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Jennifer Foster Marketing

social media engagement

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“I’ve got leads, now what?”

As you kick off your 2021 sales initiatives your prospecting activity probably looks a lot different than it did a year ago.

COVID sent us online for connection like never before. We attended classes, seminars, meetings and likely even a couple happy hours. A lot of sales professionals who had tremendous success with more traditional methods of meeting and even direct mail were forced into a new world of outreach because no one was meeting in person and very few were even in their office to receive the phone calls and mail.

  • Dedicated time can help you connect!

Enter Online Networking.

LinkedIn and other digital mediums became the main way to connect with sales prospects. And there are literally dozens of lead generation tools hitting the market every day. So you’ve got leads, you’ve made connections. Now what?

  1. Stop the social spiral but keep your consistency We all know social media is a time suck personally, so it seems logical that it can quickly become a time suck professionally. I suggest setting aside 30-45 mins per day to keep you within your limits. Set a timer, create your post, interact with your followers, comment on and share posts you follow, and when the timer goes off – you’re done for the day.
  2. Automate your marketing messages but only where it makes sense.
    Marketing automation allows you to communicate, evaluate and accelerate your leads through your sales funnel. Email and printed communications help reach your audiences with customized, relevant information, triggered by THEIR behaviors. As a general rule I do not suggest automating your social media, its just not authentic and more importantly the algorithms will generally deprioritize them.
  3. Qualify the connections and identify which are viable leads.
    You will have far more connections than will ever become worthwhile prospects. It’s the nature of the beast. So if you don’t qualify them you’re going to be out of the social spiral and into the outreach one. Bucket your leads by a few key criteria such as titles, region or whether or not you have spoken with them. The more you know about your leads, the more personalized your automated messaging and nurturing can be.
  4. Augment what you know about your lead.
    If you don’t have a lot of information about your qualified leads you can easily find more. An email address is the perfect place to start. You can then create additional content to get more information from them or simply reach out to them via email and start a conversation.

Finally, it will take both your patience and your persistence to effectively following-up with your new connections. It is a near certainty that it will take several calls and emails — research says up to 12! — at different times of the day to finally reach your prospect. A structured lead follow-up system will prepare and aid you to connect more effectively with those hard-to-reach leads that suddenly drop off the ether the moment they hit your sales funnel.

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Social Media: Shortcuts that fail your engagement efforts

Everyone by now knows that social media engagement is, well, the key to social media success. I tell my clients, you don’t HAVE to be on social media, but, by all means, if you’re going to do it, you have to do it well. And to do it well you have to be regularly engaged, and in my opinion, it needs to be personal.

There are a lot of shortcuts out there that can blast hundreds of posts out every day, but it doesn’t take long to spot them. And if you’re using them in the ways outlined below, it’s probably a sign that you could do a better job with your social media engagements.Social Media Collage

1. Employing auto responses. Nothing irks me more than when I follow someone and I get a completely irrelevant response. As a healthcare marketer I often follow a variety of topics related to healthcare.  A recent canned reply thanked me for the follow (fine, boring, but fine) but then went on to offer to help me with my practice. Um… I’m not a doctor, and I don’t even play one on TV. I probably shouldn’t have been incensed but I kind of was. The Twitter universe is HUGE — to actively be so narrow in your expectation of who will follow you, can risk putting off media, investors and amazingly talented marketing consultants who now think you have nothing to say to them.

SOLUTION: Sound like a human! Question why you think you need an auto response. How many legitimate follows are you getting? And if it’s too many to filter the hay from the chaff then, well I guess kudos, but I tend to think you’re probably falling behind when it comes to your engagement efforts. Step it up and reply to the good ones personally.

2. Relying too heavily on scheduled posts. We all probably use tools like HootSuite or Tweetdeck to schedule our content. I know I do it — it’s a huge time saver. This blog, for example, will be used to feed my Twitter  and Facebook posts for the next 4-5 business days. I’ll likely repurpose some or all of it for a LinkedIn post, too. However, I don’t rely exclusively on my scheduled posts. I still read and reply to those that I follow and those that follow me. If I’m at a local event, I share pics and quotes on Instagram, Facebook and sometimes Google+ (which I’ll admit is my weakest platform.)

SOLUTION: Schedule your posts because no one has time to spend hours every day doing it, but make sure to spend an hour or so throughout the day engaging with real time content. Whether you’re retweeting with a response or posting a pic of your workspace it helps show your brand’s personality.

 I like to use my train time to do my  “real time” social media: 20 mins a couple times a day is all it takes to prove you’re real and that you’re listening.

3. Turning over too much of your engagement and monitoring to automation. Very similar to the automated replies, bots get fooled, hashtags get hijacked, timing can get bad. Rather than recapping them I offer for your reading pleasure this article from 2014 and this one from Social Media Week.

SOLUTION: You have to monitor your social media and be prepared to adjust as you go, even for a small business or startup. A good social media consultant can execute very good social media management work for you for about a couple hundred bucks a week.

As you’re planning the 3rd and 4th quarter social media, keep these solutions in mind. You’ll likely find that your overall engagement will increase without much of a time investment: should be a great ROI!

Willing to share your social media faux pas? Tweet me @jrfoster75231