Welcome to this week’s guide. Now, social listening is a powerful marketing strategy with a lot of questions on the internet. A lot of businesses want to know how to use this very strategy to boost their sales, traffic, and leads.

Social listening is a way of tracking the mentions and popularity of a brand by getting information from different social networks and even search engines.

And looking at the fact that about 30% of tweets that tweet about a brand (on Twitter) do not include the brand’s twitter handle. This means if you’re not finding a way to track your brand or product names, you’d be missing out on about 30% customer feedback.

That’s a lot of money you shouldn’t leave on the table!

Customer service is probably the easiest and also one of the most cost-effective ways to supercharge your business growth.

Rather than paying advertising companies tens of thousands of dollars, you literally invest a little into your brand’s effective customer service.

I mean, you won’t have to find more customers or clients but focus on retaining existing customers for your business.

If you employ certain social listening techniques, whether or not a user mentions your social media handles or tags your pages, you can simply extract these insights and find out what’s buzzing on your business.

But first, let’s look into what social listening is. We’ll also cover what social listening for lead generation is and how to develop your unique social listening strategy for your business.

What is social listening for Lead Generation purposes?

To begin with, social listening is simply monitoring your social-media-sphere for any customer feedback and direct mentions of your brand, discussions or specific keywords or your competitors.

“It’s used for customer support and to listen to what people say about your products”

Yes, This study (by American Express), found that a customer shares his/her experience with more people if it’s a negative one and to twice lesser if it’s a positive customer experience.

It’s also true that 59% of Americans who use social media report that social customer service has helped them resolve customer complaints.

This makes its SUPER important for customer service.

But it definitely does more than customer service!

But it’s not just limited to that…

Data shows that 80% of consumers do research or ask online before making a buying decision.

Don’t you do that?

Most times, we search through a brands website, LinkedIn, Instagram, check comments or even make calls just to learn more about a business before you become a customer.

In fact, it’s another effective way to generate leads for different kinds of businesses. And how’d I find this very strategy?

A few years back, my hosting went down (technical issues from the hosting company) and I went on Twitter to complain about the service.

Just a few minutes later, another hosting company responded to my tweet and told me how to go about it and provided a link for guidance (note that they didn’t try to sell their hosting packages or services).

I was so excited, I ended up moving to the other host after my website was due on the former. I mean, who doesn’t want a great customer support team ready to get your website back up in situations like that?

Become an active social media listener and you’ll be able to easily generate great leads, create content your audience loves. And by doing social listening for lead generation, you’ll be killing multiple goals with one stone.

That’s when we understood the real power in not just listening to your brand name, but using it to find potential customers & clients for your business.

Definitely you need a good tool for great Internet monitoring and analyses. This is of absolute importance and will save you a lot of time and money. But in this long guide, we’ll also reveal to you some strategies to generate leads without having to invest in tools like Brand24, Twilerts or Mention.

For example, some of these tools can cost anywhere from $500 per month to $10,000 per year.

Quite much right?

In short you can do a lot by employing an effective social listening strategy. You would be able to monitor what social media users are sharing about your business then use whatever insights you get to grow your business.

4 Techniques & Tools are Commonly Used for “Social Listening” to Generate Leads?

Here:

Technique #1: Twitter Advanced-Search Hack

This hack is probably one of our favorite yet unused ways to find leads. This simply involves you making use of the Twittersphere to find potential clients or customers for your business.

I learned about this very hack when I got started looking for Freelance clients for my business. And by using this very tool, I was able to run searches and find businesses whose tweets mentioned things like…

“Hiring”
“Join our team”
“Join the team”
“Freelance graphics designer needed”
“I need a freelance”
“Buy shoes in”

Just anything that could lead you to businesses that have money and are willing to pay already rather than going through the process of finding and convincing cold leads for your business.

Get the idea?

Think about the keywords that your target customers and clients are possibly searching for online and that’s the key!

You basically, listen to what companies are tweeting about and finding real business leads you could follow up with.

So what I do is I find tweets of businesses that are hiring or have a job opening slot. This is really easy to use, with the help of the Twitter Advanced Search features.

The better you understand what your ideal business clients or customers say online, the more quality leads you’ll generate – not just by using the Twitter Advanced Search but by using Twitter as a whole for your brand.

Technique #2: Twitter Alerts (use tools like twilerts for daily, weekly or monthly alerts).

Talking about Twitter, another way to have a constant pour of potential customers and clients is by setting up periodic email alerts that send you notifications whenever a Twitter account tweets anything related to the keywords we mentioned before.

For example:

“Hiring”
“I need a freelance”
“Buy shoes in”
“Best store in”

This is also a powerful yet unrecognized way to attract business leads without having to spend $100s weekly on ads.

Here’s how to set up Twitter alerts using Twilerts:

Technique #3: Create lists to monitor their social activity on Twitter and spend a little time researching their feeds.

This little known strategy works but is avoided by a lot of marketers because if we’re being honest, it’s time consuming.

Yes, that’s correct!

Here’s how it works:

You create a list on Twitter with a list of your competitors Twitter handle. Then you monitor their tweets, and then know who’s their customer and who’s about to be their customers.

How’s this different from setting Twitter alerts?

Well, this ensures you monitor each and every tweet your competition puts out by simply monitoring their presence. Setting social media alerts for this won’t work.

Twitter lists have been a long term marketing strategy for a while now since it’s really years ago.

What you need to do is to create one feed from different twitter accounts.

Rather than viewing a feed with 100s or even 1000s of all the accounts you’re following, you’ll only see tweets from certain accounts that you select.

I personally still use this strategy to build relationships with influencers in my space.

