How to Generate Sales Leads in 30 Days Using Social Media
Guest post by Greg Digneo
When you ask someone with a successful social media presence how to build your own audience, the answer most often is, “Write a blog post, tweet it to your following, and share it on Facebook and LinkedIn.” But what if you do not have many followers on Twitter or Facebook Fans?
Recently, my young marketing company decided to start over – completely from scratch. We wanted to see if we could generate leads using inbound marketing in 30 days. Here is how we did it.
Week 1: Create a Story
You as a consumer and as a business person are completely inundated with information. Whether you are checking your email, reading your favorite blogs, online magazines and websites, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, there is information everywhere. You receive so much information on a day-to-day basis that you don’t have time to consume all of it. When was the last time you had everything read in your RSS reader, or your inbox had 0 unread messages? I’m guessing it’s been a while.
Your customers and your audience are also suffering from information overload. Think about what you read – whether it pertains to your business or not. It’s the stories that resonate with you the most. Whether it’s a blog post on how to grow your business, or news relating to your favorite football team, or the heartfelt story of a mother reunited with her child. Determine what your story is for each marketing activity. As part of our 30 day strategy we created a webinar to be the main piece of content promoted during the month.
Create a Landing Page
Before you start publishing content in the form of a blog, or networking on Twitter or Facebook you need to create a landing page. Every person who comes to your website is a prospective customer. I hear many business owners say “I only have 500 people a month visiting my site, how can I get more traffic?” When I ask how many visitors became customers of the business, very often the answer is none. What would happen to you business if 20% of all web traffic turned into paying customers? Instead of asking “How do I increase blog traffic” you should ask “How do I turn that traffic into customers?”
Week 2: Content Development
After writing great content pertaining to your story, you need an audience to read it. In order to grow our audience, we would email our most helpful posts to friends and ask them to share it with their friends. Please do not abuse your contacts. Only send a few posts, otherwise, you risk becoming a bit of a spammer and annoying. Even if you do not have a large following on Facebook, Twitter, etc., chances are that you are in contact with someone who is highly connected, who will be happy to share helpful information with their network. Make sure that your content is easy for them to share. Finally, creating content is an ongoing process. Even as you start to adopt other inbound marketing strategies, creating content, such as a blog is a continuous effort.
Week 3: Guest Posting
We found many blogs, looking for guest posters and fresh content. If your story is compelling and unique, chances are they will allow you to leverage their network and help you grow your audience and expand your reach. By pitching the story we created in week one to various blogs and friends, we have been able to set up a few guest posts over the course of these 30 days. We get the benefit of expanded reach, and they get the benefit of fresh voices.
News Release
We have also submitted a news release announcing a webinar where we will share this story with small and mid-sized business owners. However, instead of emailing the news release to journalists, we used the online distribution service PRWeb. This will help with our search rankings and increase the visibility of our story as it gets picked up by various news aggregation sites.
Week 4: Paid Advertisements in Facebook
Our final focus is on PPC (pay per click) advertising. However, instead of using Adwords, we decided to use Facebook’s advertising platform. There are two main reasons for this. First, it is cheaper. We are in a competitive space, and Adwords clicks would be well over $1.00 per click to get onto the first page. Second, Facebook ads will help you develop your buyer persona. You have visibility on things like age, gender, likes, and job titles that you are unable to see using Google Adwords. This will help us target our ads more precisely, increasing the efficiency of our campaign.
Results
At the start of this plan we started with exactly one visitor to our website. When we presented our webinar at the end of the 30 days, we had over 1200 visitors to our landing page, website and blog. There were 107 registrants to the webinar and we have already given out four proposals. Finally, due to our PR efforts, we’ve been featured on 2 blogs, and contributed to an article on Entrepreneur.com…all in 30 days.
Greg Digneo founded Cloud Marketing Labs which offers technology entrepreneurs and small business owners an experienced part time marketing department.
Jul 06, 2010
It’s amazing how simple all of that is, yet how few people do it. Really, it is that easy.
Jul 06, 2010
Thanks for posting this Laura. I appreciate the shout out!
Jul 06, 2010
Excellent article! Thank you, Greg and Laura, for providing actionable, relevant information that we can actually use. I’ll be putting your ideas to the test!
Jul 06, 2010
Awesome! Good luck!
Jul 07, 2010
It amazes me how really it all comes back to the basics. It’s not like any of this stuff is new to most of us… Yet I am certainly prone to chasing after bright and shiny objects in the search for something NEW, a MAGIC BULLET that will save me from the work of actually having to DO it all… lol. There’s my brutally honest aha for the day…
No more bright and shiny objects – time to just frickin’ DO it, and KEEP DOING it!
Thanks for the great article!
Jul 07, 2010
Hi Jess,
The basics work great! You just have to put the time in to see exactly what works, and what doesn’t. There is no “magic formula” or no quick fix. All of the tools you need are right in front of you.
Best of luck!
Greg
Jul 07, 2010
I was waiting to find out what the STORY they came up with was about! [Did I read through the post too fast?]. I like the Webinar idea, of course, but I would have really liked a little more insight about what theme they went with.
Jul 07, 2010
Hi Laura,
The story that we came up with was simply “We can generate sales leads in 30 days using social media.” It’s that simple. This is the story we say when someone asks what we do. It’s also now the basis for which we build our services around.
I hope this helps.
Greg
Jul 08, 2010
Simple is good. Thanks for the post, Greg. Is this guest post a part of your Week 3 strategy?
Jul 09, 2010
It most definitely is. The cool part about this whole thing is that even though the webinar is over, it’s still generating opportunities, in the way of revenue and distributing content.
Jul 15, 2010
Hey,
Thanks for the said information. I am putting this information to the said test now.
Jul 15, 2010
Jhon,
Shoot me an email (greg@cloudmarketinglab.com) and let me know how it works out for you.
Regards,
Greg
Jul 22, 2010
Greg,
I love the way you write this in a simple straight forward way. You chunk this stuff down into bite-sized pieces. Thanks for a great post and thanks Laura for having him on your site.
~ Joel Mark Witt
Jul 23, 2010
Hi Joel,
Thanks for the compliment. I hope that you are able to use some of these tips to build your business.
Regards,
Greg
Sep 15, 2011
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