, you position your brand as a thought leader in the industry. At the same time, you are gathering priceless user information about your prospects that you can feed into your CRM for later follow-up.
