Social media is much more than just a way to grow your brand and connect with your current customers. While brand building is important, you also need to take the time to build your social media lead follow-up program. You spend a lot of time and effort getting people engaged with your social media, make sure you are harnessing all of those leads. Lead generation is all about bringing people into your sales funnel. It’s the process where you get to know what your audience is interested in, what their pain points are, and which products you could potentially sell them. Social media leads vary greatly compared to other business leads, and can often be months away from taking action. That’s why you need to get your follow-up processes in place now, and then you will reap the benefits far into the future.
Following up on Leads from Social Media
Pick Up The Phone
Warm or cold, the temperature of your social media leads doesn’t matter. If you have a phone number for a lead, then you need to pick up the phone and call. Your social media leads will all be individuals who have had some type of engagement with your business, generally through an ad campaign. This previous engagement means that you have a wealth of information to use in an introductory phone call. Lead results from a social media campaign will provide you with location and other demographic information. You will also be able to reference the action they took to engage with your business.
Calling leads on the phone is one of the best ways to help you understand why they picked to engage with you and how to best move forward. When you call social media leads, you will want to keep the tone casual. It might be helpful to have the outline of a script written out to help you direct the conversation. Quickly introduce yourself, let them know how you got their information, and then ask a question. The takeaway from your phone call should be learning the type of value that lead needs from you so you can continue to nurture them.
Customize Your Email Sequences
Social media leads tend to be further out in the buying or selling process, which is why they interact well with nurture plans over the phone. Once your phone conversation is over, you need to keep these leads interested and coming back for more. To do that, your follow-up emails need to be overflowing with value. Value means giving something to your subscribers, including free content, coupons, or samples. Also, consider emails that include elements like video that get higher engagement rates. Your email sales funnel can be primed to nurture a lead to the final step: the sale. It’s also where you can continue to nurture them to brand loyalty.
The emails that follow the action a user takes to opt in to your list should all align in terms of their messaging. If you have multiple customer personas, then create multiple email sequences and different offers. Don’t simply bundle everyone into one big pool. You can make dozens of emails and have them pre-scheduled to send out to your different lists. Having small, super-targeted groups of prospects allows you to further personalize your messaging. You can also continue to add people into the funnel as your lead-generation activity becomes more advanced.
Typical email threads could include new products or services, events your company will be hosting or participating in, pertinent blog posts, and testimonials. You aren’t taking time in these email threads to tell your company story or really talk about your business at all. The focus is all on what you can offer to your lead, what value you can provide to them, and what pain points you can fix.
Over time you will be able to optimize and improve your email sequences. Remember to test headlines, call-to-action text, personalization tags, sending time, and other elements that will help you improve your open and engagement rates over time. Safeguard makes email marketing fast and easy. You will find that your email subscribers are the most loyal members of your audience.
Continue Engaging on Social Media
Once you start getting social media leads, don’t stop posting, liking, communicating, and participating on social media. Never think that you have “enough” social media leads. These leads should be a pipeline that you are continually looking to fill. Continue your ads and lead generation efforts to make sure that your flow of leads remains constant.
The bottom line with following up with social media leads is to stay focused. It may take time before you see your social media leads begin to convert. Stay patient and continue to nurture them along the journey. Safeguard is here with a personal consultant to provide you with solutions to manage and market your business. Contact us today to get started.