[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="350" caption="Image via CrunchBase"]
[/caption]What is the ultimate purpose of social media? You want to use it to get good solid leads that will convert into customers. Basically, social media tells you your leads are getting interested in you and your company.
You use social media as a business process, which means that you develop a process in writing that you follow and test regularly to hone it. The sales department and the marketing department, as two very different entities, need to sit down together and discuss what criteria a lead must meet before being passed from marketing to sales. Furthermore, marketing needs to follow-up after the lead is passed on in order to find out if the sale occurred. Also in order to keep the customer for life, the marketing department needs to stay in touch with the client for future sales.
If you attend trade shows and get leads, you need to determine which leads meet your criteria for further nurturing and which you can accelerate and send to sales.
If you get your leads from your website, you might want to use landing or welcome pages on your site to encourage the lead to offer you his or her email address by using a call-to-action. Then you can email your lead to find out whether he or she needs nurturing or acceleration.
You can also do the same with LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. This use of encouraging the lead to answer a call-to-action request will help you see which methods you use are working.
The next important communication point between marketing and sales is that you match the expectation of the prospective client with the expectation of a particular sales rep. You want your client-sales rep pair to be a match for each other.
The most important part of the social media process is not the number of leads you get off social media sites, but the number of leads that you are able to qualify. More of your leads will be qualified leads as you refine your social media presence. Your web presence is the face of your company. You want to keep it engaging, professional, current and lead-generating.
Jaco Grobbelaar, owner of BroadVision Marketing, helps business owners and business professionals put marketing strategies in place that consistently secure new clients. He can be reached at jaco@broadvisionmarketing.com or 707.799.1238. You can Like him at www.facebook.com/broadvisionmarketing or connect with him on www.linkedin.com/in/JacoGrobbelaar.
Related articles
- Social Media Marketing: Chasing Likes and Other Ad Agency Mistakes - Huffington Post (blog) (huffingtonpost.com)
- 8 Ways to Leverage Social Media Beyond Social Networks (hubspot.com)
