Social media has opened possibilities for businesses to sell their product around the globe, 24X7. It’s not exactly a secret that social media is one of the best ways to market your product to the globe and generate leads at almost a fraction of the price compared to other marketing platforms.
Studies suggest that social media has a higher “lead-to-close” frequency by 100%, in contrast to outbound marketing and that businesses experienced increase in their revenue by 24% when they started using social media for lead generation (source: business2community.com)
Now I’m sure that you’ve carried out various social media marketing tactics over the time and generated many leads from it. But in today’s era where almost all the tasks are automated, are you one of those who still use excel sheets to manage your social media leads?
If your answer is yes, then these problems might ring a bell: –
- Lead Leakage
- Wasting time in manually collecting leads coming from various sources into a single platform
- Improper qualification of leads
- Wasting time on junk leads
- Missing out on following up with promising leads
- Multiple follow-ups with less promising leads due to lack of team collaboration
- Unnurtured leads
In this article, I will tell you why you should start using a lead management tool for managing your social media leads.
Let me first explain to you what a lead management tool is. Lead management tool helps you to capture your leads from various channels, including social media sites onto a single platform and helps you to track their activities on your website.
There are many reasons as to why you should use a lead management tool and I will explain a few of them to you in my article: –
1) Cut down on lead leakage with a lead management tool
I’m sure every lead is important to you and losing these leads can be painful. But as your sales funnel keeps increasing, it gets difficult to contact every lead on your list. In fact, about 80% of your leads are never worked upon by your sales team. Now that’s a scary figure, right?
But if you use a lead management tool like LeadSquared, you wouldn’t have to worry since all your leads, whether they are coming in from your Facebook ads or LinkedIn ads etc. gets captured in one place and gets automatically distributed to your sales agents based on the rules you set.
Also, lead management tools notify you when a lead has not been worked upon thereby reducing your chances of lead leakage to zero.
2) Spend less time collating leads and more time, driving sales
Collecting leads which come in from various social media websites and bringing them onto a single platform where you can collect their details and follow up with them is not only a tedious task but also increases the room for error.
When you have a huge lead list, you might contact a less promising lead twice and end up being reported as spam or you may miss out on contacting the lead who could have been your biggest client ever.
A lead management tool not only collects leads and brings it into a single platform automatically, but it also allows you to track their activities and helps you understand which lead is interested in your product thereby helping you contact more interested leads first.
Bonus: Here are 10 Hacks for Social Media Lead Generation.
3) With great lead lists, comes great responsibility
A very wise social media marketer Uncle Ben once said: –
Studies suggest that: –
- 44% of sales people give up after first follow-up.
- 22% of sales people give up after second follow-up.
- 14% of sales people give up after third follow-up.
- 12% give up after fourth follow up.
In other words, 44% of salespeople have an 80% chance of not making a sale.
Obviously, if your lead list consisted of 10-20 or even 100 leads, your sales agents could follow up with them until they become your customers.
Lucky for us, machines aren’t as forgetful as humans. You just need to tell your lead management tool to remind you to follow up with any lead, either tomorrow or even a year from now and your tool will remember to do so, thereby helping you to close maximum number of deals.
4) Focus and identify sales ready leads with lead scoring
Your social media marketing strategy really took off and you have leads pouring in from various sources. Great!
Now some of these leads are people who immediately require your product, some who are considering buying your product and some who just signed up and have no idea what your product is about. Lead management tools should also allow you to customize scores.
You can either follow up with the latter category and end up putting in your efforts to convert them and still return empty-handed. Or, your sales agents can work on those who are looking to buy your product immediately, while marketing team nurtures those who are considering your product.
LinkedIn is a great lead source for B2B businesses, so you can customize your lead management tools to assign a higher lead score to businesses who come in through LinkedIn. Similarly, you can assign a higher lead score to leads coming in from social media websites, leads who viewed your product page and various other pages and leads who performed certain activities on your website like filling out contact form over leads who just downloaded an e-book.
With lead scoring, you can focus on the most promising leads, waste less time, improve your sales productivity, increase your ROI and shorten your sales funnel.
5) Use lead distribution for automated and hassle-free lead assignment
You have a great sales team and you have leads coming in, but is it possible for your team to distribute these leads to your sales prospect based on the source, location, requirement and lead score of the leads?
Lead management tools let you distribute incoming leads to your sales agents based on the rules you’ve set thus saving your precious time instead of manually distributing each lead to your sales agent. Also, this eliminates any room for missing out a lead to be distributed.
6) Target and retarget leads that meet your quality criteria
Let’s assume a scenario where you are running ads on Facebook. If any lead clicks on your ad and completes a top-of-the-funnel goal like downloading an e-book, it indicates that he/she might be interested in your product in the future. If you don’t capture that lead and its intent and use it for retargeting, you might lose a future customer.
Generally, you can retarget prospects directly from Facebook, Google AdWords or any other platform’s interface. However, the process becomes easier and almost automated when you use a lead management platform that lets you segment leads and push them directly to the retargeting platforms.
You can run multi-level remarketing campaigns on Facebook and AdWords from your lead management tool itself, by setting up automated updating of retargeting lists on different channels.
Some lead management tools also give you the information about your leads like the pages liked by them etc., which enables you to sharpen your lead nurturing and targeting process even more.
7) Get better insights on source platform with source performance reports
While marketing your product on social media, your expectation would be maximum leads at minimum cost. But how would you deduce which social media platform is working well for you and which one is not?
A lead management tool not only tells you : –
- Which social media platform is bringing you most customers and helps you identify most profitable channel
- How well your campaigns are running across various social media platforms
but it also tells you: –
- How well are your campaigns performing in various countries
- Which is the best time for displaying ads
- The number of impressions and actions generated on your ads
- The age group, interests and the number of leads who have unsubscribed leads and more.
This information will help you make smarter and data-driven decisions for your upcoming social media marketing strategies thereby improving your ROI and giving you a clear picture of where you need to invest more.
Now that you know why lead management tool is important for your business, it’s time to stop using excel sheets and avoid all the hassle of managing leads by investing in a great lead management tool and letting machines do all the tedious tasks for you.