Social media is among one of the most crucial tools for sales and marketing for today’s businesses.
Social posts can help you generate and convert lots of new leads using relevant and timely posts on social media.
However, the way you approach developing and sharing your content is crucial.
If your posts are not authentic and organic and feel too salesy, you will not get a hold of your potential clients.
Google+ has more than 50 million users, Twitter has more than 200 million users, and Facebook has over 800 million users.
Everyone is blogging, posting, tweeting, and sending messages utilizing mobile devices, laptops, and desktops.
And businesses are using social media to reach their potential customers and create conversations.
But what about B2B dialogues?
How can you start a dialogue using B2B prospects on social media?
While the old models of sales were about cold calls, demonstrating sales, and generating leads, the current B2B communications mean that you require to utilise social networks to target new prospects, show them how you can assist them to develop their business, and promote them through content.
Social media usage growth has been a significant element in the reason for social media selling being adopted.
Research shows that 94% of B2B prospects in Singapore do some research online before deciding, with 55% of them doing an online study for more than half of their acquisitions.
In the Business to Business field, the dialogue is different.
While Business to Business clients have very strong participation in social media in Singapore, their primary objective in social networks is to establish themselves as experts and develop connections for lead generation in the future.
Social media is grounded on relationships.
Connections assist in making B2B purchasing decisions.
Whether offline or online, the most effective method of advertising is by word of mouth. In the world of business, referrals and personal affirmations authenticate business decisions.
The main concern of business marketers is to shift to a communication channel that is cost-friendly.
That is the reason why social media is so engaging: the capability to generate an audience of pre-qualified brand campaigners on a media channel at a low price.
Are you interested in understanding how you can generate leads on social media using B2B prospects in Singapore?
The steps below will highlight what you need to seek when using social networks for prospecting accomplishments.
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Identify and Research Your Prospects
Before starting your engagement with prospects, conduct some online and offline research to create a list of the types of clients you are seeking.
Generating leads on social media does not indicate that you choose an account and message the owners your offer.
Your message will likely get classified as spam, and that indicates you have failed.
Look for prospects whose followers are similar to your existing customers and who you would like to have but might be quite hard to get or are out of your direct reach.
Prospecting using social media creates a personalised pitch for the prospect, and trial is excellent practice for future leads.
Use your list of prospects to determine their profiles on various social media platforms.
You can do that by simply typing their name into the search boxes on the respective social media platforms or visiting their website and clicking on the different social media icons if they are linked.
Look for B2B prospects who are in the same niche as you, and who have the clients that you would like to have.
This step can even be taken further by determining the specific group of individuals that you need to talk to.
Look for the prospects’ “About Us” or “Our Team” sections on their website to get information about them and biographies of the primary stakeholders in the companies.
You should determine if they have company social media pages and follow them; ensure that you include LinkedIn in your search.
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Don’t Introduce and Market Your Business Directly
Just to remind you: social media is excellent for generating leads and opening conversations. That means that it must be used together with other methods.
Most of the time, business owners and marketers take only a single method seriously. For instance, they might be replying to emails and ignoring LinkedIn messages.
Utilising at least three social media platforms makes sure that you infuse your leads enough to get a response.
Using social media to generate leads is an excellent way to begin, but it is recommended that you put the data in a tool to fill in the holes like the email and physical address of the prospect.
For example, you can conduct some background study on the potential leads through social media and send your prospects an email and them.
Identifying and following your prospect on social media alone does not guarantee a great pitch to send to your prospects or your readiness to engage with them.
Keep in mind that generating leads on social media in Singapore is not the same as contacting through the phone. That means that you need to create a customised pitch to raise your chances of getting engagement.
At this point, you need to determine the behaviours of your prospect on social media. Observe their type and time of engagement online through their social profiles.
What time are they more active and what types of posts do they engage with most? The other aspect to consider is the types of information they post online.
Do they create most of their posts or do they outsource their posts from their other social media platforms? Do they approach ideas and comments from their followers personally and actively?
Keep in mind that shared posts in company social media profiles go in line with the values of the business or include something that is related to their brand or that supports the company.
Companies utilise social media not only to promote their values and brand but also to engage with other related businesses.
If your target prospect interacts with clients on their social media pages, it is likely that their amount of social media marketing experts will fit well in your prospecting strategy.
