Social Media Strategy: Lead Retention

Mariya

Aug 26 2011

It’s one thing to generate new leads, it’s entirely another to retain those leads after their first experience with your internet marketing efforts.  Most consumers do not purchase a product or believe in a brand after just one visit to a company’s website or social media page.  Often it takes several visits from a potential consumer for them to feel comfortable and interested in your product or service.  While social media is a great way to generate new leads for your organization, the real objective is to build a long term loyal customer base.  If your social media sites are all about promotion and not about education, your lead retention is likely to be low.

Here are 3 tips in creating social media sites that not only attract new leads, but also ensure they will be back for more.

1.  Don’t Over Promote Your Products or Services

• There is only so much product promotion that any of us can take and we usually only take it if we have to.
• Consumers are not driven by promotional content, they are driven to find solutions to satisfy their needs.
• Consumers do not seek out promotional content on purpose.
• Web and social media sites that only promote how great their products are offer limited reasons for a consumer to need or want to revisit their sites.

2.  Create Learning Opportunities Through Educational Content

• If consumers learn something valuable to them while surfing your sites, they are likely to come back for more information in the future.
• Educational content gives you the opportunity to show off your market expertise and build credibility. Consumers like to buy from companies who know what they are talking about.
• Educational content helps with SEO (search engine optimization).  Ask yourself how many times you have searched the internet for the answer to a question.
• Learning about how or why something works is much more interesting and verifiable than reading why a product is the best when stated by the company who is trying to sell it.

3.  Collect and Publish Reviews of Your Products On All of Your Sites

• Consumers trust reviews from other consumers more than anyone else recommending a product.
• Reviews and testimonials allow prospective consumers to feel confident and educated when purchasing your product.
• Bad reviews afford you the opportunity to correct problems that your consumers are having and showcase your attention to the consumers wishes.
• If your sites offer objective reviews of your products, then your consumers are less inclined to leave your site and look for reviews elsewhere.

The best type of business is repeat business.  Repeat customers are showing brand loyalty and likely doing so because they feel some positive result after purchasing your product or service.  Repeat customers are also more likely to share their positive experience with other consumers.  The same holds true for retaining leads on web and social media sites.  If you offer content that is helpful and interesting to your leads, they are likely to feel positive as a result of interacting with your sites and will often be back for more.  The main goal for any of us in social media marketing is to increase high quality traffic to our different sites and convert that traffic into business.  It is easy when establishing social media content to instinctively promote our product repeatedly to show how great our company is and why people should do business with us.  However a quick analysis of our own buying patterns reminds us that we do not usually buy a product or service because the company selling it told us how great it is.  Instead we put value in companies that help us understand how to use their product, answer questions we have, share interesting information with us and tell us exactly what other consumers think about their product.

Creating content that educates, informs and explains is much more likely to foster repeat visitors than content that promotes, promotes and promotes.

What do you think?  Share with us company websites that you visit on a regular basis and why you continue to go back to them.

Mariya Newman

Follow me on Twitter (@MariyaNewman) and add me on LinkedIn!

 

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