Social Media Boost Sales - Next Wave Marketing Strategies

You already know social media is great for swapping pictures with old friends and keeping up with family members, but it is also a very powerful marketing tool that, if used properly, can bring customers to you and keep them loyal to your agency. Here are some ideas you might try to make the most of the social network.

1. Spread the Word about Your Agency

Most people would rather buy insurance from someone they know and trust rather than from a total stranger. Make your prospects feel like they know you by creating accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. Of course, your agency should also have its own web page. As your name crops up on one forum after another, even prospects who have never spoken to one of your sales agents may begin to feel connected to your company, and that’s exactly what you want.

2. Participate in Social Forums

Just having an account on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ doesn’t necessarily mean prospects will just stumble across your information. You need to be an active participant in social media, posting or Tweeting several times each week. Some of your posts can be direct advertisements, but the rest should be service announcements, such as passing on information about a new law that affects insurance customers, or responses to other people’s posts. The more prospects you can engage online, the greater your chances of making a sale.

3. Respond Promptly to Questions and Comments

If a prospect reaches out to you by writing on your Facebook wall or sending you a message via LinkedIn or Twitter, respond promptly and suggest ways that your agency might be able to help. Prospects who get useful information after reaching out to you to engage online will trust your agency and will be more likely to think about you the next time they need to solve a thorny insurance problem.

4. Keep an Eye on Your Reputation

Social media monitoring is a critical part of launching a social network campaign. It involves going to each of the social media websites and looking for any mention of your agency’s name. If you come across a complimentary comment, thank the person who left it. If possible, offer a small token of your gratitude such as a free ebook or insurance report.

Social media monitoring is also useful because it allows you to catch negative comments about your agency and address them before they go viral. Contact the person who made the comment and work to give him or her a better experience with your agency.

It’s important that your sales agents realize that engaging in online social networks is an important part of their work, much like cold calling or following up with purchased leads. Emphasize that being a strong online presence can help increase your insurance sales.

Facebook-Ad-Targeting

In addition to this Facebook is a great place for businesses to market their blog, product, and services. The best thing about Facebook ads are the fact that it is highly targeted. Since Facebook collects a lot of information on each Facebook user, it is possible to place an ad that will be viewed by an extremely targeted audience. There is no doubt that Facebook advertisements are a great way to generate insurance leads. For more information about this, you should go online for insurance sales tips.

In order to begin the process of starting your ad campaign, you should go to the Facebook landing page and log into your account. At the bottom of the Facebook home page, there is a link that states “Ads and Pages”. Click on this link.

The ad manager should pop up. When this happens, enter your destination URL. Your destination URL is the Web page that you want your insurance leads to look at once they click on the Facebook advertisement. If you are promoting an insurance blog, you will put that URL into the box. However, if you want to generate insurance leads on a specific type of insurance, you should enter the link of the product page.

After you add the destination URL, you should enter the title of your advertisement. This should be your headline ad and should be creative enough to grab another Facebook user’s attention. The body of the text should also be enticing enough to make someone want to click on your Facebook advertisement. If you want to add an image to this add, simply click on “browse”. This will allow you to look through your computer’s files for a picture that you believe will suit your advertisement needs. Everything about the ad should be enticing enough to generate insurance leads. If you are not sure how you can create an enticing Facebook advertisement, you can look online for insurance sales tips.

Next, you need to add your targeted Facebook audience. Facebook allows you to choose who you want to see your insurance advertisement. You can be as specific as you want. In fact, the more specific you are, the more targeted your audience will be. For example, if you have a local insurance business, you should market your services locally. However, if you offer services to everyone in the United States, you should target only United States citizen.

After you have finished targeting your audience, you can click on the “Create a Campaign” button. You will then need to enter the name of the campaign. This should be something that you can remember easily. After you do this, you need to enter your daily budget. Your daily budget should be how much you are willing to spend each day on your Facebook advertisement campaign in order to generate insurance leads. You can choose either pay per click or pay per impression.

Facebook-Marketing-For-Insurance

to this Facebook is a great place for businesses to market their blog, product, and services. The best thing about Facebook ads are the fact that it is highly targeted. Since Facebook collects a lot of information on each Facebook user, it is possible to place an ad that will be viewed by an extremely targeted audience. There is no doubt that Facebook advertisements are a great way to generate insurance leads. For more information about this, you should go online for insurance sales tips.

In order to begin the process of starting your ad campaign, you should go to the Facebook landing page and log into your account. At the bottom of the Facebook home page, there is a link that states “Ads and Pages”. Click on this link.