Understanding the time when a prospect engages on social networks also assists you in determining when you need to compose your pitch and send it to them.
It is not easy to know the number of messages your prospect gets daily or how regularly they read their messages, but their likelihood of reading your messages is higher if they are online and actively interacting with your followers when you send them.
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Create A Customized Pitch
You can now familiarise your prospect with who you are.
It is crucial to think through every word of your opening message to send to the prospect and also how you customise your pitch to become consistent with how the prospect utilises social media.
And they might have followed back after following them. That means that they are interested enough to listen.
Or, they might have posted an article about the services and tools they utilise to ensure that their company is functional, and you happen to have methods that can assist them in doing it even better.
You need to note such elements during your research step since they are essential when creating your pitch.
Think of how you can use social media to get a company that can offer you the services that you require.
Think of yourself as the prospect. What do you think your prospect needs and can you assist them in becoming better at the way they operate?
Even if that is the ground for your pitch strategy, do not forget to customise it.
On social media, individuals love the human element behind digital accounts, and nobody wants to get the impression that they are getting sold to by a robot.
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Dialogues Emerge from Relevant Conversations
The primary intention of social media is to become social; you cannot contact a prospect with a general sales proposal that you could utilise just for anybody.
You need to look at their content to determine if they are social media influencers and find out if they have a large following.
Do they publish blogs regularly or participate in social media engagements like hashtags?
Those are excellent chances to reach them and start your dialogue.
It is highly possible that your prospect would want to get feedback on their posts or add more to their articles.
What you need to ensure is that your offer is honest.
Nowadays, most individuals can easily distinguish a promotional pitch, and their likelihood of getting back to you are low when they know that was the only reason you reached out to them.
Keep in mind that you need to give your prospect soothing valuable, and an excellent method of achieving that is through dialogues that assist in understanding them more.
If your interest in their content is sincere, you can share the posts if they are relevant to your business interests and values.
The genuineness of your pitch and the significance that you stand for to your prospect as an associate is what will push the dialogue.
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Utilise Social Media to Underscore Your Values
B2B prospects can also come to your business organically on social media – even grounded on your posts on social media.
Do you interact with your customers regularly on social media?
Do you post articles that are relevant to your industry regularly?
If your prospects are likely to convert, they will research you when deciding.
The more active you are on social media, the more genuine you are when starting dialogues with a prospect using social media. Exhibiting the value of the service you offer is a sign of your relationship with your existing clients.
If you have a customer who posts an achievement or news, you should report their post on your social media pages.
That shows that you care about your connections with your clients and the achievements of the people you work together.
To succeed in engaging and connecting with prospects on the social platforms, you need to show that you can give the value and services that you provide on the various social media platforms that you utilise.
If you require to get further, endorse your prospect through your business social media platforms to show them that they have done something valuable to you.
What other way is better to introduce your business to prospects than to appreciate their work?
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Utilize Your Prospect’s Language
That means you use the language of your prospects, not your own. It includes your dialogue being based on their circle, not yours.
That indicates you need to create a conversation grounded on the aspects that will assist your prospects in solving a problem.
And it necessitates that you avoid all the common industry slang and speak utilising terms and languages that are relevant and natural to your prospects.
You need to listen keenly to their language. U
unless they are totally convinced by all the slang, they come across daily; they are not likely to use most of the slang.
Use what you have learned in your message and in your blog posts.
Create content that encourages your prospect to aspire to learn more and to get into a dialogue with you and make sure you do not waste your opportunity by letting your prospect reject your offer because of using clichés.
The above information will give you a head start in digital marketing. Many brands use the above strategies to generate sales and boost their brand awareness.
However, they scratch the surface of social media marketing.
There are plenty of tools that you can use to generate qualified leads via social media marketing.
Let’s briefly look at these tools and why you should consider having one or more of them in your digital marketing arsenal.
Thanks to technological advancements such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, you can use several tools to enhance your social media marketing campaigns. We spent the last six weeks researching and experimenting with them, and here is our list of the top 10 social media marketing tools available online today.
Even though all these tools have immense potential to enhance your social media marketing campaign, they vary in terms of features, capabilities, pricing, pros, and cons.
Let’s shift gear and discuss each of them in detail.
