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.

Learning-Twitter

- While many insurance sales tips will tell you to only talk about your own insurance offerings, the key to Twitter is to be a genuine presence, not a source of spam. So make sure that you tweet links to current news stories that relate to your point about health and life insurance.

- Respond to other tweets on topics that are related to health and life insurance. Strike up an interesting conversation with someone about insurance and you may find yourself with a whole list of brand new insurance leads

- Use HootSuite or another service that allows you to send out timed tweets. Set up a list to be sent throughout the day at spaced intervals. This frees you to write insurance policies for the insurance leads that you have gotten through Twitter, and keeps your presence constant, but not obnoxious, throughout the day. Try for an average of a tweet per hour of interesting, useful information. Of course, if someone mentions you in a tweet, then you can reply to them. The conversation that you strike up may net you additional followers and insurance leads.

- Use hashtags to categorize your tweets. Pick just one or two, such as “#Healthcare” or “#Insurance.” These tags become hyperlinks in your sent tweets, and if someone clicks on that hashtag on someone else’s tweet then an entire list of tweets with that hashtag will appear – including yours!

- Twitter limits your tweets to 140 characters long, which means that you need to be creative when writing your messages. Use url shorteners, like the one built into HootSuite or at http://TinyUrl.com, to turn long web addresses into only a few short characters so you can tell your followers why they should click on your link.

- You do not need to follow every Twitter user who follows you, but you may be interested to find out what your insurance leads are interested in, as that may help you to structure the information that you send out via Twitter. The best, and likely oldest, insurance sales tip is to listen to what your prospective insurance customers actually want and need so that you can provide it to them.

- Follow newsmakers in health and life insurance so that you can retweet their tweets to your followers, and in doing so provide valuable information to your insurance leads. If they read what you send and like it, they may retweet it themselves, reply to tell you so, or view your profile, and decide to visit your website.

- Keep your language professional and clean. While Twitter users often use slang and profane language, refrain from tweeting anything that you would not say to an insurance lead were you to meet in person. This way you will not damage your professional reputation.

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.

Image via Wikipedia

Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin are considered the next generation in communication tools. We think that these social media sites are silver bullets for prospects and business. However, filling out social profiles, friending, following, and pumping out statuses about our services is probably not going to help you make your sales quota.

Here is why:

1. Twitter is a social networking site not an Internet leads procuring site – If you were hoping to pick up debt leads by advertising your services on Twitter, forget it. No one would openly admit to their financial needs on a social networking site. In fact it will be very difficult to identify who needs your services and you may end up annoying your friends or relatives if you thought they needed financial packages to bail them out. People might start avoiding you.

2. Losing focus of your services and marketing skills– Twitter may prove distracting if you primarily want to rely on the Internet for leads. You may end up wasting your time reading up on other peoples posts or about your competition and eventually lose out on valuable marketing time. Contacting your potential debt leads should be your focus, not watching drama on Twitter.

3. Lower debt lead conversion – Internet leads from Twitter aren’t likely to result in significant volume and certainly will result in lower debt lead conversion. A bad experience with any contact on Twitter may also cause you to lose business not only from the contact but also from the contacts’ friends.

4. Continuous marketing efforts and not Twitter makes you money – Twitter in and of itself will not give you Internet leads or debt leads for business. You will have to focus all your time and effort networking and staying visible to get any business. This time can instead be used constructively to buy relevant leads from an Internet leads provider. Your debt leads can be purchased in reasonable volume and be efficiently targeted for your products and services with traditional Internet lead generation.

5. Compromising on Professionalism – Twitter is an informal site for social interactions. Posting your inclinations for acquiring debt leads or Internet leads may project you as a desperate sales person who has nothing else to do. It may also dilute your image professionally as your personal and business details get mixed with each other.

6. Lack of personalization – Debt leads business needs personalized solutions. Twittering client solutions is likely to cost you reputation and professional points. Debt customers will look at you as an ambulance chaser not a serious debt settlement specialist.

Social networking sites are best used for their intended purpose–socializing and building relationships. Using them indiscriminately to garner Internet leads may negatively impact your abilities as a sales person. If you want to make real money, you should spend your time talking to potential debt leads purchased or pursued through reliable Internet lead sites. Use the Internet selectively for your business and you will make more money. Not Twittering.

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.

Twitter is a swiftly growing phenomenon. It is full of people chattering back and forth about their daily lives and nuance. Many think it is another growing distraction and waste of time on the Internet.

I tend to agree, but those characteristics also give it some interesting possibilities for generating Internet debt leads. And here are some simple tools that allow you to give it a try.

1. Twitter.com - At the most basic level you need to have a Twitter account. I recommend this simply be a personal account, ideally with some simple version of your name as the user name. This will enable you to use the rest of the tools and engage potential prospects on Twitter.