The ad manager should pop up. When this happens, enter your destination URL. Your destination URL is the Web page that you want your insurance leads to look at once they click on the Facebook advertisement. If you are promoting an insurance blog, you will put that URL into the box. However, if you want to generate insurance leads on a specific type of insurance, you should enter the link of the product page.

After you add the destination URL, you should enter the title of your advertisement. This should be your headline ad and should be creative enough to grab another Facebook user’s attention. The body of the text should also be enticing enough to make someone want to click on your Facebook advertisement. If you want to add an image to this add, simply click on “browse”. This will allow you to look through your computer’s files for a picture that you believe will suit your advertisement needs. Everything about the ad should be enticing enough to generate insurance leads. If you are not sure how you can create an enticing Facebook advertisement, you can look online for insurance sales tips.

Next, you need to add your targeted Facebook audience. Facebook allows you to choose who you want to see your insurance advertisement. You can be as specific as you want. In fact, the more specific you are, the more targeted your audience will be. For example, if you have a local insurance business, you should market your services locally. However, if you offer services to everyone in the United States, you should target only United States citizen.

After you have finished targeting your audience, you can click on the “Create a Campaign” button. You will then need to enter the name of the campaign. This should be something that you can remember easily. After you do this, you need to enter your daily budget. Your daily budget should be how much you are willing to spend each day on your Facebook advertisement campaign in order to generate insurance leads. You can choose either pay per click or pay per impression.

The following insurance sales tips will show you how to talk to people using Facebook to get them interested and to generate leads. Facebook is a great tool both because it connects so many people and because people will be more likely to talk about tough subjects online than they will in real life.

1. Find Groups For Similar Topics
There are groups for everything on Facebook. You do not have to find groups specifically for life insurance, but you should find related groups. This may include groups that talk about all of the other things that have to be done at the end of a life — making a will, distributing property, paying off debt, and all the rest. These groups will contain people who are interested in life insurance, so you can contact them and create leads.

2. Target The Right Age Group
One thing that you can do is to keep your efforts aimed at people who are getting on in age. While it is true that all people should have life insurance just in case something happens, it is also true that older people are more likely to acknowledge the need. They are more likely to be thinking about it. If you target them when you are making contacts, you will have better success.

3. Target People Who Are At Risk
You should also look to people who have dangerous lives, people who may want life insurance because their profession puts them at risk every day. This could include police officers, firefighters, soldiers, and the like. These people often have groups relating to their profession where you can talk to a large number of people at once. Even if you cannot find a corresponding group, you can probably find out what they do from the information that is listed in their profile.

4. Be Active
You want to become an active member of the Facebook community. Start a Fan Page where people can check out the basics of your company. Talk on the discussion boards of all of the groups that you join about the benefits of life insurance. Start conversations on the wall of your own page. Go out and add people to your contacts list instead of waiting for them to find you. Anything that you can do to make it so that people see you can generate insurance leads.

The following insurance sales tips will show you how to talk to people using Facebook to get them interested and to generate leads. Facebook is a great tool both because it connects so many people and because people will be more likely to talk about tough subjects online than they will in real life.

1. Find Groups For Similar Topics
There are groups for everything on Facebook. You do not have to find groups specifically for life insurance, but you should find related groups. This may include groups that talk about all of the other things that have to be done at the end of a life — making a will, distributing property, paying off debt, and all the rest. These groups will contain people who are interested in life insurance, so you can contact them and create leads.

2. Target The Right Age Group
One thing that you can do is to keep your efforts aimed at people who are getting on in age. While it is true that all people should have life insurance just in case something happens, it is also true that older people are more likely to acknowledge the need. They are more likely to be thinking about it. If you target them when you are making contacts, you will have better success.

3. Target People Who Are At Risk
You should also look to people who have dangerous lives, people who may want life insurance because their profession puts them at risk every day. This could include police officers, firefighters, soldiers, and the like. These people often have groups relating to their profession where you can talk to a large number of people at once. Even if you cannot find a corresponding group, you can probably find out what they do from the information that is listed in their profile.

4. Be Active
You want to become an active member of the Facebook community. Start a Fan Page where people can check out the basics of your company. Talk on the discussion boards of all of the groups that you join about the benefits of life insurance. Start conversations on the wall of your own page. Go out and add people to your contacts list instead of waiting for them to find you. Anything that you can do to make it so that people see you can generate insurance leads.

The problem is that people have become very skeptical of cold calling — many people do not even answer the phone. They have also stopped reading magazines and newspapers to a large extent, so you cannot advertise in those publications with the same level of success that used to be possible. Everything has shifted to the internet. Therefore, it is very important that you use the internet as the powerful tool that it is to get leads.

