Photo by Tracy Le Blanc from Pexels
By
Jim Hingst
One
of the biggest challenges that a small business faces is generating enough
leads from all of its marketing activities to reach your sales goals. If you are investing time and money on social
media, your efforts need to produce a return on your investment.
It should be no surprise that social
media is the most effective marketing tool. With nearly half of the 7.9 billion people in
the world using these platforms, social media not only can deliver a message to
a broader audience at a lower cost. Above all, it can produce a greater volume
of sales leads than traditional advertising and communication channels.
To effectively reach your target audience
and generate acceptable results, your social media strategy should have specific
goals that are measurable, relevant and time-bound. See my story on goal setting. The reason to gauge the effectiveness of
social media based on the number of leads generated, is to determine if your
marketing activities are working.
Setting a goal for leads produced is a practical
target, because you can easily track your results. An increase in brand awareness,
on the other hand, is not so easily measured nor is gauging improvements in
attitudes about your business. Using likes or shares or numbers of followers also
has little practical application that affects revenue or profit. Leads, on the
other hand, are important because you can turn those into cash.
Many of these old key performance indicators
(KPIs) are a little too squishy for pragmatic marketing, especially for small
business that need results that you can turn into sales. See my story on measuring the success
of business plans.
How relevant are the numbers of followers
or likes to your company if they don’t produce sales and profit for your
business? What’s most important are how many prospective customers are interested
enough in your social media content that they respond either by email or by
phone or by filling out a form on your website landing page.
Lead Follow Up. Collecting
leads is only worthwhile if you and your associates follow up in a timely
fashion. In today’s world, timely means following up the same day that you
receive the lead.
That’s where email marketing is important
for small business. It provides immediate follow up of social media leads until
you have the time to phone and schedule a face-to-face meeting. Email marketing
is also highly effective on its own in lead generation.
For each lead, you need to record who
responded, when they responded and what were the results. Did the lead result
in a quote? Was the value of the quote? Did you get the order? If not, why not?
If you are sales oriented, you should
track your interactions with prospects through the sales funnel from initial contact
to closing the sale. You should also collect key information in your customer
relationship management (CRM) program.
The information entered into your
database should include the nature of the prospects business, key contacts,
size of their fleet, locations of their store outlets, as well as phone numbers
and email addresses.
Selecting the Best Platform. Another
major marketing challenge facing small business is choosing the best social media
platforms. Many experts feel that Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter (in
that order) generate the highest volume of sales leads. Read Where Social Media Fits into Your Marketing
Plan.
LinkedIn is especially well suited for
building B2B relationships, while Facebook has the largest user base with more
than 2.7 billion active users. While Facebook produces the highest volume of
traffic and you certainly should have a presence on its platform, it may not be
the best choice for B2B marketing.
What makes LinkedIn a better
choice for B2B marketing and lead generation than Facebook is that its active users
are professional people, such as mid-level managers, executives and business
owners. Facebook, on the other hand, is more of a platform for personal
communication.
When prospects use
LinkedIn, they are looking for products or content related to their business.
This audience is more likely to have an interest in the products and services
that a sign shop offers, such as corporate graphics, signage or large format
digital printing. What’s more, LinkedIn users include those who are decision
makers or who can influence buying decisions.
Optimizing Your Profile. Review
your profile for each of your social media platforms. It should include your
contact information including phone number, email and website. In
optimizing your profile, make it easy for prospects to find you.
Your profile should also include keywords
that prospects will likely use when searching for products and services that
you offer. A sign shop might use keywords, such as wide-format digital prints,
fleet graphics, banners, decals, signage and window graphics.
Another important feature of your profile and
your company branding is the imagery that you use. People make an immediate
judgment about you and your business in an instant.
If you are in the graphics business, your
graphic design must be outstanding. Not only should the imagery attract the
attention of your target audience, it also should be unique enough to
differentiate you from your competition.
You should also maintain visual consistency
across all of your social media channels, website and other forms of business
communication. In fact, as part of your marketing strategy, you should create
guidelines or a stylebook for all aspects of your visual communication.
Hashtags. Another important addition
to your profile are hashtags. They are a way for you to label your content. It is
also a great way for your target audience to easily search for and find that
content. In that sense, hashtags facilitate the search process just as keywords
do. When you create a hashtag that is specific to your industry or niche within
that industry, it also helps to promote your shop and your products and
services.
With a more convincing profile prospects are
more likely to engage with you content. Content that provides value helps boost
awareness of your shop and encourages responses. What’s more, it helps build
relationships that lead to sales.
Crafting Your Posts. Write your social media posts using an economy
of well-chosen words. The copy should
contain a key benefit that would appeal to your target audience. Photography
should be attention-getting, sharp and memorable. Finally, your post should
have a call to action. Give the prospect a reason to contact you.
When you deliver value in your content, you stimulate
interest in your product offerings. That influences those in your target
audience to respond to your calls to action and can ultimately sway attitudes
that impact buying decisions.
Ideally, social media posts should
include a link to a landing page on your website. A landing page is not the
same as your home page. Instead, the page includes a form designed to collect
leads.
Social Media Content. When you
post on your social media platforms, your content should be relevant to your
business. More importantly, it should relate to the interests and unmet needs
of your target market.
Useful information
on your social media platforms helps form those positive first impressions which
become lasting impressions. Those good impressions set the stage for your sales
meetings. It also reinforces your messaging and branding.
Remember that quality of content trumps quantity.
