Inbound Marketing For Australian SMBs

While your end goal for might be sales, the secret to success for lead generation with social media is to know where it fits into the buy cycle for your business. My view is that it's at the beginning, and should be utilized to build reach, awareness, rapport, trust and authority. So here are my 8 social media tips for small business owners and marketers:

The term “leads” in the title means “qualified leads” – read this article to learn how to attract qualified leads into your marketing funnel with an effective blog.

In my recent articles on blogging I write about how to use your blog platform to educate your audience. It may seem like you’re giving a lot of expertise and knowledge away to your competition but he truth is the benefit far outweighs the risk and here’s why.

Firstly, by sharing valuable content your audience is interested in and will share, helps to keep you top of mind, establishes you as an authority, builds credibility, educates prospects on your product and gives people a reason to share your product.

Secondly, if you focus on pushing out valuable content your audience will come to enjoy your articles, look forward to reading them – building rapport and trust. Once you have rapport and trust with your prospects they are more likely to convert to a lead and customer.

So now you have...
Awareness, expertise, credibility and trust.

The next step is lead generation!

To increase leads, make sure you have an offer on the side of your blog, just like I have the ebook and coaching series offers on this blog.  Personally, I hate being “sold to” or “pushed” and what I love about this approach to lead generation is that the education has been done on your prospects’ time and on their terms – without a pushy sales process to scare them away.

The art of lead generation and nurturing is to continue this added value as they move their way through the lead – buy process. Always giving the lead an opportunity to convert into a customer when they are ready.

A lead generation offer is an offer of information that the prospects want, in return for their contact information. What contact information you ask for needs to reflect the value of your free offer. Eg: A detailed research report is more valuable than a 2-page how to guide, so for the report you could ask for more than just the email, company name and contact name. You could ask for phone, company size or type or any other information that is valuable to you.

I’ve included links below for blogging and lead generation.

If you have any questions at all please use the comment section below. Happy blogging and lead generating.

Check out these blogging and lead generation resources:

9 Tips To Increase Leads From Your Landing Pages
Improve Lead Generation:  How To Understand Your Prospects Needs
Blogging Made Simple: Learn How To Write About What You Know

If one of your problems with blog writing is the planning and scheduling, you're not alone! I see questions on forums and LinkedIn groups around these topics all the time.

As you start a new year full of motivation and drive determined to achieve your revenue targets 2012, the key to success is to break it down into achievable tasks with an actionable timeline.

The purpose of this blog is to help you determine your goals and tasks for Q1 2012 and get organized with a plan and timeline.

If you’re wondering what the business value of social media is for small business or B2B – you're not alone, I hear this all the time from business owners.  The purpose of this blog article is to show you that social media is working and growing as a lead generation source and provide insight into how it fits into the overall lead-customer sales cycle.

To be successful at any type of lead generation whether it’s organic or paid you should set up a specific landing page designed solely for one offer and one purpose – to convert traffic to a lead.

Each and every time you create a new offer set up a specific landing page for that offer. Some examples are:

1.    Paid search to promote a webinar
2.    Organic search for a whitepaper promoted via social media and a blog
3.    A Call To Action (CTA) on your website to download an ebook

I can't believe I turned the page on the calendar over the weekend to start a new month. This year is flying by - way too quickly.

As a marketing or sales professional the first thing you want to do when you make a new connection is to pull them into your marketing “funnel”.  Tell them about your product or service, how great it is and how it would help them. BUT DON’T DO IT!

With the use of email, social media and mobile devices – we’re all experiencing information overload. How many emails do you get and not even open because its not relevant? Or direct messages from your social connections that are clearly a sales push, so you just delete it. DON’T BECOME ONE OF THEM!

Instead take the time to understand the process your leads take before they buy, and plan your lead generation and conversion offers accordingly.

Marketing Takeaway: To be successful at lead generation – plan your offers to meet your prospects’ needs, not your own.


Top Funnel Lead
This is a lead who has a problem/need that you could possibly provide a solution for – but they’re not ready to buy yet. 

To a traditional marketer reach means the audience who will hear their radio ad, see their TV ad or read their print ad. Another way to increase reach was to buy lists for direct mail and telemarketing. 

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail and old adage but an important one that is being lost with today’s technology.