4 Things to Know About Generating Social Media Leads

I don’t know how many of you have developed a TikTok addiction recently, but anyone with small children could probably spot the symptoms of the newest social media obsession.

Even if you don’t have kids, you’re probably familiar with social media addiction. More than half of us use Facebook or Instagram every single day.

Which means you can use social media to reach half of your market every single day.

Sounds like a no-brainer, right? No one ever says they couldn’t use more leads.

But before you dive into generating leads on social media, there are a few things you need to know.

That’s why I invited Kevin Barry, Co-Founder of Right Percent, on today’s show.

He shared some valuable lessons he’s learned through his experience with social media lead generation, including:

• Why social media lead generation works best when targeting large markets
• Why leads from social have less intent than organic leads
• Why social should have its own dedicated sales team (who respond quickly)
• Why your sales team needs to know the ads

So before you plumb the social media depths, read on and learn some of the best pieces of advice for generating social leads.

Social Media Lead Generation Works Best When Targeting Large Markets

With so many people regularly using social media, it’s a phenomenal place to generate leads.

“55% of all Americans use Facebook or Instagram every single day of their lives… That includes 55% of pretty much any target customer. So, if you’re targeting dentists, about half of them are Facebook.”

KEVIN BARRY at Right Percent

If you want to target dentists, you already know over half of all dentists will be scrolling through their Facebook feed every single day.

But the way Facebook targets dentists can be a problem if your market consists of only dentists who play in Rush cover-bands.

This is because Facebook uses machine learning — or scary robot AI — to find target audiences. The algorithms of these scary robots aren’t particularly good at finding small target audiences — which might be why they haven’t found John Connor and taken over the world yet.

A good rule of thumb: Social media targeting is most effective in market sizes of over 200,000.

If your market is smaller, social can still help in other ways, like retargeting to help out the sales team, but it won’t be the best driver of growth.

Leads from Paid Social Have Less Intent than Organic Leads

If your sales team is used to customers carefully researching before filling out your contact form, they might struggle adjusting to leads from social.

Think what people are doing when they scroll through their social feed. They might be bored, killing time or, let’s be honest, sitting on a toilet.

So, it makes sense why most leads on social are often people who saw your ad, spent 5 minutes filling it out and took another 5 minutes to completely forget you exist.

This is often a problem for salespeople who are dependent on commissions from sales.

Why bother chasing these lukewarm leads when you can focus on hotter leads from elsewhere?

“The first thing to know about leads from paid social is that they’re going to have less intent than organic leads.”

KEVIN BARRY at Right Percent

Which leads us to an important point…

Social Should Have a Dedicated Sales Team (Who Respond Quickly)

If it’s possible, you really should have a separate sales team for social or give these leads to the outbound team.

If a dedicated team is being judged solely on social media leads, they’ll treat them all like great leads and close much more often.

Likewise, an outbound team will usually love social leads because they are much higher quality leads than a typical outbound lead. Instead of calling people out of the blue who have never heard of the company, they’re reaching people who asked to be reached (even if it only took 5 minutes to forget).

While either a new dedicated team or your existing outbound team are a good start to address the short attention span of the average social lead, it’s not the complete solution.

One of the most important metrics by which any team handling these leads should be measured is response time.

If it’s normal for a lead to hit send on their message, flush, hopefully wash their hands and then forget about you forever, you want your team to reach them as quickly as possible.

Getting back to them in 5 minutes means they’ll know why you are calling and their connectivity rates will be so much higher. If you wait until 3 days later, they might have no idea who you are or why you’re calling.

Your Sales Team Needs to Know Your Social Ad

There are two main types of ad to use on social media:

• Simple “buy our stuff” ads, which is pretty straightforward. It lets the user know the basic features of the product and the salesperson follows up.
• Content-based ads, which often do great on social. These ads deliver industry insights, top 10 lists or other content related to the decision-maker’s interests.

In the first example, your sales team should already be familiar with the product, so there isn’t any extra work.

With content-based advertising, it’s especially important your sales team knows the content as well as they know the product.

“You definitely want to let the sales team know what the content is so that they get used to selling from a certain piece of content.”

KEVIN BARRY at Right Percent

If the content is what piqued a customer’s interest, then being fluent in what brought them to you is key to making the sale. Your team should be selling from the content.

You can see this in action, too. Research shows conversion rates dip for a while when switching to new content because the sales team is so used to selling to the old content.

This blogpost includes highlights of our podcast interview with Kevin Barry at Right Percent. For the entire interview, you can listen to The B2B Revenue Executive Experience.

If you don’t use Apple Podcasts, we suggest this link.

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