That’s the £64,000 question on every business owner, sales person or marketer’s lips, – whether they’re are large organisation or a small to medium sized business.
Simply put, you can’t but Social Media helps open up doors to people that might not have found you if you only used traditional communication methods…
The fact is, there is currently no established best practice to date on ‘what to do’ for the best, as it varies not only from company to company but for each and every individual involved.
As a marketer that has run my own consultancy and now working for an agency – I’m still experimenting with what works and what doesn’t. I refine, tweak and test my approach hoping to learn from these daily/hourly experiences. One of the biggest challenges is trying to establish what people need. But I find the best course of action is just to ask and by doing so I’ve discovered that peoples needs differ. I know that is about as much help as the answer of ‘42’,in the ‘Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. But Social Media at least helps start a topic of conversation that is pertinent and specific to the individual you’re communicating with – no matter what Social Media tools you are using…
I think the main problem with the concept of lead generation is that it was not designed, in the traditional sense, to work with or along side Social Media. E.g. you have a list of contacts – bought or rented; hopefully they have given permission to be contacted by 3rd parties… You call, email, send letters and hope that the ‘list’ responds to your messages. I know that a lot of marketers use Social Media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn as if they were traditional marketing tools methods – unfortunately/fortunately (delete as appropriate/inappropriate), this doesn’t work and people switch them off.
We can, however, use Social Media to help build our relationships with people and organisations. But the question still remains, is it a viable one-stop shop to generate leads? The answer I believe is no. Not by itself. But that remains true for any marketing tool. As marketers, we know that in order to get a better response we need to have an integrated campaign as opposed to just using one channel. E.g. if you want to get a better response to your Direct Mail campaign you should also send out an email as it will increase the response rate plus using personalisation will also increase the effectives of the campaign. What businesses need to recognize is that Social Media are a set of communication tools and when used effectively – i.e. integrating them into the communication strategy with traditional methods – will help place a ‘tick’ by your name when a need arises for your product or services.
I am a middle aged digital native. I am a digital advocate, but I believe in the power of permission based integration, so the interest created by Social Media tools will augment and support invitations – enticing people to check out services we supply by helping them make an informed choice.
If I were asked ‘what should be the first thing I should do when using Social Media tools?’ I’d say, ‘You need to develop a sixth sense.’ A sense that let’s you see a signal – a virtual hand in the air – that they are interested in talking business with you. At times, this isn’t easy, but it can be given a helping hand by embedding a call to action at the end of your blog posts or provide people with a ‘choice’ e.g. click here for more information or click here to talk to us about what you need etc.
This of course means using Social Media as a way of fostering connections and nurturing a community among individuals. This is nothing new to offline networking advocates and makes good business sense, because a company whose people are identifiable within online communities will be questioned when it comes time to making a purchasing decision.
But I don’t think this is Lead Generation. Because it doesn’t lend itself to the traditional Lead Generation processes and analysis methods that make business development quantifiable and accountable.
If you try and utilise Social Media using the same approach as traditional Lead Generation techniques you might as well just take out a banner advertisment on a spefific website!
For me, Social Media has brought in new clients and is helping us solve problems for our existing ones plus, and this is a ‘biggy’, using Social Media helps us understand our clients needs and their customers’ better.
As always, happy to be challenged and I’d love to hear your thoughts and views…
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