6 Tactics for Converting Social Media Traffic into Leads

6 Tactics for Converting Social Media Traffic into Leads:from B2B Marketing and Lead Generation | Optify by Jennifer Wong
Are your actively turning your fans and followers into hot prospects?
The 2011 IBM Chief Marketing Officer study revealed that 82% of CMOs plan to increase social media use over the next three to five years.
Smart marketers are taking this opportunity to strategically drive traffic into their sales funnel, now.
Here are 6 tactics to turn social media activity into real business leads:

1. Write tweets, posts, and updates with clear calls to action

Looking to increase your organic traffic? Download our work plan to build your #SEO campaign in 15 Mins. bit.ly/Kp4N51
— Optify (@optify) September 10, 2012

Use ad copy best practices when writing the tweets, posts and updates you distribute. The goal is to get your target audience to want to click on your content to draw them to read more (and convert) on your site.

2. Add social sharing options to all of your content

The true value of social media provides is its ability to spread content to an extended network beyond your known contacts. By making it easy for others to share your content to their personal networks, you’ll significantly extend the potential reach of your content.

3. Use landing pages

Once someone has clicked on your call to action, make sure your landing page is optimized to convert the visitor into a lead.
Driving more traffic to your site is pointless if you don’t have the offers, forms and aligned landing page set up to convert those visitors into leads. Here is a guide from Optify that outlines 10 tips to create effective landing pages.
A few landing page tips include:

• Tailor the design, images and text for conversion
• Create an emphasized call-to-action
• Optimize the headline and sub-headline

4. Optimize your social media profiles

One easy and sustainable way to align search and social media to drive more inbound leads is to fully optimize your social network profiles to be more discoverable by your buyers. As a B2B marketer, I’d recommend starting with LinkedIn since it’s a network of primarily business professionals whom are interested in sharing and discussing ideas about business solutions. Here is a step-by-step guide to learn how to optimize your LinkedIn profile for lead generation.

5. Include paid social advertising campaigns

Just like how PPC campaigns compliment SEO, you can also run paid campaigns on the social media networks that have resulted in driving high quality leads for your sales team. Before you start spinning up paid campaigns, be sure you have the benchmarks in place to be able to closely manage and analyze the success of your paid promotions. If you can get the cost per lead/cost per opportunity at/or below your other marketing channels, it may be a great channel to invest budget.
In an ROI survey of over 700 marketers, Wildfire App discovered that nearly all marketers find value from social media and that 75% of marketers plan to increase their media spending in 2012.


For example, Optify uses Twitter Ads to increase leads by 700%.

6. Empower your sales team

The responsibility of a B2B marketer is to drive sustainable demand for the sales team, month after month. Make your sales team a staple part of your social media lead generating strategy.
Your ultimate goal is turning your social media connections into leads and then into customers – and your sales team is an essential part of this. Use inbound marketing technology to give your sales team insight into how engaged a prospect is and what they are interested in. Once you have drawn social media leads to your website with content offers, your sales team can set up alerts and watch in real time which leads become hot prospects. They’ll have more information and a better prioritization, allowing them to maximize your social media leads.
This article was first published on Business2Community.com