How Social Media Complements Your Sales Funnel

Neal Schaffer: 0:01

Welcome to maximize your social actionable advice on how your business can maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social, social media author, speaker, consultant, and founder of maximize social business. Neal Schaffer. Everybody this is Neal Schaffer, welcome to a another episode of maximize your social. If you heard my podcast last week, you know that I've been answering questions from podcast listeners and readers of maximize your social and by the time you hear this podcast, Social Media Marketing World will already be closed, I do hope to be able to share some interviews with you of some great people I met in future podcasts. And if you're listening to this, you definitely want to make sure that you do a search for the hashtag, SMM, w 14, is going to be a lot of great insight that you can find out about, including my presentation and panel. So today, we're going to keep on the questions that Seth Hynde Sathya becoming a rockstar here on maximize your social podcast that Seth, one of my readers and listeners, this podcast sent to me last week, it was about building social strategies that align directly with business objectives. And I tried to cover the topic of determining what those business objectives are, because I think if you can determine what those objectives are, you know, what you need to do, the next thing you need to do is obviously, dig a little bit deeper into social and try to figure out where your audiences how they use each platform, and what platform does it make sense to use what tactic in order to help you achieve your objective? And sorry, if I didn't go into more detail on that the last podcast, but I was hoping that you would understand that but I'm going to go on to assess next question. And he did ask a few. And hey, you know, Seth, I'm gonna answer all your questions. Do we get them all done? Step? Second question was a great question that some of you may be wondering as well. And the question is how to properly build a sales funnel that flows from social to the website? Where does the funnel building process start? So a sales funnel, a marketing funnel? And I think there's a lot of different ways of looking at it. But it really comes down to and I talk a lot about this, whether it's doing social media marketing, consulting, or whether it's doing social sales training. But where do you get your business? Right? Do you get your business through word of mouth? Do you get your business 100%? over the web? Do you get your business from sales reps? And or do you get them from marketing partners? And where did they get their business? You need to? If there was a sales report that your accountant is looking at, or your CEO is looking at on a monthly basis? Where would your sales breakdown? What would it look like? Where would your sales be? How are you developing sales from where? Because that determines what the funnel is? If you're getting sales from distributors, right, there's only so much you can do to directly influence it, you are trying to directly influence the end customer. But it also comes down to engagement with those distributors to keep top of mind as well as are you 14 the right customers to the right distributors, if you're 100% distributor base, for instance, if you're ecommerce, I think you already have a sales funnel built into your website, and that's how you develop business. If you're b2b, you might be doing a lot of content marketing, using white papers and webinars and what have you to try to generate leads, and then bring them into the funnel to try to close them at the end of the day, probably using a salesperson if not marketing, automation and or a combination thereof. So as you can see Seth and everybody else listening to the podcast, none of these answers are as clear cut as you'd like them to be. Because it's almost like saying, Well, how can I use the internet to help me with selling social media can just be used so broadly, that it really comes down to the specific application for your company, and your specific sales funnel. But if there's a sales funnel that flows from social to the website, well, you first of all need to attract people to your social media profile. And it needs to be very, very clear from your profile, how they can get to a relevant landing page. So let's put it this way. You know, if we were on Facebook, we have a Facebook page. And we have an about and at the very, very top of that about, you can include a link to your web page, which I highly recommend you do. It's a very, very visible link. People don't need to click through about they can immediately click from that link to your web page, for instance, right? Obviously, if you have any other you know, Pinterest or Instagram, you want to make sure that your URL is your homepage. It goes the same with Twitter with Google Plus what have you. LinkedIn is now discontinuing the products and services tab, when they have the products and services tab, you could have created several different landing pages for each one of your products. Unfortunately, no can do anymore, or you might be able to do it, but very, very soon. You're not gonna be able to do that. I don't know when the exact date is. I'm thinking mid April is what I think they said, both LinkedIn it's going to become your company page and having one URL, but at the end of the day, I think what a lot of companies miss out on and I talk about this when I talk about Twitter especially, and what I read When you do as well is to create a landing page that is specific to the social media platform that you expect traffic to come from a separate landing page. That is the URL for those who come from Twitter. For those who come from Facebook, for those who come from Pinterest from Instagram, what have you. And I know from an SEO perspective, you might take a hit if you're trying to draw people to