Is your business seeing success with its social media lead generation efforts?
For our latest research report, we partnered with Sharpspring to reach out to our collective communities, and get their insights into exactly what they’re seeing, which social platforms and approaches they’re finding most effective for lead gen, and what they expect, in future, in regards to their social lead building efforts.
More than 320 marketers took part in our survey - you can download our full '2019 State of Lead Generation Report' right now, but this week, we're also breaking down some of the specific elements, and what they mean for your social media marketing approach.
Here's the second element - how to establish a more effective social lead generation pipeline.
Part 2: Effective Lead Generation Processes
As we outlined in the first installment of our report, most businesses are seeing only moderate results from their lead gen efforts.
So why is that? Are businesses setting the wrong expectations, or is social media really not as great as we might hope as a lead generation engine?
To dig into this further, we wanted to try and establish what plans businesses actually have in place to drive their lead gen efforts, and whether the failure to achieve optimal results could lie in simply not mapping out an effective strategy.
According to the majority of respondents (64%), they do have a lead gen plan in place.
Those plans include listing relevant offers, including CTAs and establishing follow-up workflows - all key elements which should boost your lead gen efforts.
Alternatively, the results also indicate that at least 26% of respondents don't have such a plan in place, which is an important consideration within our broader data set (note that in the first element, a similar 30% of respondents also indicated that they were dissatisfied with the volume of leads they’re generating). But with most businesses establishing a process to not only appeal to their online audience, but also drive them to their offers, the data should provide a relevant indication of the current viability of social media lead generation.
That said, if you don’t have a clear strategy, and a lead gen process flow built into your efforts, you need to map one out. It’s one thing to post content in order to get Likes, but if you’re not seeking to convert those views into e-mail sign-ups, queries - and ultimately sales - you’re likely setting your approach up for failure from the start.
Different businesses will have different objectives in this respect, but the core elements you need to consider in your approach are:
- Offers – Are you enticing your audience to further engage with your businesses through relevant offers, including discounts, whitepapers, online events, etc.? If you have an offer, you can prompt your audience to sign-up, expanding the relationship beyond a generic social platform engagement.
- CTAs – Your audience won’t act if you don’t ask them to, so it’s important to include relevant calls to action within your social posts, in order to drive that additional response that will take them beyond being a basic social media fan. Your ultimate goal is to convert, to share your business offers and prompt your audience to make a purchase. Generating more direct connection, and moving beyond Likes and comments, is key in this.
- Follow-Up Messaging – You also need to have a plan in place for engaging, and re-engaging, those who have taken that next step. Once you’ve gone to all the effort of getting them to sign-up, and building that next level of connection, you need to ensure you maximize this by establishing a follow-up process based on their response – or lack of it. Determine an adequate frequency for re-connection, and try to make your messaging as personal as possible to maintain that link.
Formulating a defined procedure for maximizing your lead generation efforts is key - otherwise you’re simply letting those opportunities go to waste, and you will indeed be ‘dissatisfied’ with the results.
In our next installment, we'll take a closer look at which social platforms, specifically, are generating the best results for leads.
You can also download our full '2019 State of Social Media Lead Generation' report right now, and get across our full insights.