The following insurance sales tips will show you how to use Facebook, the massive social networking website, to advance your insurance business.

1. Start A Fan Page
A fan page is basically a home base for your business in the Facebook world. People have personal pages; businesses have fan pages. You can list all of your company information on these pages, along with anything that you would want people who were interested in insurance to know. You can use these as a sort of net to draw people in. Somewhere on the fan page should be a link to your real website, a place that people can go to get more information. You can also list your other contact information, such as a phone number.

2. Promote Discussion
Facebook is all about communication. Once you have a fan page, start discussions on the wall. This is a place where you can make statements that other people can respond to. You could start a discussion about how important health insurance is or about the different kinds of plans that can be found. It does not really matter what the discussion is about. If it gets people talking, communicating with you, this is a plus. You just want to get them interested, and then you can contact them about buying a policy.

3. Get Your Name Out There
You will want to be active in other areas of Facebook. Do not just sit back and wait for people to find your site. Go out and find groups that look like they would be filled with people who need health insurance — there are probably groups dedicated to the topic. Talk to them. Ask them to become fans of your page. Add them to your list of friends. Anything that you can do to actively recruit Facebook contacts can generate leads since you will then show up on their information feed whenever you post a status update about insurance policies or deals.

4. Link Up With Other Professionals
Other companies have profiles on Facebook as well. Do not just ignore them. Try to link up with them — you may be able to work together to help each other. This is a great tool for connecting with other people in the business community.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Social Networking has become an effective platform offering a great opportunity to generate debt leads. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc are being increasingly used as an alternative strategy for generating concrete debt leads.

There are several creative ways that you can use to network and develop Facebook lead generation using the right techniques.

Choosing friends interested in networking – there are millions of people on Facebook for different reasons and it is for you to choose those that are interested in networking rather than dating and making new relationships. Having the right people to start with is your 1^st step towards attracting debt customers. Starting a casual discussion of mutually interesting topics and then guiding the conversation towards your goal of getting information from the people, will help you identify your potential leads.

Email subscriptions – this can be one of the best ways to maximize your network by including an email/newsletter subscription form on a side bar of your Facebook profile. This will help you build your newsletter distribution for capturing more leads and generating sales.

Make special offers – when someone is looking through your fan page of your Facebook business profile, it is possible that they have an interest in what you are offering or at least may be interested in the information and knowledge you are sharing. This can be the best time to show them a reason to learn more about your products and also offer them free trials. If you can provide them a link to contact your customer support or enable a live chat to answer their questions, this can be a great way to generate quality debt leads that can convert to sales.

Using a mix of free and paid content – you can create and publish blogs and post the link to it on your Facebook page. Sharing knowledge and informative content can greatly boost your networking success in generating leads.

However, it is important to understand that the secret to generating leads using Facebook is in providing useful information and not in marketing yourself or sounding like a sales person. Often people make the mistake of directly marketing their products and pitching their business on personal profile pages which can lead to their profile being deleted.

Following are some important points to keep in mind while generating leads on Facebook:

• Upload your photo to add more credibility
• Fill in all the necessary information below your photo so that people can easily know more about you instead of searching for your information. Also, add your blog URL.
• Join groups that interest you and state the reason for joining the group.
• Send friend requests to people you would like to communicate with but avoid too many requests at one time to prevent your profile from being deleted.
• Show active participation in your chosen groups and try to comment on the topic in discussion in the group.
• Try socializing with other people in your News Feed
• Show appreciation of other people’s posted work
• Share your knowledge and information through conversations and your blog posts, videos, etc and avoid any sales pitch.

Image via CrunchBase

Social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc have become a great online resource for generating leads if used correctly. They have become one of the best alternative mediums for introducing a business to the target market and building a list of potential leads.

This article outlines 5 best strategies that can be used to attract debt consolidation customers using twitter in the right way.

Build your network actively – the 1^st step towards building your database of debt leads is to add people who could be potential clients in your industry and frequently tweet valuable content. However, avoid any direct sales pitch or spamming people. It is also a good practice to re-tweet posts of other people as this indicates that you are reciprocating. When you do this, there are higher chances of your own posts and information being re-tweeted which means your potential leads can grow significantly.

Using twitter advanced search – the advanced search feature in twitter makes it possible to filter searches based on a lot of parameters. This includes complex filtering of keyword searches as well. You can create an advanced search around your topic relating to debt consolidation in order to identify your potential debt leads. For instance, if you want to know if anyone is asking about debt consolidation help or the procedure, you can do a search using the term debt consolidation.

Addressing people’s questions – most often people ask questions, complain about something or search for stuff on twitter and they are happy to have someone answer their questions. With this, you can send out tweets addressing their questions relating to your business and turn up debt leads with a higher success rate.