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Biteable
You already know the importance of creating stellar content to spur engagement with your target social media audience.
The content should convince them that your services or products are the best options in the market.
It should also encourage them to take the desired action, such as visiting the landing page or adding the product to the cart outright.
Biteable is designed to help you create engaging visual content for different platforms, including Twitter.
Use it to create short informative, entertaining videos with a high potential of going viral. Note that visual content gets 3X times more engagement than conventional tweets.
The tool offers a broad range of free video templates, music, animated scenes, and music you can use to create videos on the fly.
We recommend trying it out using the free account to get first-hand experience before buying the premium version.
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Buffer
Initially, Buffer was a Twitter scheduling tool, but over the years, it has been upgraded to help social media marketers schedule posts for Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
Unlike Biteable, Buffer is available as a chrome browser extension that makes it utterly easy to post content on different social media platforms in seconds.
The tool shortens links for sharing purposes, making them more appealing and sharable.
In addition, you will get access to advanced analytics that monitors every aspect of the campaign to help you benchmark the campaign accordingly.
Use is to stand out of the crowd by creating custom videos and photos that resonate with your audience.
Apart from scheduling, you can reply to the comments inside Buffer and schedule posts without prior experience.
If you have a team, you can add them to the tool for more collaboration and productivity.
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Buzzsumo
Research is an integral part of any digital marketing strategy.
To get ahead of the competition, you need to do extensive content research to know which topics best match your qualified leads needs and expectations.
Buzzsumo is a powerful tool that you can use to do research for your social media marketing campaigns.
It also goes the extra mile to give accurate data on how different posts perform across the platforms you market.
Consistently creating rich content is not easy.
The brains behind Buzzsumo know that we digital marketers often run out of ideas. As a result, it gives content ideas based on the trending posts and what your competitors are doing to get more leads than you.
Influencers can enhance your social media campaign by connecting you with warm audiences already interested in what you do.
Buzzsumo can help you connect with the right influencers and get timely alerts of brand names, links, keywords, domains, and more.
Tracking your competitors’ social media campaigns to know how to create better content and engage with your audience.
For instance, you can create posts based on trending topics to create a buzz online without spending a fortune.
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Missinglttr
Missinglttr is another reliable social media marketing tool that you can use to get the most results from your campaigns.
Use to schedule posts for different social media platforms to free up your schedule for other equally important business tasks.
Even though the scheduling process is automated, you still need to spend time creating the text and adding visuals to the posts.
If you run out of content ideas, this tool can scrape through your past blog articles for new post ideas.
Adding this list to your digital marketing arsenal will give you ample time to create succinct evergreen content.
At the same time, it works in the background creating awesome posts for Facebook and other platforms.
Apart from scheduling, Missinglttr has a URL shortener that allows marketers to create custom links for sharing on other marketing campaigns.
Note, these are just the main features; there is more to Missinglttr, so go ahead and check it out when you get a chance today.
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MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar is a robust social media management tool with many features that will enhance your campaign’s ability to send qualified leads your way.
You can count on it to enable you to share and re-share posts and monitor social traffic and engagement levels without spending a fortune.
The tool is available as a web plugin and is fully compatible with LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Use it to schedule posts to enable you to engage with your audience consistently.
With this tool, the audience will know exactly when to expect a new post.
We recommend using MeetEdgar to post evergreen content that doesn’t have an expiry date.
That is, your audience will find the information in the post relevant and valuable months after posting.
A top feature that gives it a higher cutting edge is the category-based scheduling that allows marketers to spice things up by mixing different content types.
Like the previous tools discussed, it also has a URL shortener tool that will make URLs more appealing and sharable.
You can also track the URLs to know the total number of clicks they accrue over time.
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Hootsuite
The world of digital marketing often takes us through twists and turns.
It is more or less like an unending maze and the battle to be the most influential brand in the market keeps companies on their toes.
Hootsuite was developed to make it easier for you to generate sales from your social media marketing campaigns.
With this tool, you can manage multiple social media marketing tools in one user-friendly and intuitive dashboard. I
n this dashboard, you will get information on how your posts perform in terms of engagement and clicks.
This information will enable you to prioritise platforms that deliver the most results and know which kind of content best resonates with your audience.
