When you hear the term “lead nurture”, the medium that probably pops into your mind is email. We have become so accustomed to hearing how everyone should be using it to generate and nurture leads that it’s easy to forget that social media plays a key role in our sales lead management processes.

If you take the time to nurture leads via social media and pitch products at the right moments, your sales figures are likely to grow dramatically. Studies show that people are 71% more likely to purchase something based on a social media referral, and especially when combined with email, social media-based nurturing builds the trust that will eventually lead to a sale.

But just using one social network to capture and nurture leads will not suffice, as the average netizen maintains an average of 5.54 social media accounts. If you are only trying to nurture a lead with Twitter, then you’re limiting the chances of that lead converting to a sale. As your competitors are doing the same on other networks like Facebook and Linkedin, they might steal your potential customers.

Therefore, to get the best results, you need a strategy that simultaneously nurtures leads across the various social channels that your audience frequents. It’s all about building brand equity over time by cultivating the impression that your brand is active and accessible everywhere.

As there’s plenty of information out there on basic lead nurturing tactics like auto-posting curated content and asking questions, in this article I am only going to discuss advanced tactics for cross-channel engagement, like custom audiences, social QR codes and Linkedin ABM ads.

If you’re unsure what these strategies are and how to use them, then read on to learn how to get started.

1. Custom Ad Audiences for Nurturing Email Leads on Social

At its best, cross-channel lead nurturing works by offering an immersive brand experience across all media channels – not just social media. For example, email can be tied in with social nurturing using a tactic like custom advertising audiences.

You can upload a list of email subscribers to most top social networks like Facebook, Pinterest and Linkedin and create campaigns to keep your brand and its messaging top-of-mind. You can even advertise and nurture these custom audiences based on their stage in the funnel. For example, an email custom audience containing a list of customers’ email addresses can see upsell offers, while a custom audience segment containing fresh subscribers can be shown a cheaper product to get them to make that first purchase.

This type of campaign can reduce your email unsubscribe rates too, because you can display the same message to the same person multiple times without annoying them repeatedly via email.

With custom audiences you can also add in blog posts and landing pages to your social lead nurturing strategy by installing a pixel provided by the social network on these pages – or by segmenting audiences using a content analytics intelligence tool. You can then display different ads to people who have visited these resources. This is especially powerful for brands that already receive a lot of organic traffic and can segment accordingly.

Thrive Themes

An example of a company making the most of the retargeting/custom audience feature is Thrive Themes. I recently read a blog post on creating quizzes on their website, and I checked out their Quiz Builder tool’s landing page, so that now, they are targeting me with the above Facebook ad.

They have other products as well, but because they are tracking with a pixel, they know that I am interested in this one.

2. Social QR Codes that Enable Channel Leaps

An easy way to get offline customers into your social lead nurturing funnel is through social QR codes. People can scan codes that refer them to your social media pages.

You can even create action QR codes where people who scan the code on their mobile device are directly made to perform an action like follow you on Snapchat, ping you on Messenger or join a Facebook group.

The QR codes can be displayed on brochures, visiting cards, display signs, posters and in so many other offline places, and you can also use them in your social profile images and posts, to keep your audience engaging with you on multiple channels.

Apps like Facebook Messenger and Snapchat let you create QR codes within the app itself. When people want to connect with an account, they can just scan it on your Messenger and Snapchat chat app and add you. You can also download this code and print it.

Once they connect with you, you can automate a lead nurturing process with the use of bots and when the lead turns hot you can take it to the next level with a live person. As both these networks are private messaging platforms, you can use them to nurture leads better. People will be more inclined to share personal information. Through these personalized messages you can sell products and even get people to connect with you on other social media by messaging more QR codes.

A shopping mall in Singapore used QR codes to get people to enter a social media contest that nearly doubled their Facebook likes. They got 4,400 new likes.

As you can see in the above photo, the mall used mascots dressed in QR code costumes to run this campaign.

You can also link QR codes to landing pages, subscription forms and other stages of your marketing funnel. To make sure you get the best results optimize this page for all your mobile devices.