Converting your network of people – once you have built your credibility, rapport and trust with your close network, you can simply let them know what you do. You can also create good landing pages for converting your potential leads into profitable sales. It may not be possible to build trust with every person at the same level, but there may be quite a few people who may not have any problems if they were led to your landing page whose link you would have occasionally tweeted. When your visitors land on your tweeted URL or your landing page, they can know what you are offering, why they need your help and why they should choose you for debt consolidation help.

Tweet about what you do – you can share information on what you are working on and what you offer and when people find the information helpful, they may ask your suggestions and this will build better relationships to get you closer to your goal of procuring leads. If you have a blog with informative content about your business, you can expose the new audience to it on twitter by using TwitterFeed. TwitterFeed syndicates the content of your blog and distributes it across twitter, getting you more traffic and increasing the chances of finding potential debt leads.

These tips on using twitter for lead generation can help in maximizing the potential offered by this social network. It is important to use this medium correctly to attract debt leads and increase the sales closing ratio.

Simply adding these people to your various social networks is like stocking the pond. Here’s how I keep my radar up for opportunities.

Keyword Searches

Start with keyword searches on your various social networks. Many of them will feed you conversations and discussions in real-time. Just do a few searches and find a good refined flow of chatter about debt, credit cards, spending, budgeting, and other finance terms. Then blend in modifiers like need, problem, pay, or trouble.

These simple searches will start to show you a new world of consumer debt problems.

Facebook, Twitter, Google Alerts

Where should you search for these debt problems? Where the people are, naturally.

Start with the most popular–Facebook. Chances are as soon as you start adding Friends to your network you will see indicators of debt problems. However, for real debt lead (potential) volume I suggest start a Fan Page. Focus your Facebook page on debt education and you will attract debt problems like flies.

Second to Facebook, I like Twitter. The fundamental question is, "What’s Happening?" and boy do people tell you. Even something as personal as financial woes are flying across the network. Add to this the efficiency of Search.Twitter.com and you have another ready flow of debt relief prospects.

Finally, although not as sexy as real-time social media like Facebook and Twitter, Google Alerts is still a good source of debt leads. I add my debt keyword searches into Alerts and gobble up lots of people talking about debt problems on their blogs and social networks.

RSS Feeds

Watching all of these debt problems flow by can be overwhelming. Even worse it can be distracting and waste your time. The truth is most are not ready to close, or even inquire into your debt relief services. That means you need to find an efficient way to monitor these streams over time. RSS is the best solution.

Most of these social networks and real-time searches can produce RSS feeds. You don’t really have to understand the details of the technology, but if you subscribe to them in a RSS reader (Google Reader) you will have a steady flow of social media debt leads to supplement your debt lead buying.

Lead management continues to pick up steam in marketing and sales circles. As more and more consumers move online for their mortgage and debt relief research smart businesses are adjusting.

Why do you need to adjust? Because when mortgage and debt customers go online they behave differently.

The Good Old Days

In the good old days customer found you because of a post card, the yellow pages, an attractive storefront, or a referral from a friend–today, they Google you. So, why are things so different?

In the old days there was a tendency for you to get contact right when the customer was ready to do business. For example, they already had a house picked out, they had made the decision to refinance, or they were at a breaking point with creditor harassment. Google and the simplicity of the Internet has changed this timing.

Now people search Google just out of curiosity or interest. As a result they come across information about mortgages and debt settlement that makes them wonder, “Should I be looking into these things?”

By the way, this is why aged mortgage or debt leads can be so powerful. People that don’t get this change in consumer behavior are dropping these leads on the floor. And you are getting them for pennies on the dollar.

Sales Cycle is Longer

The obvious result is that you are going to get prospective customers into your sales pipeline a lot earlier. This is great. Or is it?

There are many missed opportunities because of this shifting and lengthening of the sales cycles. That is unless you have a process to manage it. This is where lead management can be a competitive advantage.

Loading in leads into my lead management system can put my follow-up on autopilot-sending emails, reminders to call, or responding to task items. Unlike spreadsheets, sticky notes, and legal pads lead management is like a virtual assistant. It keeps me top of mind with all my clients.

Loyalty is Harder to Gain

Another important factor to consider is that relationships, real relationships, are harder to form with the rise of the Internet. Sure you probably have hundreds of people on you email list, Facebook, or Twitter but none of them touch the customers you used to meet at their kitchen table.

One of the ways to combat this distance is using lead management to give them a more frequent and personal feeling. Again, with the ticklers and emails that remind you to just check-in and say, “hi!” will get you to a real relationship faster.

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