Many sales pros and B2B marketers have written off social media as a somewhat effective, if difficult to measure, means of increasing brand awareness. Sure, it can get people talking, but it doesn’t do much to directly contribute to the bottom line.
If you’ve caught yourself thinking like this, think again. Social media can be a fantastic source for lead generation, if you know how to uncover and interpret the data it provides.
There are a number of ways that social media can be measured and used to generate leads: gated content, email opt-ins, paid advertising campaigns and more. But tied into all of these activities is data – what you know about your customers, your competitors, and your industry.
Improve targeting and segmentation
If you have a big audience on your mailing list, you can boost open rates, engagement, and actions by using social data. By blending what you know about your audience on social media (their interests, recent purchases, connections, etc.) with their email addresses, you can break a large audience into smaller groups. These smaller groups should have characteristics that relate to your brand’s marketing and sales goals, such as their job titles, brands they’ve recently interacted with, or their influence on social media. Each group can then get customized messages, which will help generate more leads over time.
Personalize your messages
Whether you’re sending a cold email or responding to a longtime customer on Twitter, the more you personalize your message, the better. Consumers want to feel that the brands they interact with understand and care about them. Social data allows for more tailored messages in both sales and marketing. Emails don’t have to be generic “check out our latest feature” notes anymore; they can be customized to tackle recent challenges your prospect has mentioned on Twitter or LinkedIn. Customer service tweets no longer need to redundantly say, “for assistance, call our toll-free number”; they can now directly address the current and past issues the customer is experiencing.
Automate based on the buyer’s journey
Social data can also be used to develop marketing and sales automation in order to capture and move more leads down the funnel.
For instance when you know that your customer is in the decision stage of the buyer’s journey, based on their interactions with your brand on and off social media, you can create an automated email drip campaign to showcase key product features that will address their pain point and increase the urgency along the way.
Using social data to inform lead generation campaigns will strengthen them and increase the number and quality of leads that come through. Whether through automation, personalization or segmentation, you can develop more precise, targeted lead gen campaigns thanks to the proper application of social data.