Facebook has been the touted as the next big thing when it comes to low cost marketing. I conducted a brief experiment on facebook to generate leads. As you know, lead generation can be quite expensive when conducted by marketing agencies, and also if you use Pay Per Click to get opt-ins and leads lists.
Firstly, set up a Facebook Group Page. Why not Fan Page? Well, if you set up a fan page, you will not get the ability to send a message directly into the inbox of your prospects. What you will get instead, is your message displayed on the wall posts. This is better than nothing, but keep in mind that wall posts are cluttered anyway, so I chose to go with the Group Page.
Do keep in mind that you do lose some flexibility with the group pages (you cannot personalise the landing page for non-subscribers vs present subscribers etc)
Technicalities aside, lets see how my experiment did
Experiment objective
1)To see how viral facebook can be
2)To see how quickly leads can be generated amongst targeted prospects
3)Feasibility of using Facebook to cater to prospects as an educational provider
My experiment involved running a campaign for a consulting firm interested to establish itself as a premium graduate branding firm. It will help graduates to brand themselves and get in front of employers more often and hopefully allowing them to secure jobs with better perks, salaries etc.
After setting up the Group Page, i proceeded to do the following
1)Craft the pitch (“Join this group if you wish to get more employment opportunities when you graduate etc”
2)Create an incentive for group members to in turn, recommend the group to others on their list of friends.
What incentive did i create? Well, most of the graduates were asking for CV revamp and edits. So I offered that to members who were kind enough to spread the word. They were also given a free seminar on Graduate Personal Branding.
The end result:
In less than 7 days, I managed to get 420 signups from graduates based in my own country. What I found amazing was that, had i used PPC to generate leads, that would have costed me quite a bit!
420 leads in 7 days is good by any standards, especially because 1)it is FREE 2)these are targeted audiences and 3)lead generation companies achieve similar results but charge much more, and does not have a relationship with the members
Let’s go through the steps again
Your company has to
1)set up facebook group page account
2)create a Unique Selling Proposition to educate prospects as to why they should join
3)create an incentive to encourage members to promote the page to their own list of friends.
4)Send regular useful, but NOT spammy information to the prospects. You need to nurture your lists, not spam them to death.
Remember, when you are selling anything, there is always the concept of the emotional bank account. You need to make small, regular deposits into your list’s emotional bank account by providing them with useful, meaty info. Building up your relationship with them this way, soon you will be seen as credible authority and go-t0-guy in your industry, so when it is purchasing time, they choose YOU as their service or product provider.
At the end of the day, your regular deposits will allow you to make emotional bank account withdrawals which would really boost your sales!
What I mean by this is- Having given so much free info to customers and prospects, when you finally do offer something for them to purchase, they would do so due to two reasons
- Knowing your free content is great value, makes them wonder how much better your paid content would be, hence they buy
- The relationship that you have built up with them subconsciously prods them to buy whatever you are selling
- You are now seen as an authority in your field or industry due to your social media marketing efforts
That’s all for now, just a small experiment for you to try. Don’t just look, go TRY IT!