You can try it out first for free to get the hang of its features and decide whether it suits your brand’s goals and visions.
Most companies have a team of social media marketers, and Hootsuite is alive to this fact, as evident from the many collaboration features it offers.
Brand mentions and comments are displayed on one page to help you respond to them fast.
Apart from scheduling posts, you can also use it to create a social media calendar and assign tasks to different team members.
Hootsuite podium also has free online social media marketing courses that you can do to enhance your marketing and management skills.
Use these courses to get a deeper understanding of social media marketing.
This review of the Hootsuite social media management tool wouldn’t be complete without mentioning that you can integrate it with not only Facebook but also other platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter.
Suppose you also market your brand on community platforms such as Storify, Tumblr, and Reddit.
In that case, you can use Hootsuite to monitor your activities and capture accurate customer data such as email addresses for future use.
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Mention
In the current fast-paced and competitive digital marketing world, you cannot afford to ignore social media listening tools.
Mention is one such tool that has stood the test of time and has proven to be one of the best social listening tools today.
By subscribing to this tool, you will get real-time reports on the number of times your brand is mentioned on social media platforms.
Staying abreast of what existing and potential customers are saying about you will provide ideas for improving your offers.
On the dashboard, you can respond to mentions and comments in seconds, saving time.
In addition, you can use it to locate influencers who have the potential to impact your social media marketing campaigns positively.
Also, Mention has a strong competitor analysis tool that you can use to keep tabs on the type of content your competitors are using to get leads.
Use the report not to copy their tactics but rather to come up with better strategies to outrank them and cost-effectively generate more leads.
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Sumo
Unlike other social media marketing tools discussed above, Sumo is in its league as it comes with tools meant to add value to every aspect of your marketing strategy.
One of the features that give it an upper hand is a social share feature designed to make it utterly easy for your social media followers to visit your website when they come across your posts.
Apart from comments, the total number of shares on different posts will help you gauge the relevance of different content formats to potential customers.
Sumo keeps track of the shares and clicks on the post or URL.
Use the information to fine-tune your social media marketing campaign.
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IFTTT
IFTTT is an abbreviation for If This, Then What. As you can tell from the tagline, this social media marketing tool is designed to help you set the ground rules for your campaigns.
That is, it allows users to create rules that trigger certain actions.
It’s superbly effective in ensuring that customers get to see ads that best resonate with their interests and interactions with your content.
For example, you can set it to display a particular ad banner to customers after they like or click on a post on Instagram or Facebook.
It’s effective in doing away with the previously manual processes that were tedious and time-consuming.
Since everything is automated once you set the rules, it will enhance your productivity and help you get maximum ROI from your social media marketing campaigns.
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Zapier
Finally, Zapier impressed our team due to its user-friendliness and ease of use. From a distance, it seems to work like IFTTT, but there are some glaring differences.
One of the differences is that IFTTT is easy to learn and master.
Zapier automates complex tasks that IFTTT cannot do, making it an ideal choice for brands who have been actively involved in social media marketing and want to get to the next level of automation.
That said, we noticed that most brands use both tools, Zapier and IFTTT, as each has its pros and cons.
We can confidently state that Zapier is more compatible with the other social media marketing tools discussed than IFTTT.
These are the top 10 social media marketing tools that we strongly believe can help you generate more leads from the different networks.
Learn how each works by leveraging the free and trial versions before subscribing to the higher packages.
Consult other social media marketers who have in the past used any of these tools to get a clearer perspective before buying.
Our team can also guide you through the selection process and properly integrate the selected tool into your social media marketing strategies.
We’re also known globally for offering no-fail social media marketing services. Get in touch with us for more details.
Final Verdict
The traditional rules of getting prospects still apply.
The methods that you utilise to get new customers have only evolved.
However, ensure that your pitch is not salesy, and don’t forget to start a conversation that is mutually beneficial and does not waste time.
Even if the steps above might seem relatively lengthy, they can reduce the time needed to complete your process of selling since the initial conversations and research assist in developing the first official sales business meeting.
Social media is an excellent tool for processing sales by establishing a lasting relationship and showcasing the services that you offer.
Your profiles on social media can give your prospect the validation they require to start a dialogue.
Get in touch with us for professional social media marketing services and guidance in Singapore.
