Generate Leads with Social Media and Funnel Them to Your CRM Tool

More and more, social media is being used as a fertile ground for finding, qualifying, and converting leads. If you generate leads with social media, however, you also need an effective and efficient way to handle those leads once you have them. The following techniques can help you improve the way you generate leads with social media while also improving the way you handle them using customer relationship management (CRM).

• Understand what you want to accomplish with social media: Clearly define your social media goals and processes and understand what you want your social media involvement to produce. Do you want to use social media to narrow your focus to better-qualified leads? Do you want your social media presence to be a means of communicating directly with both leads and existing customers? Create social media guidelines and processes, then let your best employees function freely within those guidelines.
• Produce more leads with focused and relevant content: In social media and other online marketing venues, content continues to be a major resource for generating interest and producing leads. Use your social media participation to provide content that directly addresses the needs, wants, and problems of the individuals you want to turn into leads. The more focused and relevant you can be, the more likely it is that you will attract exactly the type of leads you’re looking for.
• Provide gated information downloads and information sources: Give your leads plenty of freely available information, but ensure they provide something in return to open the “gate” to the material. In most cases, this involves providing white papers, reports, or other information in exchange for a name, email address, or other contact data. The data you gather at this point can be used to effectively segment leads. The more data you get from your leads at this point, the easier it will be to organize them in your CRM tool and find effective ways to qualify and convert them.

How could you improve the way you generate leads with social media and ensure those leads are effectively processed and tracked with your CRM tool?

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