What Is Social Currency and How Can It Help Your Business?
September 6, 2018
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One of the most important skills you can build is being able to generate more leads for your business. Imagine being able to build a predictable stream of customers. That’s what I want to help you with today, with 3 simple steps to generate more leads.
The ideas I want to cover all revolve about being genuine. If you aren’t genuine with your business, or what you sell, this probably won’t work for you.
It’s going to involve delivering value to your customers. It involves permission marketing, where you talk to customers on their terms and with their consent.
If you’re someone who doesn’t believe in doing these actions, and instead believes in spamming your customers, then you’ve already lost. These steps to generate more leads and sales won’t work for you.
However, if you believe in good karma and building brand equity through providing consistent value, then these ideas will work. Let’s jump in and discuss how you can provide value, nurture your customer relationships, and generate more sales.
The first step to generating more leads online is to start providing value to your audience. Providing value first is how you start attracting the right people to your business.
If you run a business, you have a target audience of ideal customers you’re trying to reach online. In turn, those people have unique interests and problems that you can tap into through content.
Value to them is subjective and likely revolves around those unique interests and problems. If you can tap into those areas through and provide value through content, you can start drawing potential customers to your business.
Content may be anything from video tutorials or influencer interviews or behind-the-scenes training. It can be the blog posts you write or social media posts you schedule or any number of things you post online for your audience to engage with.
Although the format of content you post is important to some degree, it’s more important we get you thinking about value.
Value is not a picture of your coffee you just purchased to get you through a gruelling Wednesday morning.
However, if your audience is other budding entrepreneurs, value may be a photo of your coffee talking about 3 strategies that help you prioritise your work on a gruelling Wednesday morning.
Did you just see what changed?
Value was added to your content because you provided something your audience wants or needs. They may need strategies to deal with gruelling days at work, and that piece of content just helped them level up. That’s value.
Let’s say you own a kitchenware shop, and you just shared how to correctly sharpen a knife for cooking. You may not have directly expressed that you sell knives, but your video explaining how to sharpen them is a lot more valuable than someone hearing about your latest range.
This not only positions you to set up that you sell knives such as the ones in the video, but it positions you as an expert on knife sharpening. If someone uses your video to go home, sharpen some knives and cook the best meal of their life, it adds to your credibility and their desire to do business with you in future.
The idea here is we are looking to create content that provides value to the select group of people our products can help. Why? Because it’s attracting potential customers to your business and showing them you care about helping them.
A good rule of thumb for thinking about value is to work on creating informative and interesting content.
It also means asking yourself:
What are the biggest problems my target audience are facing? How can I help them solve those problems?
If I was my ideal customer, what do I wish I knew more about in this particular area?
What does my target audience find interesting or what do they care about?
These questions and more help you get a clearer picture on what you should be talking about through your content.
If you’re really stuck, why not even ask your customers personally? Why not reach out to previous customers, or ask the next ten who walk through your doors about what they find the most difficult in your space.
The great part about giving value, whether it is through a blog, your social media channels or any other platform, is that you create good will.
It helps you build that initial interaction with potential customers, and shows you aren’t just here to sell them something. You’re here to help them, and to most people this means the most.
So, your first step is to go out and start providing value to your audience. Start creating content that is informative and interesting for your ideal customers.
If step one was all about attracting the right people to your business, step two is about creating a connection.
Through the valuable content you’re putting out online there should be more and more potential customers engaging with your business.
The next step is to gain commitment from this audience and to capture their information.
Why? So that you have an easy method of continuing to provide them value over time and nurture the customer relationship.
Capturing information and gaining commitment again must start with you thinking about what’s valuable to your audience.
In order to receive, you must give. What can you give your audience that is of enough value that they are willing and happy to hand over their contact details for you to follow up with them?
This is often referred to as a lead magnet, suggesting that this offer must be a magnet that draws in leads. However, like every magnet there are different strengths.
The strength of your lead magnet is all based on the perceived value you are providing to your audience. The more value, the stronger the pull, and the more likely they will want to hand over their information for what you have.
A lead magnet can come in many forms. It could be a free guide or eBook. It may be a webinar or short online course. It could even be a resource pack or a discount code.
Each of those different things I listed are just different formats of conveying some value to your customers. Additionally, different types of lead magnets work better for different industries or businesses.
Next, you need to create a landing page in which the transaction can actually take place. The obvious spot is to create a unique page on your website that provides information about the lead magnet, what value is given, and a form for your audience to enter their details to receive the lead magnet.
You may be wondering why even go through all this effort just to collect their details?
The reason is because by collecting their information, you can keep in touch and build a stronger relationship between you and them.
Not every person who interacts with your business ready to purchase at this very moment.
That doesn’t mean you should ignore every other person who isn’t ready to buy. Instead, you should think about how you can make the connection between you and them so strong that when they are ready to buy, you are their first choice.
Your actions for this step are to think of an offer that you’re happy to create and give to your customers in exchange for their information.
Okay, so at this point you’ve provided a ton of value to your ideal customers. You’ve also now exchanged a power piece of value in return for their contact information.
At this point, your job is two fold:
Continue to follow up and be a great guide for your audience. Act as their trusted adviser on their journey to achieving their goals and solving their problems.
Establish yourself as knowledgeable and experienced in your area or industry. Make it undeniable that you are the person they should trust to help them with whatever products or services you sell.
Now, this can be quite intimidating. That’s a lot of pressure to live up to when you’re trying to be the best in your industry.
However, that’s what it takes if you want to grow your business. You need to invest in knowing the most about your area. Be so good at what you do that when people think of *insert your industry* they come to you.
Now, it’s your time to follow up consistently. You have their information, and they trust you not to be some annoying sales person with it.
Also, it doesn’t help you anyway if you were. People are only one click away from unsubscribing from your email newsletter and telling everybody they know how annoying your marketing is.
So what do you do then? Well, you need to be genuine. That consistent value you’ve been creating… keep them in the loop about it.
Not only that. Open your inbox to feedback, questions and insights. Learn what’s troubling your ideal customers and what problems are keeping them up at night.
Then, go out and create content around it. Send it to them on a regular basis that works for them.
Over time, if you aren’t being overly annoying, you can send them an offer. Yes, it’s okay to send an offer to your database. You need to also make sure you’re generating sales.
However, at this point you’ve done all the groundwork to build trust with your audience. You’ve also created so much helpful content that in their eyes, you are the expert of your space.
Guess what that means… You’re the person a large majority of them will want to buy from.
Through giving value, keep in touch and providing them with an offer they can’t refuse – you’ve created a community of loyal followers who respect what you do. You’ve guided them to make better decisions, avoid mistakes and thrive in their life.
To most people, you’ve built a relationship that is worth trusting with their hard earned dollars.
This is how you effectively build a consistent stream of leads and customers to your business.
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