one unique page. And obviously, the more backlinks you get to that one page, the higher you know, the more authority, the more domain authority that page is going to have. But on the other hand, it might be more effective from a conversion perspective, if you are able to describe your company in 140 character tweets, or to be able to show a widget of people that have recommended your company on Twitter by you know, showing a widget of all the favorites or a Storify. That comes from twitter, it shows that I speak to speak that you speak and I recognize that you came from Twitter. And because you came from Twitter, we already know you know us, here's how you should be looking at our company, right. And you could do the same for all these platforms and have special landing pages really customized look and feel for their expectations coming from the network, as well as how and what you want to market to them. So that's one way of building the sales funnel that flows from social the website beginning with your profiles, but outside of the profiles, how are you going to attract people from social media to your website. And that's really where the funnel begins. When they get to your website, did they come from social. Now, there's obviously different ways of doing this. Obviously, the most popular way of doing this is through blog content, right. And we can talk about content marketing in general. But you know, the blog is a great way. And I always say to blog as part of social media, it's, you know, a combination of user generated content with a personal profile. So assuming that you have actual unique employees that are blogging for you, and they all Google authorship, you can see how powerful a blog can be if your social media marketing, but the blog, anything that comes from the blog, or any link that is shared from the blog to social media, that drives traffic, from social media to your blog, you have just begun that sales funnel that flows from social. The next is, you know, when they come to your blog isn't seamlessly integrated in your website. And this is where a lot of companies, they have separate URLs for their blog, they don't seamlessly integrate the blog into the website. And therefore people have to do a few more click throughs, to find something that may interest them, you want to seamlessly integrate it right to keep that funnel tight. And to improve the efficiency of that funnel to try to maximize the percentage and number of conversions you can get. And that it's the call to action. There are some companies who and I do it as well, I use a plugin called OptinMonster on certain pages of maximize social business and maximize your social that allows people to opt in to a list to you know, get a free download for ebook based on the specific content that I'm showing them. So you know, a blog is a great way to bring people to your website. There's also any time you have an event, any lead generating activity, a webinar, a free white paper, a free ebook, these are other things that you can share and should share regularly in social media that can also draw people to your website and begin that funnel. And they're going to a very, very specific page, right? There's general engagement that you can do in social media that hopefully gets people to get interested in what your company is doing. For instance, if you hosted a Twitter chat, or if you hosted a Hangout on Google Plus, you know, you have people joining it, and they're like, Wow, who is the host of this? Let me find out more about them. And then hopefully, at some point, if they're interested in the content is relevant, they jump from social to your website, which begins the funnel. Now, obviously, that's, you know, I'm talking very ecommerce centric. If you're not about a e commerce site, and you don't generate all of your leads from your website, right? It comes down to social selling employee advocacy, right? How many of your salespeople can have more people call them or email them. And when they asked how they found out about them, they found out through social media or social media made it you know, touched it in some way through the ability to get an introduction to a decision maker, what happened? So that's more specific to the b2b. It could be distributors, right. One of the case studies in maximizing LinkedIn for sales and social media marketing that I wrote about was the Irish dog, Bloody Mary mix company out of Moline, Illinois, her husband and wife run in and out of the garage, they found 25% of their distributor sales, and they're 100%, distributor based beverage company, on LinkedIn groups. So right there, you begin to see how engagement in LinkedIn groups can add to your funnel as well. And that's a funnel that doesn't necessarily go through your website. So you know, just to summarize what I said, You need to understand where your sales are coming from what your website funnel looks like right now. And then do you have enough avenues for people to come from social media to your website? Do you give them enough reason to do the engagement and content? And then once they come is it optimized for conversion, knowing that they came from social media, and they saw either a piece of content or Are you engaged with them? or what have you. So I hope that gives you some idea set. And if any of you have any follow up questions on this or need clarification, let me know. Send me a tweet, comment on maximize your social.com whatever it may be. But that's it for today, folks. Keep it short and sweet. Wherever you are in the world. Make it a great day. We'll talk to you again soon. Bye. Bye, everybody.

Unknown: 10:22

Thanks for listening to maximize your social. We appreciate your iTunes subscriptions, ratings and comments. If you would like to appear on the show or recommend content, please contact Neal Schaffer at Neal at maximize your social.com Thanks for listening and have a great day.