How to improve social media lead generation for your B2B business

Here are some of the most effective strategies for social media lead generation for B2B businesses...

When most think of social media lead generation for B2B businesses, they think LinkedIn. However, as great as LinkedIn is at B2B lead generation, it’s not the only social platform that can get you great results.

In this blog post, we’re going to be covering tips for how to improve social media lead generation for B2B business.

Why use social media for lead generation?

Lead generation is an essential part of a healthy, thriving B2B business. And social media presents an amazing opportunity to find leads; with around 2.62 billion social media users worldwide in 2018 and that number expected to grow up to 3.02 billion in 3 years, it’s the biggest directory of potential leads that exists.

But it’s not just the sheer number of users that makes social media an attractive lead generation solution. Social media helps businesses:

• Improve awareness of their brand
• Growing their social media traffic to, later on, convert them into leads
• Improve engagement with potential leads and improve your lead nurturing

And, of course, it also helps with lead generation.

Download our Premium Resource –B2B Online Lead Generation Guide

The guide is structured as a checklist of 12 online lead generation techniques.We start with recommendations on selecting the best types of content and how to measure the effectiveness of your current approach. We then look at specific tools to drive visits to your site and then look at how to persuade more site visitors to convert to leads.

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Start by getting the sales team onboard

Research has found that the number one marketing challenges faced by companies is generating traffic and leads. Traditionally, the marketing team delivers leads and potential prospects to the companies’ sales reps and from there, it’s up to them to convert them into customers.

The challenge with that is that while the marketing team that knows how to attract the leads, it’s usually the sales rep that knows best what sort of leads make up the best opportunities.

Plus, salespeople can leverage social media too. In fact, sales reps are starting to see social media as relationship building tools which have a big impact on their revenue, with 90% of top salespeople use social selling tools, while overall sales professionals are at about 71%.

That’s why social media shouldn’t just be for the marketing team; sales reps too can benefit from leveraging it and generate more leads, faster.

Drive traffic to your gated content

The easiest – but potentially very effective – way to generate more leads using social media is, quite simply, to promote your gated content and downloadables on your social profiles.

That content can be something like: a webinar, an e-book, a long and extensive how-to guide and so on – the only important thing is that it needs to be a piece of content that provides value to your (potential) leads.

So, how should you promote your blog or other content on social media? To start with, you need to promote each one multiple times, as long as it is still a relevant subject matter and the content is up to date. Depending on what social networks you’re using, you can promote your content at different intervals; for example:

• On Twitter: once a day
• On Facebook/LinkedIn/Google+: once a week

When promoting your content on social media, try to be creative and try different things, such as:

• Change the calls to action in the text updates to see which ones drive the most traffic
• Experiment with different media (images, GIFs, videos) to see which attract more clicks. For example, a short video that shows what the piece of content is about, or an image with a compelling quote from your content (use Canva or Crello to create such images quickly and easily)

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Leverage social listening and monitoring to discover opportunities

One of the ways to be more proactive with social media lead generation is to leverage social media monitoring and/or social listening.

But first, how do the 2 concepts differ? Social media monitoring is when you monitor your brand name or some keywords across social media to find relevant mentions as they happen. Social listening, on the other hand, helps you see the big picture by allowing you to track any keyword/brand/topic/etc. across all the different relevant social networks.

Most social media management tools have a monitoring feature – like Agorapulse, Hootsuite, and pretty much any full-suite social media management tool – so it’s very easy and convenient to set up a monitoring search and check it regularly for opportunities.

If you want to take things a step further and gather more data about your audience, some of the top social listening tools include Brand24 and Brandwatch; what’s great about them is that you can use them not only to aid with lead generation, but also for market research and influencer discovery, among others.

But how exactly do the 2 help with social media lead generation? There are several different methods worth your attention.

• Start by monitoring your brand name: not everyone is going to properly tag you when mentioning you online. Use social media monitoring and check regularly to catch any enquiries as soon as they come in and to answer in a timely manner
• Monitor your competitors: your competitors customers (or interested customers) are likely to use social media to complain about bad products or services and to air any other grievances they might have with the company. Like this, for example:

@santanderuk So as a business customer paying £££ in charges each mth I now can't use the counter svc? Well done, you just lost our account.

— Fuggles Beer Cafe (@FugglesBeerCafe) December 19, 2016

These negative mentions present an opportunity for your brand: an opportunity to engage that user and, potentially, get them to become your customer instead.

When you monitor your competitors, you might also run into people enquiring about their products or services, or showing interest – this too presents a great opportunity to engage and find potential leads.

• Monitor for similar products/services: following up on the previous point I made, people often use social media to research products or services that they’re interested in. In that case, they might use tweets like “I need some help with (…)”, or “What’s the best cloud service?”. If you’re on top of these mentions, you can reach out to them, engage them in conversations, and, hopefully, sell

Hold a social media contest

Pretty much all social networks allow you to create contests; they can be quite effective at generating engagement, more followers, and more leads and they’re quite easy to set up too.

And you can use different tools to help you create better, more compelling social media contests – and other offers; for example, you can try tools like Woobox or Shortstack to create giveaways, sweepstakes, and much more.

Contests are particularly great for attracting new people to your account and therefore boosting your followers and your engagement. However, they’re also great lead generation tools – but only if you give away the right prize.

If, on the other hand, you’re giving away something that everyone wants to win (an iPad, a trip, etc.) you’re probably going to get a lot of people who are not leads, signing up.

If you want to ensure that you’re mostly getting actual potential leads signing up, then you should try to target business owners and decision makers with products and services that will help their business – ideally, one of your products and services.

This way, you’re not going to get that many entries, but what you will get are people that are likely to be your target audience – and therefore, that could be later converted into customers.

Conclusion

There are numerous ways to improve your lead generation on social media – these are just some of the most popular methods. And not only can social media help you generate leads, but it also is the perfect platform to nurture those leads by engaging with them regularly and by sharing amazing content that provides them value.