This post is about how social media marketing can help your business generate targeted, high quality leads.
Here’s what we know about the more traditional approach to lead generation:
- Somewhere close to you this morning, a group of small business owners will be attending an early morning networking breakfast, each hoping that someone gives them a lead.
- At another location, a small business owner is wondering what will happen, when her radio commercial is played today.
- Another business owner, will be standing by the phone, waiting for the response to his latest mail shot.
- Then there will be the business owner, waiting to see what happens when the magazine she advertised in gets published today.
- Finally, one business owner will be summoning up the courage to start making cold calls.
Those are some common ways for small business owners to try and get business leads.
Another approach – Social media marketing
Social media marketing allows us to network on a local, national or global scale. It allows us to build targeted networks of great contacts, based on our specific area of commercial interest. The cost is extremely low and there’s no cost barrier to building as big and successful a network as you can. For those of us who add blogging to our social media marketing mix, we can also showcase our expertise and knowledge to these amazing people, so they can get a real handle on who we are and the value we bring.
This blog and my other social media marketing accounts, generate sales and business leads for my business all day, every day. This means I have the freedom to run a successful small business, whilst living in a beautiful, rural location, with clients and customers worldwide, and never need to attend networking events, pay for advertisements or pay for any other type of marketing.
Online and offline – It’s all about people
If you’re thinking that social media marketing only works for businesses that are mainly based online, consider this. I was prompted to write this post after receiving 2 messages on the same day, from 2 totally unconnected people. They give a perfect example of the way online and offline have fused together.
- Irene Koehler wanted to know if my ears were burning, because at a meeting in California, Kelly Kim, the co-founder of Twylah, mentioned me to her. These professionals had never met before and I had nothing to do with their meeting, yet they both knew me because of my social media marketing. A great example of online merging with offline.
- Later that day, Shona Easton asked me if my ears were burning, because she was talking about me to a guy at an exhibition in London. Shona knew me initially via social media, but her conversation with that person at the exhibition, took my reach offline.
In short: Before you tell yourself, ‘I’m too busy to find out how to correctly use social media marketing’, it’s important you know the possible upside, when you discover how to do the right things, correctly.