How to drive conversions, leads, and sales on social media

Additional data points

Social data can be an invaluable tool for optimizing your efforts to drive leads and sales. Engagement metrics indicate how well you’re building and nurturing relationships with your customers and prospects via social. Monitoring your progress in these areas can help you deliver conversions over time. Tracking activity and reach can help you understand more about your audience, their content preferences, and the most effective targeting strategies.

Someone is talking about your industry, brand, product, or competitors at this very moment. You can’t afford to miss opportunities like this. The techniques outlined here will help you capitalize on conversations that are already happening, improving your chances of generating and converting valuable leads.

• Use technology to search Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter for mentions of your brand, your product/service, or the competition. Answer brand and product questions directly and offer to share more information wherever appropriate.

• Conduct ongoing keyword and hashtag searches to find prospects who don’t specifically mention your brand or offerings, but may express a need or desire your brand can fulfill. Look for creative and appropriate ways to respond to or engage with these prospects.

• Monitor Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube for media tagged with your products or service. Respond when appropriate with an offer to talk or provide more information.

Conversions and lead generation

Playstation encouraged its VR community to share tweets and pics with a shared hashtag with their shoppable mosaic.

You are probably already sitting on great content that, when properly leveraged, can help propel lead-generation efforts. First, if you haven’t already, implement gates (forms that require users to enter names and email addresses in order to view a full page or asset) on your longer content to make sure you capture the leads interested in them.

Next, in order to get the most bang for your social marketing buck, reexamine some of your longer assets like white papers and look for ways to create bite-size versions like tipsheets or infographics that capture the essence and entice people to consume the full asset. Better yet, make this a part of your content planning process moving forward.

A few more ways to repurpose content:

• Share compelling images or graphics on Instagram and Pinterest. Include a link to the full document.

• Share key insights from a white paper on LinkedIn and Twitter. Be sure to include a link to your gated landing page so that interested users download the whole thing.

• Sponsor updates or promote posts and Tweets to share a valuable new asset with a broader audience.

• Post a blog recap of a recent study or company event, with a link to download more details.

• Post PDFs of all publicly available documents on SlideShare, with links to full documents.

• Leverage your content to create a dynamic web experience by linking each piece back to an online point of purchase.

Rather than scrambling to produce more and more content, develop ways to repurpose content and ensure you are achieving conversions, leads, or sales.

Referrals from friends, family, or colleagues really help drive purchases. Provide opportunities for people to add reviews and share your content with their network. Amplify positive ratings and reviews across social channels.

Ways to increase advocacy:

• Add social sharing buttons to every page on your website.

• Actively monitor ratings and review sites like Facebook Reviews, Google Reviews, Foursquare, and Yelp. Thank positive reviewers promptly and work to resolve any issues quickly for less satisfied customers.

• Share links to review and discussion pages via Twitter, and ask people to share their feedback.

Social selling

Companies are increasing their spend on social media advertising almost across the board. But no matter how much of your advertising budget you put into social, it’s important to consider how social impacts customers during each step of the shopping journey, from discovering new products to reading testimonials from real customers to making a purchase.

Word-of-mouth is still the biggest influencer in consumers’ decision making process, so amplify the voices of supporters and carefully respond to each inquiry and complaint. Tailor social content for specific platforms to ensure the right message goes to the right audience.

Khoros Marketing helps you simplify your social media marketing operations with one platform to manage all of your enterprise social accounts. Our software is built for enterprises with industry-leading support and product coaching to increase brand engagement and accelerate sales. Request a demo today to learn more.

Key features:

• Publishing, Planning, and Labeling

• Governance and Approvals

• Analytics and Reporting

• Paid and Organic Management

• Moderation and Listening

Success story: US Tennis Association

The United States Tennis Association (USTA) onboarded Khoros Marketing to expand their retail sales during the US Open, a tentpole event that comes and goes within just two weeks each year. By pairing their retail products with engaging social content, the USTA turned browsers into buyers, driving traffic from their shoppable gallery to the product page in their online merchandise store, directly impacting their bottom line.

Key results:

• 10X growth in clickthroughs

• 60% increase in page views

• 3x increase in viewer engagement