There is an almost endless amount of activity on social media, how do you figure out who to connect with and how do you connect with them in a meaningful way that builds trust and leads to sales? B2B social media is about engaging and conversing on the right channel with the right audience.
As many companies are asking themselves those exact questions, there are quite a few software options that can help you connect with current leads, as well as find new leads and keep them covered.
Social media products and services
To figure out who is on social media and interested in your product or services, social media dashboards can search keywords related to your business and pick up on recent tweets or posts that mention them. Some of these solutions include HootSuite, Twitter Search, Sprout Social, and Buffer.
Once you have identified the people who are tweeting about your area of expertise you can begin to engage with them. Because this is social media, not paid advertising, it’s a good idea to take it slowly so your leads don’t feel spammed. Retweeting, sharing, and promoting their content is a good way to show up on their radar without being invasive.
For B2B social media, LinkedIn is a good tool to start a conversation about business needs. Once a rapport has been established, offering a trial experience or a webinar is the next step.
Great content
Creating content that habitually helps potential clients with useful information keeps these people coming back and connected with your business, and establishes you as a leading voice in your field, someone people can trust to find effective solutions for their needs.
Once you have these people in your sales funnel, there are ways to automatically manage how much information goes out to who, and at what time. IFTTT (If This Than That) lets you choose a trigger channel, say, Twitter or Google+, choose the trigger, such as a new follower, or a new mention of you and then sends out an action such as a new tweet, a change in profile image or a return mention.
The direct approach
For a more direct approach with a warmer lead who has expressed a problem you could fix or who has replied to one of your tweets or posts, you can reply to them with a personal response. Reach out and use their name, and bring the conversation back to the initial blog post, followed by a question that is fairly easy for them to answer in a few words. This question should ideally move the conversation towards an understanding of the lead’s needs, and/or problems they are experiencing. It’s the perfect way to blend social media and content marketing.
The most direct way to engage your lead is to directly contact them by email, on Facebook messaging or using LinkedIn InMail. If you go this route, be sure to mention how you became aware of their interest in your business, use a mutual connection if you have one, and include a link to your web page.
These different tactics are all dependent on your business and the value of your product. Selling lower-value B2C items is probably going to be dependent on reaching a high volume of people efficiently, so automatic response systems are probably going to provide the best return, while high-value B2B products will benefit from a more personal touch with the transactional portion of the sale left to a personal meeting.
There are many different avenues to connect via social media marketing platforms. Testing approaches, content and messaging can take time and trial and error to figure out which best practices are for your particular company. Once you have a working system, social media will undoubtedly become an important lead-generator and sales engine for your business.
