The Biggest Disconnect in Social Media Marketing

Posted by Phaedra Stockstill on Mon, Jun 18, 2012 @ 09:02 AM

Your company or small business has spent valuable time and dedicated resources to building your corporate presence on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The purpose of these increased social media marketing efforts has been to generate more traffic and bring qualified leads to your site. You're seeing increased traffic to your site but are still not seeing the qualified leads you had hoped to capture. What's going on?

You've basically run into the biggest disconnect in social media marketing - your company website - the most important piece of online real estate you have, is not equipped to convert the traffic you are directing to it through various social media channels into valuable leads.

You should consider your company website a lead capture engine. If there's no way to convert increased traffic from your social media activities into bonafide leads - you've just wasted a lot of time and money. Effective calls to action are critical to capturing leads. You've got the visitor on your site, they have a pain point or business problem they want solved - you need them to take the next step, the action - which ideally is downloading something of value you have in exchange for their email and contact information.

Given that lead capture and lead nurturing are so critical to your website effectiveness and revenue generation, here are some best practices to consider when designing your lead capture strategy:

Target your audience - are you speaking to C-level executives, mid level managers, or general consumers? Understand the profile of your audience so you can provide them the most helpful content and the most enticing calls to action. CEOs and CFOs will be motivated differently than managers underneath them. Offer something excessively valuable to your target audience.

Qualify your lead - if your website visitor takes the next step and decides you have something beneficial to them - perhaps it's a free consultation or a useful whitepaper, be sure to capture lead information that will help you judge the quality of this lead. For example, don't hesitate to ask a lead their level within their company or the yearly revenue of their company. If you capture a lead that is in middle management for a company you are targeting, it would be worth your while to give them a call and inquire as to who the decision maker would be for the product or service you are offering. Conversely, if you have a lead who turns out to be a graduate student researching your industry, you'll be able to filter him out when calling leads and actively prospecting for business.

Segment your lead nurturing - it's common to have a number of audiences for a product or service. If you are selling to the healthcare industry you might be targeting doctors and hospital administrators - two audiences that might have separate needs or drivers for your offering. Segment these audiences and have them receive differently focused emails while nurturing them down the path to conversion.

Call backs are lead nurturing tools - calling a lead that just converted may only get you to voicemail but it will certainly assure that you are top of mind to the prospect and will likely spur a follow up visit to your website. Always leave your website address when leaving your voicemail.

Content is still king, even for leads - quality content that is regularly updated will keep leads coming back and keep them moving down the sales funnel. Be sure you're regularly offering new and fresh content.

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Tags: lead generation, Inbound Marketing, social media marketing, lead capture

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The Biggest Disconnect in Social Media Marketing

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