A few months back, I along with my friends did a consulting project for a startup in order to get more lead inflows into their sales pipeline. In this post, I would like to share my experience as to how we did it and how you can also follow the same Lead Generation Strategy in order to develop your Lead Pipeline.
The client with whom we were working was a startup involved in Electronic Design & Automation services. They were looking for ways to get more leads and grow their sales pipeline. After talking to the founders, we got to know that in the past they had received a couple of clients from Social Media and Friends referrals.
Our Approach:
Now that we know, that the startup had received a couple of leads from Social media in the past, We can very well say that if this technique had worked in the past, there are chances that it might work out again as well.
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| Leads using Social Media Sales Funnel |
In order to test our hypothesis, We devised a social media plan for the startup. Our plan comprised of just 2 simple tasks which we wanted to do every day. They were:
- Everyday Posts on Unique and Useful contents
- Sharing of Posts among Target Audience
That's it!
Are you surprised?
Let me explain it in more detail...
1. Everyday Posts on Unique and Useful Contents:
The Challenge:
Since the clients were expecting results within the short term, We could not use their blog for posting regular content. This is because even if we post on the blog and expect search engines to give traffic, it would have taken somewhere around 3 months for the results to be visible even after leveraging SEO techniques.
So, we were left with the only choice to prepare social media posts that would be posted on its social media channels on various platforms such as Facebook, Linkedin & Twitter.
Our Rulebook?
In order to post regular updates, we made sure that we stick to our philosophy of building relationships with our social media followers or prospective customers. In order to nurture a good relationship, one of the most important things we can provide to our customers is Information.
- Information has to be New,
- Information has to be Unique.
- Information has to be Useful to followers.
What did we do?
In order to do that,
- We spent a humongous amount of time browsing various Electronic Design & Automation Magazines, Journals, Articles, Blogs, News, just in order to get some new information that might benefit the prospective customers.
- We prepared a list of such posts wherein we posted some useful tips for customers for better electronic designs, tips for reducing costs using electronic designs, tips for increasing revenue using automation,
- We posted various news and articles regarding some other industry leaders who benefited from using such electronic design & automation.
- We posted these in the form of creative images having visuals along with texts of 1 or 2 lines.
Result:
- Posting unique and useful content helped establish the startup as a technology thought leader in their domain and hence helped them build trust among its fan page followers.
- Additionally, regular posting of content every single day helped the startup to let the world know that they are alive and are not going bust anywhere. Thus customers can trust them for a long period of time and hence rely upon them.
- Since the posts were useful to the users, a number of Facebook fan followers contacted the startup via their Facebook fan page in order to implement the technology (about which they had posted) for their company.
- This is one of the benefits of posting about the latest technological happenings in your domain because the clients would start trusting you.
- This is because, since you are talking about that new tech, you must be knowing something about this new stuff compared to those other service providers who never talk about this latest stuff.
2. Sharing of Posts among Target Audience:
This was the second component of our Social Media based Lead Generation strategy.
What did we do?
- We searched and found numerous groups on Facebook which dealt with the subject of Electronic Design & Automation and became members of those groups. Once we got added, we started sharing our everyday social media posts there.
- We ensured to share those posts only in groups having our targeted prospects who might be having buying decisions in their companies. Though we could have shared at multiple places here and there just to inflate the "reach" metrics, but thankfully we were low on human resources for that.
- We had prepared our social media posts without including any link to our website or with any of the salesy promotional content.
- Since our posts did not contain any salesy or promotional content, they were readily approved by group admins and the group members liked the posts since they were informational in nature helping them learn more. Now that they liked the post, they again shared it among their networks of like-minded people.
Result:
- The sharing of posts by other users among their network can also be indirectly called as referrals. Even though they haven't referred any of their networks to the startup as a client, they have definitely referred our Facebook or LinkedIn page to their networks.
- In this case, many of the referrals and the group members started following the startups' social media channels and now they also started contacting the startup for implementing projects using the new technologies about which the startup was posting on their social media handles.
- During this campaign, the startup managed to get 2-3 enquiries from prospects via the Social Media channels during one month of this campaign. Since It was a Deep Tech B2B startup, so this was a healthy number to be proud of.
What we could have done better here:
- Though later we felt we could have included CTA links in the description of each post but we never had time to experiment with that. Moreover, at that point in time, we felt the website was not ready as a better landing page, so we wanted prospects to visit us on social media pages and direct message us.
- We initially restricted ourselves to sharing only in groups having decision-makers, but later realized the referrals came from the network effect. We could have shared to a broader audience and if anyone likes, their friends our colleagues who are decision-makers in their respective organizations could also be reached. Had time permitted, we could have experimented with this.
Ultimately,
Both these components worked in sync and created a synergy that helped the startup get more and more leads from Social Media fan pages to contact them.
Thus if you want to get more leads from Social Media platforms,
- Just start posting useful content which might help your user.
- Regular posting of useful content will help you gain the trust of your followers in your expertise and reliability.
- The key is to share it among the targeted audience instead of just sharing among your friends (non-target audience).
- Once it is shared among the right audience, they will start contacting you via the Social Media platform thus helping you improve your lead pipeline.
Hope it helps you achieve a better and bigger Sales Lead Pipeline!
Do let me know your thoughts on this...
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