Many people use social media to connect with loved ones and share funny memes, but it has evolved greatly over the last 15 years. Today, social media is a big platform for B2B companies to generate leads and get more sales.
Social media for B2B lead generation involves implementing marketing tactics to pique the interest of potential buyers and encourage them to submit their information to be integrated into your sales pipeline. This approach to lead generation empowers growing businesses to identify potential decision-makers who are interested in learning more about their products or services.
From here, sales reps can reach out to leads to qualify them and explore what they’re looking for, allowing the reps to implement the right sales and marketing campaigns based on the lead’s wants, needs, interests, and pain points.
If you’re looking to generate more leads through social media, here are the top five ways to maximize your social media lead generation strategy:
Distribute Thought Leadership Content
Distributing thought leadership content on social media is a great way to build your brand name, establish industry credibility, and attract potential buyers.
Thought leadership content looks different for every company depending on the marketing resources available. This includes valuable, interactive content such as how-to videos and carousel posts to showcase your company’s expertise. If other thought leaders in your industry find your content valuable, they’re more likely to like, comment, and share your posts, allowing you to reach a wider audience.
More often than not, thought leadership content is shared from an individual’s profile rather than the company’s business page. This social media marketing approach is most often done through LinkedIn because it’s easier to get in front of like-minded professionals. When sharing thought leadership content from a trusted expert’s account versus a company LinkedIn profile, you have a greater likelihood of attracting users to your content. If content comes from a company page, users are more likely to scroll past it because they identify it as an ad or “another company trying to sell them something.”
It’s important to measure the effectiveness of your thought leadership content strategy. This will help you identify what type of content is converting the most users into leads and leads into customers.
Interested in learning more about the impact of thought leadership content? Read our blog here to learn how to create a thought leadership content strategy that yields results.
Invest in Paid Lead Generation Ads
While organic social media posting is an effective approach to build brand awareness and get in front of potential buyers, investing in paid social media ads is a great way to get more leads more quickly.
Social media lead generation ads differ depending on the ultimate goal of the ad. For example, if you want to generate soft leads who are interested in learning more about your industry expertise, a paid social media ad could encourage users to submit their contact information to download a guide, sign up for a webinar, or access other exclusive lead magnets. On the other hand, if the goal is to generate more ready-to-buy leads, the ad should contain copy that highlights how your products or services help buyers alleviate their pain points.
Here is an example of a paid lead generation ad we use on LinkedIn to promote our lead generation services:
With paid lead generation ads on social media, you can target the right buyers by their job title, industry, company size, and other relevant sales and marketing criteria. Additionally, customizing leads based on this criteria allows marketing teams to retarget leads who have previously searched for your company’s products or services, boosting top-of-mind awareness and reducing the amount of time a lead spends in the sales cycle.
For more insight into how to build LinkedIn ads that convert users into leads, read our blog here.
Practice Social Listening
If you want to see the most impact from your digital marketing and social media lead generation efforts, it’s essential that you practice social listening to learn what people are saying about your business and the products or services you offer.
Social listening is a social media analysis tactic where marketing teams monitor their social media channels for mentions of their brand, industry, or topics to see what potential buyers are talking about regarding their company’s area of expertise. It involves tracking conversations, comments, and feedback on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and more to better understand how people are talking about and engaging with a brand or industry.
Monitoring social media conversations gives marketing teams a deeper understanding of their target audience and what they are looking for in a product, service, or provider. This empowers teams to create content that aligns with the audience’s interests, engaging more people.
Additionally, social listening can help companies stay up to date with industry trends and identify competitive threats. Monitoring and analyzing social media conversations related to your industry and area of expertise will help you gain insights into what your competitors are doing, allowing you to stay ahead of the curve.
Use Social Media to Prospect
Social media is a powerful tool for sales prospecting and implementing new potential leads into your sales pipeline. With the right approach, you can enhance your sales and marketing strategy and engage the right decision-makers for your business.
To prospect on social media, it’s important that you follow these guidelines:
- Identify and follow target accounts: Many B2B companies use social media channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to identify target prospects and explore who the best decision-makers would be for pitching their product or service.
- Engage with potential buyers: Marketing specialists can engage with potential buyers on social media by commenting on their posts and offering valuable insights on how to handle issues within their area of expertise. This can help build relationships and establish your company as a thought leader in your industry.
- Share valuable content: Sharing valuable content on social media that speaks to the pain points and challenges of your target audience is essential for helping them identify where they can improve their business’s operations. This can include blog posts, case studies, and other forms of marketing collateral that showcases your company’s expertise, providing essential insight to potential buyers.
- Use targeted advertising: One of the greatest benefits of social media lead generation is the ability to use targeted advertising to bring in potential buyers that meet your sales and marketing qualifiers. For most B2B companies, this is accomplished through LinkedIn and Facebook because users can be targeted by job title, industry, company size, and other relevant sales qualifying criteria.
- Participate in industry groups and chats: Last but not least, B2B companies can participate in industry groups and chats on social media platforms to engage with potential buyers and establish themselves as an industry thought leader. This includes joining and interacting with relevant groups on LinkedIn and Facebook as well as different chat forum channels, such as Reddit and Quora.
Collaborate With Industry Influencers
With the expansion of social media engagement and the ability to reach a wider audience, collaboration between B2B companies and highly respected industry influencers has become much more common. In fact, it’s growing across many channels of communication, such as podcasts and webinars.
Collaborating with industry influencers for social media lead generation empowers growing businesses to:
- Build trust and credibility
- Reach a more targeted audience
- Share unique, industry-leading insights
- Maximize their content creation strategy
Let’s take Abstrakt’s Grow Show podcast for example. Before starting our company podcast, our leaders were asked to be guests on several sales and business growth podcasts. When they saw the reaction from listeners, they knew the insights they wanted to share were valuable for small to medium-sized business owners.
We then shared their guest appearances on social media, bringing attention to both our business leaders and the podcast itself. As a result, our business leaders, Scott Scully, Jeff Winters, and Eric Watkins, developed a sales and marketing podcast called The Grow Show, where business owners can learn about the latest trends in sales and marketing along with everyday business topics.
Key Takeaways
Social media isn’t just a channel to share life updates with your friends and family anymore. It’s a crucial platform B2B businesses can use to get in front of potential buyers to help them find solutions to their pain points. No matter how big or small your social media lead generation budget is, there’s an approach that can fit the needs of your business, whether it’s outbound or inbound lead generation.
Abstrakt’s inbound lead generation and marketing collateral solutions give businesses high-quality content to share on their social media platforms for a more effective growth strategy. If you need website content or sales enablement assets to share on your company’s social media profiles to generate more inbound leads, contact the creative experts at Abstrakt!
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