You don’t want to annoy your followers with spam. Nothing is more obnoxious
that shameless, chest-pounding self-promotion. Prospects don’t want to read
advertising. They don’t want to be sold. Instead, they want you to help them
buy. They want information that they can use in their businesses.
Posting examples of your best work or
providing news that prospects can use helps increase visibility, builds a
following and generates more leads.
A great way to deliver your message is to
tell a story. One effective type of storyline is based on the problem-solution
format. For example, in a social media posting you could report how a retailer revamped
the appearance of his store interior with new wall graphics. That change in décor
resulted in a higher volume of traffic and higher sales. The post could link to
landing page where the prospect could fill out a form and download the definitive
white paper on store identity programs.
Social Media Contest. To
generate more sales leads, you could run a social media contest in which participants
complete a simple form. You could also base a contest around a discount. The goal
of the contest might be to build your database of contacts for your email campaigns
and sales efforts.
One popular way to generate leads is to
run a Twitter contest. It’s also a great way to build your company’s brand. The
goal of your contest could be to drive traffic to a landing page on your website,
where prospects could enter the contest by filling out a form.
So that you don’t discourage people from
filling out a form, keep it simple. All you need for a lead is the contact’s
name, company name, location, phone and email. With that information, you have
everything you need for to measure the success of your campaign.
Of course, a contest always needs a prize.
The contest does not necessarily need to be expensive. It does need to be relevant
to the prospect and have some value. For example, in prospecting for fleet
graphics or store graphics, you could offer a copy of an authoritative and
comprehensive book on the subject, such as Vinyl Sign Techniques.
The type of contest suitable for the
corporate graphics field could be a photo contest in which prospects would
submit a picture of their company vehicle, store sign or window display.
When you
try a tactic, such as a contest, measure your results to determine what worked
and what didn’t. This will provide you with an insight when planning future
social media strategies and tactics.
Posting Frequency. To get
noticed, read and remembered, you should post regularly. A best practice is to
schedule posts on specific days, two to three times during the week. Some experts
suggest only posting later in the afternoon, when the workday is winding down
and businessmen have more time to read your posts.
The key to a successful social media strategy
is to consistently post content that is informative and valuable to your
prospects. Nearly 80% of
B2B buyers research a prospective vendor online before agreeing to a sales
interview.
Repetition of
your messaging on social media is critical to eliciting a response. Just as it
takes five to seven sales contacts before a prospect makes a buying decision,
it takes just as many times before an
interested prospect contacts you.
Creating original content
takes time which, for most people, is in limited supply. When you are pressed
for time, you can always recycle information from old blog posts or you can share
industry information and new of events.
As a sign builder or
graphics provider, you are in the visual communication business. Exciting
visuals, either still photographs or video clips, are especially important in
engaging with your target audience.
Using Twitter to Promote Your Content. Repetition reinforces your
brand identity and boosts your credibility. To ensure that you sustain the
frequency of your postings, you should develop a posting calendar to schedule
your tweets.
Formatting Your Tweets. The Twitter format
restricts the configuration of your message. To ensure the greatest impact of
your tweet, keep your message short and sweet (about 100 characters). That
message should suggest some benefit and a call to action to encourage your
target audience to respond. In addition, include an attention-getting image, and
a couple of hashtags. Most importantly, incorporate a link to drive sales leads
to your landing page.
Are Paid Social Media
Promotions Worth It? Most small shops have a limited budget to spend on a paid
promotion on a social media platform. Be forewarned, this type of advertising
on some platforms can be a little pricey. Advertising on LinkedIn, for example,
may cost you more than Twitter, but you will likely reach a higher quality B2B
prospect.
If you have budgeted for
social media ads, your money is best spent on a conversion campaign. A conversion is defined as a specific action,
such as a lead generated. If your goal is to generate sales, you want leads,
not brand awareness.
A platform, such as LinkedIn,
uses filtering tools so you can target a specific audience. That way, you are
not wasting your money communicating with prospects in a geography that you couldn’t
possibly
serve.
To track the effectiveness
of your paid social media promotions you should measure your results against
your marketing goals and the outcomes of previous campaigns.
LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator. Regularly
posting on your social media platforms and waiting for prospects to call you is
not the only way nor is it the best way to use these platforms. A more
proactive approach to using social media will likely produce better results.
LinkedIn, for example, features their Sales
Navigator which allows you to search their database for your ideal sales
prospects. This feature employs a number of filters, which excludes sales
suspects which are less likely to become paying customers. It not only finds companies
with the money for graphics, but uncovers key contacts with the authority to
spend that money.
Using the Sales Navigator feature requires
you to proactively contact the sales lead either through phone prospecting, direct
mail, email marketing or a combination of approaches. This feature for finding
the best prospects, of course, is not free. The least expensive plan is $79.99
per month. To see if the LinkedIn plan is a good fit with your sales and
marketing strategy, you can try it for free for a month.
Conclusion. In a small business you can’t do everything alone. To improve your content
and results on social media encourage others in your shop to contribute to the creative
process. Solicit their suggestions and their stories. When anyone is in the
field, remind them to take pictures of the installation process and the finished
graphics.
By involving your associates in different aspects of your business you will
make them feel as part of a team. In addition to their contributions in your marketing
strategy, your team members will be more motivated to perform better at
whatever task they are engaged in.
The more involved
that your employees become, the more likely it is that you will attain your
business goals, whether it is to generate more leads or to improve the quality
of your products or to provide better customer service.
Good
Luck Selling!
© 2021 Jim Hingst, All Rights Reserved