2. TweetGrid - The primary way you will be looking for debt leads is to search for triggering terms and conversations that may indicate a customer looking for help. You can simply create multiple queries in TweetGrid to monitor for these specific keywords. TweetGrid also makes it easy to engage if someone asks for help or more information about debt settlement or relief.

3. HootSuite.com - This is a great little tool that allows for you to schedule future Tweets. The smart Twitter user understands that people in trouble with debt and on Twitter will go looking for experts. This is where this tool comes into play. Make sure you are loading up and regularly scheduling helpful Tweets about debt relief. This will help draw in a good audience of prospective customers.

4. Seesmic Desktop or TweetDeck - Keeping all of this organized requires a good command center. Try one of these. They will let you manage multiple conversations, searches, and even Twitter accounts. These tools make it easy for you to directly engage prospects on Twitter and keep track of the various conversations.

Twitter is still emerging and evolving as a real-time Internet channel. And there is definite promise for significant lead generation opportunity in the future. Learning to harvest this marketing channel now will certainly pay off in the future.

If you liked this post please sign-up to the RSS feed or get them via email and avoid missing the next Aged Leads Strategies best practice.

CALL 949-861-3122

I know many of you blog to build your personal brand or increase you flow of high quality exclusive leads. The question is are you branding that blog or just spitting out content?

3 Reasons to Brand Your Blog

I came across a nice article on CopySnips.com about branding your blog. He is talking to copywriters and for-profit bloggers, but we’re all in the business of making money so it seems like a pretty important topic. This is especially important if you use blogging for lead generation, which you should by the way.

Here are CopySnips.com’s main points:

• Branding makes you easy to find
• Branding makes you memorable
• You can create and reinforce your brand’s image

Winning Customers, Why Make it Hard?

Ultimately, we all know that winning customers is about having good service and a quality product. I assume you are working hard on that every day, but why would you make it hard to find your great business?

That really is the problem you are solving with branding. It is not the glitz and the glamour. It is the making it easy part.

You need to use you blog in an intelligent way to get prospects familiar and funneling into your sales process.

So, take a look-see what CopySnips.com has to say.

BTW, if you enjoyed this post, click here to retweet it to your Twitter followers

Related articles by Zemanta

• How Should You Select Categories for Your Business Blog? (wordsellinc.com)
• Search & Authenticity Are Key to Corporate Blogging (kylelacy.com)
• Here is one lead generation answer that works (marketing.blogtanker.com)
• Are You at a Blogging Crossroads? (davidrisley.com)

Are you following me on Twitter? You should be. I am constantly Twittering out ideas, tips, and news I pick up from my stream of daily feeds on debt, mortgage, and loan modification.

Here are some recent items you may have missed if you weren’t following me:

• Reverse Mortgage – Bank of America executive says it is part of retirement now
• Naked Capitalism – Debtors Revolt?
• Loan Modification – California Attorney General targeting loan modifiers

Twitter is a great way to tune into late breaking news on most any topic, but especially financial industry news.

So, if you don’t have a Twitter account sign-up for one today at http://twitter.com. In all cases start following me at http://twitter.com/troywilson

Related articles by Zemanta

• When Does a Reverse Mortgage Make Sense? (myretirementblog.com)
• Modifying a mortgage? Don’t pay a fee (money.cnn.com)
• While Debt Mounts, Couple Chases BofA Loan Modification (huffingtonpost.com)
• Equity Now Presentation (slideshare.net)
• The Pros and Cons of Reverse Mortgages (time.com)

Sales 2.0, social media, social networking, and other like terms are literally sucking the air out of the room. But, will it really work on it’s own? Will it work without “real” contact, real connections?

Here are a few really good lessons to review before you begin believing sales happen without phone and “belly-to-belly” interactions.

Funnelholic on the “Pounce Controversy”

This all started with a simple post/survey by Mike Damphousse on his blog asking, “Webleads: Pounce, pause, nurture, or wait?”

Funnelholic gave his initial answer, which then evolved into this essential conclusion: Phones still matter!

Please remember:

1. The phone still works.
2. For it to work, we need to get our phone resources connected with the right people (NOTE: if you sent an email to someone, I hope you sent it to a targeted list).
3. New technologies should increase our connect rates, NOT keep us from talking to people.
4. The phone is your best weapon in the lead-conversion rate war.

Need some more convincing? How about from the master marketer himself…

Seth Godin on Social Networking

Related articles by Zemanta

• Building Your Own Outreach List (nettiehartsock.com)
• Social Media Cynics in the Press Room (byronmiller.typepad.com)
• Facebook Use Grows By 700%; Maintains Top Social Networking Spot … (jonggunlee.tistory.com)
• Social Media and Socialising…Let’s not muddy the waters. (socialmediatoday.com)