Are you monitoring social media channels for your agency clients? You should be. Here’s a look at why it can help with lead generation and also a list of our favorite social media monitoring tools.
Whether your agency works with B2B or B2 clients, social media can be an excellent platform for lead generation. But if your clients have limited ad budgets, how can you help them find new leads and generate sales organically?
With social media monitoring, you can identify and nurture leads at all stages of the sales funnel.
Discover ways to drive sales with social media monitoring and get to know three of the best tools for the job.
Social media monitoring is the process of scanning social platforms for brand mentions, hashtags, and keywords—and then responding to them in a strategic way.
Because monitoring identifies social media posts that don’t tag your clients directly, this process highlights sales opportunities that would normally stay under the radar.
From identifying cold prospects to nurturing warm leads, your agency can leverage these tactics to drive sales for clients.
To drive sales for clients, you need to know their customers.
By tracking industry hashtags and keywords, you can identify their target audiences’ interests and learn what type of content they engage with.
You can use your social monitoring data to create more detailed buyer personas. Once you have more in-depth customer avatars, you can develop more targeted social media content and engage in more effective social selling on behalf of your clients.
As you scan your social monitoring inbox, pay special attention to the phrasing and terms that regularly appear in posts.
Identify terms that indicate prospects are starting to think about or seriously considering a purchase, so you can successfully guide them toward a sale.
Some may use pricing terms that reflect cost-related concerns, which you may be able to address.
Other potential prospects may use help-related terms that show they need assistance with comparing options. For example, the Evernote team seamlessly joined this thread about notetaking app recommendations.
Social media users may have amazing things to say about your clients—but they may not always add your clients’ @ when they post. When you monitor your clients’ brand names and related keywords, you can make sure you never miss a rave review.
Respond to these positive posts and share them on your clients’ pages.
By stating clients’ selling points in their customers’ own words, you can use authenticity to lead to more sales.
As you make social monitoring a habit, you’re likely to find that some social users routinely land in your monitoring inbox. Each time you interact with these highly engaged users, you have a chance to deepen their relationship with your clients.
In many cases, you can transform then into brand advocates who spread the word organically. This word-of-mouth marketing can increase brand awareness and drive sales at no cost to your agency.
For example, the Bagel Bites team’s response helped turn this casual customer into an engaged advocate.
When you follow the most popular hashtags and keywords in your clients’ industries, you can find the most important influencers in their niche.
With the right social monitoring tools, you can connect with influencers who have the biggest reach or the most engagement.
Once you build genuine relationships with influencers, you can forge official partnerships.
Then you can develop influencer marketing campaigns that expand your clients’ audiences and generate sales directly.
Not every post about your clients’ brands will have a positive slant.
Instead, you’re likely to uncover complaints about your clients’ products, rants about their services, or unflattering comparisons to competitors.
Rather than letting these posts slide, take the opportunity to respond in a positive or helpful way.
Use your social media monitoring powers to offer customer service, even if the original poster didn’t tag your clients. With this proactive approach, you can recover lost sales and win over frustrated customers.
For example, the Starbucks team used this opening to resolve a complaint and promote a new service.
Regardless of sentiment, any post about your clients can affect their brand reputation.
When you take the time to find and respond to social media comments—especially those without tags—you demonstrate your clients’ investment in their customers.
By showing that your clients care, you can turn lapsed customers into repeat buyers or convert prospects who are on the fence. This approach also allows you to enhance your clients’ reputations, establishing them as responsive, helpful brands.
When you add industry terms and hashtags to your social monitoring dashboard, there’s a good chance you’ll find mentions of your clients’ competitors.
Posts that express discontent with competitors or ask for alternative recommendations offer excellent opportunities to make a sale.
Flex your social selling skills by introducing your clients into the conversation. By sharing your clients’ unique selling points or explaining how they make up for a competitor’s shortcomings, you can win over other brands’ prospects.
To track mentions, hashtags, and keywords effectively, you need the right social media tool.
Take a closer look at three apps that can streamline your agency’s lead generation process.
When you want an all-in-one tool that handles monitoring and other social media tasks, Agorapulse delivers. This social dashboard offers monitoring for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. It automatically sets up branded search results so you won’t miss conversations about your clients.
With Agorapulse, you can also set up unlimited saved searches with campaign hashtags, competitors’ names, and other important keywords.
You can even add language and location settings or exclude certain terms to keep your results relevant.
Agorapulse also lets you label posts that appear in your monitoring feed. That means you can categorize posts, save them for team review, or flag them for follow-up. You can even automatically route posts to the sales team to make your lead generation process even more efficient. (Give Agorapulse a try via this free trial.)
If your agency already has a social media scheduling tool, then a specialized monitoring tool may be a better fit.
Brandwatch focuses exclusively on monitoring and has dashboards that support your market research, competitor analysis, influencer marketing, and customer experience processes.
You can use Brandwatch’s built-in monitoring tools to map the customer journey, gauge purchase intent, and identify new leads on behalf of your clients.
You can also find micro-influencers to boost your clients’ brand awareness and track the return on investment (ROI) from any partnerships.
Brandwatch also makes keeping an eye on your clients’ competitors easy. You can track clients’ share of voice, uncover sales opportunities, and understand where competitors fall short.
Keyhole is a hashtag tracking tool that can give your agency social media monitoring superpowers.
In addition to Twitter and Instagram, Keyhole also tracks Reddit, Quora, and other social platforms. That way, the tool can give you a more complete picture of the conversation surrounding your clients’ brands.
Keyhole’s market research features identify and track trends so you can help your clients stay ahead of the curve. Its brand monitoring features gauge customer sentiment, so you can better understand and connect with your clients’ audiences.
With Keyhole’s influencer marketing tools, you can find and compare the best partners for your clients. Then you can build relationships, turn influencers into brand ambassadors, and boost sales over time.
With these tools and strategies, your agency can offer more value and help clients increase sales. Put these practices to the test and start taking your lead generation services to the next level.