I simply created a Twitter list that I call “Influencers” and instead seeing random tweets from my “following”, I see tweets from the influencers I added to the list.

Here’s how to set it up:

Log into your Twitter account and on your profile, click on “Lists” and click on the “create new list” button.

Put the name you want and add a little description. I prefer to put something that easily reminds me of the reason I created the list in the first place.

Next, toggle on “Private”. We really advise keeping this Private thus the people or accounts you add won’t be notified when you do.

And just to be clear, you don’t need their permission to add them to your Lists (when set Private, they won’t even be notified).

Finally, Listen to What Generates Buzz and Create Your Own Blog Content on it.

Business Blogging is the Answer to More 2X More Clients in 2019

And like we always say…

“People know how important creating blog content is, they just don’t have the time to”.

Here’s the thing…

Every Business wants to achieve one thing or another…

Every agency dreams of one thing or another…

This could be more clients, more brand reach, more traffic, leads, authority or even brand exposure…

I wouldn’t pretend to know what yours craves but to reach the goal you’ve set, you need your business to reach as many targeted people as you can…

Instagram could get you a handful clicks to your agency website or bring you clients but Business Blogging would get you 10X…

Let me ask you a question…

If you don’t already blog and you are forced to make a decision to invest in business blogging right now OR NOT.

What would you say?

There’s a high possibility that you’d say NO right?

Most Likely YES!

And that’s totally okay because more than half of digital agency owners don’t know the power and importance of business blogging.

30% of digital agencies don’t have a blog. Most of those that do, either publish a few times in a year or most times don’t publish at all…

Now, about 9 months ago, I really wanted to grow my traffic, leads and eventually sell a book from my blog.

I started pumping SUPER detailed, long form and engaging blog content almost every week and within 3 months, my blog totaled about 12 posts.

Each post has a minimum of 2,500 words with a post going as much as 10,000 words and a few around the 5,000 word mark.

This caused a tremendous growth in my traffic (went from literally nothing to 5,000 monthly users) on my new website.

And also tripled my email SignUps in less than 2 weeks.

In fact, after working with one of our clients and published just a few posts, we’ve attracted over 91,000 visitors to our client’s app website.

Would you love this type of result for your business?…

To achieve this, we basically did 3 things;

1. Published well-researched, value adding (mainly how tos) & detailed blog posts that had 2,500 to 5,000 (each) at least twice every month.

2. I promoted the hell out of it using mainly influencer marketing, twitter & pinterest marketing.

3. Rinse and repeated!

All blog posts have at least one hundred (100) social shares with the highest having 6,000 social shares followed by a 3,000-shared article.

How does it affect your SEO (Google Rankings)?

Research by hubspot shows that companies who Blog receive 97% more backlinks to their websites.

I guess you know what Google thinks about backlinks and how powerful it is to website owners. It can make or break your traffic…

I’ve personally used business blogging to get exactly 1,814 backlinks to just a single blog post on my website, causing it to appear on several #1 page rank for top competitive keywords beating huge company websites like Forbes.

And that very post has been the #1 client source for my business over the past year.

Here’s how:

Write and publish professional blog content that’s detailed & engaging enough to attract & keep readers.

Long form content performs better thus keep your articles around 2,000 to 5,000 words.

Create a blog promotion strategy to reach as many targeted people as possible using strategies like email reach outs, influencer marketing, twitter marketing and SEO.

Finally, use effective lead generation strategies to grow our email lists.

How to Find What Content is Hot in Your Market

To succeed with content listening, you have to do a little research on what content is drawing the most shares, attention, links and searches using a tool such as Buzzsumo or SharedCount.

Tools like that can be expensive thus not possible for every business to get. But not to worry, a lot of them offer free trials you can take advantage of and learn a little more about your niche.

Buzzsumo.com costs around $100 monthly but offers a 14 day free trial. During this period, you can have access to some of the major features Buzzsumo brags of.

What content gets the most shared and what gets which backlinks?

With Buzzsumo (or a tool like aHrefs), you can even see which sites links back to any content online.

Another strategy to employ is to subscribe to their blogs using tools like Feedly. In fact, here’s more you can do:

• Find and follow their YouTube channel
• Find and follow their Slideshare decks
• Subscribe to their Yelp RSS feed. And by doing this, you’ll monitor their reviews online.
• Find out where their executives speak and what conferences they attend.

CONCLUSION:

Lead generation is a broad topic for businesses and the ultimate advise we can give your small business is to test, use analytics and figure out what works for your type of business.

It’s evident that finding the right strategy for your business is the best thing to do; rather than chase any new strategy that comes in or trends on the Internet.

Think about it…

Reach out didn’t work out for me but do you know how many businesses, entrepreneurs, startups and companies have generated millions of dollars in revenue from sending cold reach outs?

Countless right!

Likewise countless businesses went out-of-business by focusing on content marketing. But even more have thrived by focusing on effective content marketing strategies.

Here, we try to make a balanced mix of different marketing tactics to ensure we offer the best for our clients.

Thus, testing and tracking is key!

Social media listening may not be for your brand. For example, if you’re a small business without much capital to invest in social listening tools then you might want to invest that in other ventures like self education.

Get the idea?

On the other hand, medium sized to huge brands with marketing budgets can employ these listening and monitoring techniques. Having a great plan and an efficient social listening tool would be a great way to start.

Social media monitoring tools are best used for general market research projects, and for brand listening. They yield results that are far too unwieldy for more general lead prospecting purposes which will require a much heftier budget to get any use out of it.

Thanks for reading this guide, let us know what you think in the comments and don’t forget to subscribe to our exclusive newsletter as we publish great marketing content here regularly.