Social media platforms are popular places to market your business – regardless of your specific industry or niche. Some of the most popular social media platforms to market your business with, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, have 214 million, 133 million, and 68 million users in the USA respectively. This means that no matter who your target audience is, you can be sure that at least some of them are on social media. Since they boast giant user bases and make it easy to spread information, clients come to us asking, is it really that easy?

Like most things in life, if it sounds too good to be true, be suspicious.

Many businesses don’t have the time or knowledge to learn the intricacies of creating a flawless social media marketing strategy, but how do you know what agency is right for you?

LeadGen Compass uses social media in lead generation, and we’ve helped manage social media marketing companies. Let’s take a look at what you can expect a social media marketing company to do for you, and how we would choose the best one for your goals. As always, if you’d rather talk to one of us directly, you can reach us at 402-682-7418.

The work of a social media marketing company

Social media marketing agencies are supposed to help clients generate new leads online using social media platforms. Unfortunately, we find that our clients tend to accept a minimum of effort from the agency or freelancer, only coming up with new posts for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter.

To be effective at generating leads from social media, look for these signs from your agency of choice.

Learn about your company’s sales cycle

Before any social media marketing company can efficiently and successfully market your business, they’ll want to learn about your sales cycle. With so many different businesses, especially in your competitive niche, no two have the exact the same sales cycle.

Your preferred social media marketing company should work to understand everything about your sales cycle, including the the problems your products or services solve, the audience that finds this most valuable, and your goals for your business. The reason this is important is because the way you use social media and the way your competitors use it will be different. Lead generation is not a one-size-fits-all proposition

Options for engagement

Most social media marketing companies will offer a social media specialist to help you understand what social media platforms are available, the advantages of each, and how they might benefit your business. What you’re looking for are options for how to use the platforms, how you should measure success, and what to expect for results.

For most companies, social media amplifies existing lead generation efforts, so beware of any company that doesn’t take the time to understand all of your other lead gen projects.

Ability to create content and run ads

Social media marketing companies pride themselves on their ability to create the content you need to share on your best social media platforms, plus they’ll run paid ads to reach your target audience. The challenge comes from the agency’s desire to hit content production targets, and the client’s ability to come up with content topics. Get a strong sense of where the agency expects the content ideas to come from, and if they’ll source it all, be careful. Your team, especially your sales and customer service teams, need to be the source of your content because they talk directly to your clients and prospects.

3 Actions You Can Take Today to Improve Social Media Lead Generation

In addition to advice on how to manage social media marketing companies, we have some ideas you can implement immediately. These first of these ideas is built on the assumption that you are sending your prospecting clients to your website.

Follow your site visitors

At LeadGen Compass we follow a rough rule in lead generation that we call the Rule of 30. It states that a prospect needs to be exposed to your message ten times before the message gets through. The challenge is in todays oversaturated data market, you’re lucky to get one in three messages through. So plan on 30 touches. Where do these touches come from? Well, if your team is sending prospects to the website, you can use retargeting to increase the number of impressions. It’s an easy  way to increase impressions without altering your sales cycle.

Engage with prospects directly

The great thing about social media is that your prospects that are active on social media are used to engaging with strangers and brands directly. The challenge with that is it requires someone from your company to be interested in having that same level of engagement. We tested a series of Facebook Messenger ads and learned that the people who responded to the ad expected immediate responses. The bot was not enough. Unless you have someone on staff plugged in enough to stay on top of a message, investing in direct engagement is not recommended. However, if you have the resources, test direct engagement because it works.

Buy ads

The demographic and psychographic information that the social media platforms have on their users is impressive. Running ads to the audience you define makes a lot of sense. The challenge we find in lead generation is advertising to these segments is, at best, a branding exercise. Increasing awareness is part of the process for sure, but it takes time and a budget. This is why we prefer and prioritize paying for re-targeting ads as mentioned in point one. That said, anytime you can define your audience and get your brand in front of them, it’s a good thing.

To talk to LeadGen Compass and get a feel for how it would work for your company, call us at 402-682-7418 and talk to a marketing coach today.