3. LinkedIn ABM Ads to Laser Target Decision Makers

If you want your targeting to be even more specific than the above-mentioned custom audiences, you should give Linkedin Account Based Marketing (ABM) ads a chance. Using Linkedin ABM ads, you can target the exact companies or decision makers within a company and nurture them. This can increase conversion rates as your ads can be more specific.

For targeting companies, all you need to do is upload a .csv list containing the company names, and add whatever supplementary targeting parameters make sense, and Linkedin will ensure that people at these companies see your ad. Since Linkedin users often add their job titles to their profiles, you may want to set the targeting options to reach decision makers like CEOs, CMOs or chairpeople. And these ads don’t have to just be display advertisements, as you can send personalised InMail messages as well.

For maximum cross-channel impact – and media budget efficiency – you can combine Linkedin’s Account Based Marketing to drive website visits and email conversions, and then use pixels to retarget the person via another social network’s custom audience ads.

4. Surveys for Identifying Specific Community Opportunities

Asking your website audience quick questions can be a great way to learn more about them, so you can prospect for “lookalike” leads. Making sure your brand is active in many places is important, but maintaining steady engagement on the best social channels for your audience is even more important.

If you aren’t reaching people on their favorite social networks, where they are spending most of their time, you’re missing out on key nurturing opportunities. Just because someone was referred to your product or service by Linkedin doesn’t mean that this is their favorite social network. The only way to determine this information is through a survey.

As people don’t like spending too much time answering questions in a detail survey, you can use a survey popup tool like Hotjar and only ask one or two important questions about their social media preference.

You can also experiment with a detailed survey if you would like to. But to get the most out of this, you should ask the important questions first and leave details like age and gender for later. Even if they abandon the survey in-between, you will get answers to the questions that matter most.

5. Multi-channel Ticketing Systems to Streamline Service Messaging

As a result of your lead nurturing activity on various social media, customers will begin to communicate with you in a bid to get quick customer service.

Approximately 42% of people who share complaints on social media expect you to get back to them within a 60 minute period. Achieving this feat can be daunting and time consuming for businesses if you use every network individually.

This is the advantage of multi-channel ticketing systems like Zendesk, where all the queries complaints can be handled in one place. Tools like this can display all the tickets each person has left in the past, hence, you can use this information to offer more personalized customer service.

When you use a multi-channel ticketing system, you will also know if a person has complained to you through different media at the same time. And instead of getting back to them several times, you can simply just do it once, via smart, customizable boilerplate responses.

6. Social Hubs for Immersive Education on Your Website

A social hub is webpage where you display your social media activity via one tiled multi-feed. This includes the content you have posted on each page and the interactions you have had with your followers.

A great example is Cisco’s social hub. Here I can see content from their blog, YouTube channel, Facebook and more networks, all in one handy place on their website.

The main benefit of a social hub is that it can boost engagement by getting people to interact with your social media posts directly from your website. It will become one of the many media part of your cross-lead nurturing strategy.

Another big benefit is that it can increase authority and trust, as people can see all the quality content you put out in one place. It displays your expertise. You can even display social media updates praising your company. They can have an effect akin to testimonials and case studies.
You can easily set up a social hub using tools like Tint or RebelMouse.

Build Relationships Across Channels

So now you’re good to go with my six recommended advanced tactics for nurturing leads across social channels. You can get started today with the easier techniques like custom ad audiences, surveys and Linkedin ABM ads. You may do well to add the more time-consuming techniques, like social QR codes, multi-channel ticketing systems and social hubs, over time, as they require more planning.

Have you used any of the above tactics for nurturing leads across social channels? Would you like to add others to this list? Please leave your comments below.

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By Ryan Kh

Ryan Kh is an experienced blogger, digital content & social marketer. He is the founder of Catalyst For Business and contributor to search giants like Yahoo Finance, MSN. He is passionate about covering topics like social Media, branding, startups & entrepreneurship. Follow his latest tweets on Twitter: @ryankhgb.

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