Connecting where your market lives is a critical success factor for keeping your name, brand, or offer top-of-mind in the prospect pool and client base.
We learned decades ago that location is a major and compelling factor for marketing and positioning. Now companies like Facebook, Pinterest, and Amazon teach us that location means the space you occupy in the social media world of your market. Keeping yourself relevant for that market, and leveraging it for lead generation and more business, is the new multiplier for development and expansion. While many traditional platforms of marketing, canvassing, calling, and selling remain the same, some distribution channels for reaching the market have evolved. We have learned from Millennials and Generation Z that, whatever your organization, applying social media platforms and accelerated connectivity is the new rule for engaging the mind-share and movement of markets.
While your organization may have dedicated personnel and assets in social media and viral marketing, the actual client contact person must occupy this space on an even greater micro level. Be more organic and make it fit your personality to leverage your advocates. The possibilities are endless and, while requiring little additional effort on your behalf, can become your best way to reach mass markets with no additional cost.
Social media is great for brand building, brand awareness, and building a following, but it seldom translates into immediate transactions, so remain focused on the complete connection process. To increase your market mind-share, explore these ideas and allow your own creative juices to flow to reveal even more powerful strategies and tactics for making your mark on the marketplace.
1. Connect your Facebook account with your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts and any other pertinent social media accounts, so that when you send a brief action-oriented message or update to one account, it replicates across every account.
2. Remember that it takes at least seven relevant social media messages, alerts, and updates to capture a person’s attention.
3. When you are meeting with a high-profile contact with leverage on others you are attempting to attract, tweet about it. Utilize instant communication platforms to inform your market and potential prospects where you are and when you will be somewhere. For example, when you have an informational booth or table at a job fair or business networking event, send out continuous updates to let others know to come by and see you or join in the fun. When you are meeting with influential others, have them duplicate your efforts and tweet to their followers about you, telling them to stop by.
4. Allow people to join you when you may be meeting socially with others. Make this a conversational community.
5. If you are at an event where there is signage or something visual that can spread your message without you having to type or say it, shoot a picture and tweet it, and post it to Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, and your own website. In the picture, tag and identify everything that can have magnetic appeal with others in the social media search world.
6. If you have just made a contact, share that through the words of the client to your Facebook page, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, your website, and tweet it.
7. Every transaction is a moment to share and have the customer (new client using your services, new member joining your organization, new donor or sponsor, etc.) do the same for their followers. This is about mass expansion to your market space and the other person’s followers and contacts.
8. Follow the LIKES for instant lead generation and leverage this smartly.
9. Every time you make a connection or enlist someone into your organization, shoot a picture of them with you (you are the representing agent and thus the market product that must be recognized) and have them post it to their social media platform. For several days after this connection, follow that person’s social media platform posting, visit their social media platforms where they posted your picture, and monitor who has liked their photo.
Click on that Like and go to that new contact’s social media platform to do a cursory review to determine if they look like a prospect and, if so, click back out and onto the social media platform page of your client, and click a message, text them, or call them, and have your new client-customer arrange a three-way meeting ASAP with the new prospect. Leverage your new client to assist you in making your next connection.
Do the same with organizations similar to yours. Regularly review and monitor their social media platforms. Look at their social media platforms for new posting of clients and connections, go to their new customers’ personal social media platforms and see what their LIKE followers may reveal to you for lead generation.
10. 80% of sales are closed/made on the fifth contact or more, so allow social media to complement your TouchPoints™.
11. Most selling professionals are really mere order takers and accept whatever the market will provide; 48% of sales people never follow up, or don’t follow up in a timely manner to have any positive impact from the initial contact.
12. My research with the largest sales forces in the nation over the past twenty years is that 12% of sales people only make two to three contacts and stop, 25% of sales people make a second contact and stop, and fewer than 10% of sales people make more than three contacts with a prospect.
13. Another reason most professionals never reach apex success is that 70% of marketing people do not have or use systems on a regular basis to manage their business. Make social media a systematic part of your daily efforts: coffee and tweet to start the day.
14. If your organization is fortunate enough to have communications, PR, marketing, public affairs, social media marketing, etc. individuals, teams, departments, or agencies, then it is critical that all parties work together whenever possible and synergistically leverage what they are doing with the same hash tags and links as lead source generators. Do this across all appropriate social media platforms.
15. Ideas for meaningful communication: Build a social media announcement or blitz around other traditional announcements or marketing campaigns for any new service offer or product offer. Any new client endorsement, testimonial, or affirmation can be communicated. Celebrating someone’s accomplishments, accolades, awards, or notations can be communicated. Any urgent calls-to-action or celebrity engagements for your industry, business, or space should be communicated. Have a regular communication update or blog or bulletin board of posts or re-posts from individuals within your organization with exciting messages that your prospects and advocates could become addicted to following. Spread around the content development for posts by assigning a regular brief from key constituents within your organization, so that the message is not always coming from you. The ideas are endless, so let the creative DNA flow here.
Be proactive in this space. If not, your competition will be and they will make the connections you miss. This is not necessarily because they have a better value proposition; it is because the market can’t find you, does not see you, or you are not easily accessible.
Although social media space was once a place for Generation X/Y and Millennials to hang out, today’s reality is that this is Generation Z’s business address. Some research is even revealing that a demographic and possible new explosion in traffic is with the Baby Boomers – so reach prospects, customers, or even influencers here.
Rather than through traditional computers, social media today is an on-the-go instant connectivity reality via a range of virtual mobile devices. And while these devices are not always accessible for live phone conversations, they can be used for text and picture transmission 24/7.
To learn how to connect with your market and what messages grab their attention, simply watch, observe, and ask. Play where the market is. Better yet, predict where the market is evolving and be there when they arrive!
Dr. Jeffrey Magee, Certified Management Consultant, Certified Board Executive, Certified Speaking Professional, Certified Professional Direct Marketer, is a highly-sought-after speaker, author and consultant who works with individuals and businesses that wish to greatly increase their productivity and profitability through business and leadership training without limits. DrJeffSpeaks@aol.com, www.JeffreyMagee.com
This article is reprinted from Issue #9 of Nonprofit Performance Magazine. Subscribe today so that you won’t miss other actionable articles that will help you run your nonprofit organization with less pain and more gain!
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