Social media has matured as a marketing channel over the years and is often paired with other channels like websites, blogs, videos and more to accomplish a specific business goal. I believe there are essentially six social media goals worth considering. In a previous post we discussed brand awareness and community engagement and in another post, we discussed how to grow followers and drive more traffic. In this post, we will explore the final two social media goals to generate leads and generate revenue directly.
Lead Generation
When we talk about leads in the context of a social media goal, we are talking about capturing a prospect’s contact information. With a prospect’s contact information, we can add them to an email drip campaign to drive them through our value ladder or pass the lead across to our sales folks to make a sale or to upsell the prospective client.
Remember, as we discussed in “How to Drive Growth by Correctly Targeting Traffic” there is the traffic that we attract, the traffic we rent, and the traffic we own. Traffic that we own are our leads. In the end, we want to capture all traffic that makes it back to our site and convert them into leads that we own.
According to Mary Rose Maguire, before you implement any form of lead generation you need to spend some time thinking about what will happen when you get your prospective client to provide their contact information. She encourages her clients to create a flowchart that details the entire process and all the elements needed so the sales team can make it work. She recommends having everything in place on the back end before you receive that first opt-in from your website.
When it comes to lead generations using social media it almost always involves driving traffic to a squeeze page where the prospect is encouraged to exchange their contact information for something for free.
One of the most popular ways to get a prospect to provide you with their email is to offer them a free download. The download could be a paper, a report, an eBook, a template, or anything that the prospect sees as valuable. This is generally the first micro-commitment the customer makes with you.
If you want the prospective client’s phone number and physical address, one of the popular tactics is to use a Free Plus Shipping funnel. Here you offer a client a free paperback or something that has a high perceived value for free as long as they pay for shipping and handling charges. Of course, when they accept your offer they have to complete a form with their shipping information and phone number.
Lead generation often includes some form of Pay Per Click (PPC) ads to drive traffic to your squeeze page, so you have to target your ads well to achieve an acceptable return on investment. Additionally, you will want to be sure to test the effectiveness of your ads so that you do not incur a lot of PPC costs with a high bounce rate.
Revenue
The ultimate goal of every business is to create revenue and all the social media goals are in some way aligned to make that happen. So, in this context when we are talking about revenue as a social media goal, we are talking about strictly turning a prospective client into a paying customer directly without the need of further nurturing.
When it comes to understanding how social media can drive revenue directly we must make the distinction between business to consumer (B2C) and Consumer to Consumer (C2C) storefronts. B2C storefronts are automated in their ability to capture a customer’s payment information and create the order. C2C storefronts require the seller to often manually take payment from the buyer and deliver or ship the product.
A good example of a B2C storefront comes from Facebook. If you have a business Facebook account you can add a Shop Now button that will allow the business to post an item for sale and then use an eStore to sell directly from either their Facebook page or a separate e-commerce site.
Facebook is not alone; Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter have a Shop or Buy Now button in their functionality for business accounts. Generally, you create a shoppable post that is linked directly to an on-platform or off-platform e-commerce website. Some also provide the capability to create an offer, discount or deal and create a timeframe for when it will be active.
While most B2C storefronts are designed to sell products, some platforms allow you to create an event and sell tickets as well.
Then there are hosts of C2C social media sites that allow you to sell products on their platform similar to a classified ad.
Facebook Marketplace is a good example where one consumer can sell to another consumer. However, there is nothing that prevents a small business from using a platform like Facebook Marketplace to sell their product direct to a consumer.
Additionally, there are private social networking sites like Nextdoor that allow you to interact with your neighbors. Many of these private networking sites also have a For Sale tab where you can sell directly to the consumer.
In addition to direct selling by having a social media storefront or selling directly to consumers using a peer-to-peer selling platform, another effective way to generate revenue is by using social media to engage with people in a one-on-one platform. You can respond to people directly on the platform about a problem or issue they have and direct them to a product via a URL you have that will solve their problem. For example, I might respond to a person’s inquiry on Reddit about how to do a business valuation with a comment directing them to an eBook I sell on Amazon on how to buy or sell a business that contains several formulas for doing a business valuation.
You can also deliver live or recorded demonstrations or reviews of a product you offer and include a link directly to your store where they can buy your product.
Finally, there is the matter of using social media to leverage commission sales that others make on your behalf. For example, affiliates and influences can utilize their social media channels to sell your products in exchange for a commission.
Are your social media goals to create leads or to generate revenue directly?
