Social Prospecting + Outbound Prospecting = A Powerful Combination
There are 1440 minutes per day…and there are approximately: 1,209,600 new data producing social media users each day.
656 million tweets per day! More than 4 million hours of content uploaded to Youtube every day, with users watching 5.97 billion hours of Youtube videos each day.
There is the problem facing you. Content, content, content. So what can you do? Combat it with Consistency, consistence, consistency. Familiarity breeds opens and opens are the start to reading. Reading brings you to the start understanding. And reading is the start to understanding. And
understanding makes knowledgeable customers. So yes it might be getting harder to stand out from the crowd (which is why the social channels are making so much money selling sponsored posts). If you are starting from scratch with no followers or a very small audience on the social platforms like Linkedln, Twitter, Brandergy or a Facebook business page it can take from six months to two years to create enough traction to pull prospects in to you.
(fyi Larson & Associates has a follower growing plan to help fast track this for you)That does not mean you should not be doing a targeted, narrowly focused social selling strategy to fit in with your targeted, narrowly focused marketing plan. The more nitch directed you are the more positive your results will be. It does not mean it will require money but it might require more effort to get a to get the kind of marketing traction you need to get a positive return on your investment.
So what’s a poor marketing guy going to do? Combine inbound and outbound prospecting strategies and get double focus with your planning
Outbound prospecting and inbound social prospecting are natural partners. Social selling impacts familiarity, is an excellent tool for prospect research and awareness, and will create inbound leads even in the business to business setting. It is, however, a long-term, passive strategy that requires patience and is unlikely to produce immediate results or to ever scale to a size that generates enough inbound leads to allow you to reach your sales and income goals.
Outbound prospecting, on the other hand, is an active approach designed to fill the pipe line by engaging prospects in person, by phone, by e-mail, by direct mail, through social inboxes, or by text. It is the art of interrupting your prospect's day, opening a conversation in 15 seconds, setting an appointment, or gathering information.
When combined with social prospecting, outbound becomes
enormously more powerful. The combined benefits include:
• Building familiarity, which increases the probability of engagement
• More targeted prospecting lists focused on the highest-qualified prospects and individual buyers
• Leveraging triggers to open buying needs at just the right time
• Nurturing and educating prospects ahead of expected or projected buying time
• Research to gain contact information
• Influence the buying process as a coach
• Qualifying and self-qualifying
• Refining and making your outbound -prospecting message relevant
Once again, it comes back to balance—balancing your prospecting channels, methodologies, and techniques to be efficient and effective with your scarcest resource: time.
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