Leveraging Social Media & Viral Marketing in Selling & Lead Generation as a Sales Professional, Association Membership or Military Recruiter – it’s all the same rule book!

Connecting where your market really lives is critical to keeping your name, brand and offer top- of-mind in the prospect pool and with the current client base you have. Making sure your name is where the market is, is a critical factor to success.

McDonalds and Marriott taught the World decades ago that one major and compelling factor to marketing and positioning is – location-location-location. Today, companies like Facebook, Yahoo, Pinterest, Amazon, Zappos, Alibaba to the pop icon of the day, all teaches us that means what space do you occupy in the social media world of your market?

How do you keep ‘YOU’ relevant for that market, and most importantly once done, how do you leverage that for lead generation connectivity and more business – this is the new force multiplier for account development and your portfolio expansion?

Whether you are positioned as a B2B, B2C, C2C or hybrid of something in the middle, applying social media into your arsenal of ways to reach the market and stay connected to the market is the new normal!

Think of social media as another channel in the media, communication, connectivity arsenal. And your ability to integrate all of these as appropriate and when appropriate, provides you with a market advantage.

Successful selling professionals across a myriad of industries, as well as educational and military recruiters that I have coached for decades have recognized that while many of the traditional platforms of marketing, canvassing, calling and selling remain the same (and are critical), it is recognizing that some of the distribution channels for reaching the market have changed, evolved, and if embraced can increase your over-all effectiveness substantially – you ca reach more, faster, directly and with less to no revenue involved!

While an organization can have dedicated personnel and assets to this new social media space and viral marketing channels, it is also incumbent upon the actual selling professional to occupy this space on an even greater micro level, be more organic, and make it fit your personality and leverage your advocates (Centers-of-Influence) to become viral.

The relevant messaging and push/pull marketing TouchPoints™ are actually endless and while this can be an undertaking that is little additional effort on your behalf, it can become your greatest selling point, branding play, lead generation channel, and greatest way to reach mass market with no additional revenue funding!

Generation Millennial and Z may be aware of the traditional old world rules are relevant still, there are new rules for engaging the mind-share and movement of markets as well – social media platforms and accelerated connectivity that are their centers of gravity.

Whatever the social media platform is that your market is engaged with, that is the social media market for consideration!

Be mindful that Social Media is great at brand building, brand awareness, and building a following, but seldom does Social Media translate into immediate sales transactions, so remain focused on the complete selling process.

To increase your market mind-share and market-share, explore these ideas and allow your own creative juices to flow to reveal even more powerful strategies and tactics for making your mark on the market place.

Consider these strategic and tactical actions daily, and let your creative mental DNA expand and add more SOPs to the list:

• Connect your FaceBook account (Your Page or a Fan Page), with your LinkedIn account, with our Twitter account (and any other social media account that your prospects live within and that your advocates are addicted to), so when you send a brief “action oriented” message or update to one account it replicates across every account simultaneously.
• Connect your Website Home Page account, with your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (and other relevant social media platforms) account, so when you make informational, promotional, awareness updates to our website it replicates across your social media platforms and unique followers. And reverse, as you post to any one of the other social media platforms it reverse replicates on tour home website page(s) accordingly and appropriately. This allows you to leverage the social media platform power and increase you reach into larger on-line communities. If you for example retweet a message of yours or one you are following it populates onto and across our platforms …
• Remember it takes at least seven relevant social media messages, alerts, updates to capture a person’s attention.
• Anytime you are meeting with a high-profile contact that would have leverage on others you are attempting to attract, Tweet that.
1. Utilize instant communication platforms to inform your market and potential prospects where you are, when you will be somewhere
2. As you are meeting for example at a trade show/informational booth or table, at a job fair, college fair, business networking event, etc., you could send continuous updates out thereby letting others know to come by and see you or join in on the fun you are having
3. If you will be meeting with new customers or influential others (COIs), have then duplicate your efforts and push Tweets of other social media platform messaging connectivity to their followers about you and to stop by
4. If you just made a great sale, share that as a 411 with your platforms, this can create buzz and energy for others to want to have the same experience with you
• Allow people to join you when you may be meeting socially with others, make this a conversational community.
• If you are at an event where there is signage or something visually that can spread your message without you having to type or say it, shoot a picture and post that to your FaceBook page, Tweet it, Snapchat it, Instagram it, Pinterest it, onto your own Website, etc.
1. In the picture ‘tag’ and identify everything within the pic that can have magnetic appeal with others in the social media search world
• If you are at an event where there is signage or something visually that can spread your message without you having to type or say it, shoot a picture and send to your advocates, followers and leverage onto the ‘hosts’ social media platforms by strategically ‘hash- tagging’ their name, brand, key personalities.
1. In the picture ‘tag’ and identify everything within the pic that can have magnetic appeal with others in the social media search world
• If you have just had a selling victory, share that through the words of the customer to your FaceBook page, Tweet it, Snapchat it, Instagram it, Pinterest it, onto your own Website, etc.
• Every time you make a selling transaction happen, that should always be a moment of share, and have the customer (new customer using your product, new member that joins your organization, you have just enlisted someone into your Service, etc.) do the same to their “followers” and to their social media space (it is about mass expansion to your market space and more importantly the other persons’ market space of followers and contacts!) …
• Here is where the power of social media can generate instant leads for you and where you can find your next sell. Follow the LIKES for instant lead generation and leverage this smartly.
• Every time you make a sale or enlist someone into your organization, shoot a picture of them with you (you are the representing agent and thus market product that must be recognized!) and have them post it to their social media platform
1. Then for several days after this sale/enlistment follow that person’s social media platform posting, stop-in to their social media platforms home page where they posted your picture and monitor who has hit LIKED on their photo,
2. Click on that Like and go to that new contacts social media platform and do a cursory review to determine if they look like a Prospect, and if so, click back out and onto the original social media platform page of your customer, and click a message (or text them or call them!) and have your new client-customer arrange a three-way meeting ASAP with the new LIKE Prospect; Leverage your new customer/enlistment to assist you in making your next sale!
3. Accelerate your social media lead generation by … Take this one level richer, do the same with your competition. Regularly review their social media platforms, if you know your direct selling agent competitor, monitor their social media platforms. look at their social media platforms for new posting of clients- customers, go their new customers’ personal social media platforms and see what their LIKE followers may reveal to you for lead generation and do the same here as Point “a” and “b” above.
• 80% of sales are closed/made on the fifth contact or beyond, so allow social media to compliment your Touch-Points and accelerate the mind-share you own!
• Critical to why most selling professionals are really mere order takers and accept whatever the market will provide, 48% of sales people never follow up; Or follow up in a timely manner to have any positive impact on the initial contact activity!
• My research with the largest sales forces in the Nation over the past twenty years (Pfizer Pharmaceutical, ARMY National Guard, IBM, Anheuser-Busch, ABM, and more) is that 12% of sales people only make two to three contacts and stop; 25% of sales people make a second contact and STOP; Less than 10% of sales people make more than three contacts with a prospect or lead!
• Another reason most selling professionals never reach apex success, is that 70% of sales people have and use no systems on a regular basis to manage their book of business. Make your social media a systematic part of your daily efforts – Coffee and Tweet to start the day!
• If your organization is fortunate enough to have in-house or out-sourced Communications/PR/Marketing/Public-Affairs/Social Media Marketing/Etc. individuals, teams, departments, or agencies connected to you, THEN IT IS CRITICAL THAT all parties work together whenever possible and synergistically leverage what one another is doing with same HASH-TAGS, LINKS, and as lead source generators … And do so across all appropriate social media platforms - FaceBook page, Tweet it, Snapchat it, Instagram it, Pinterest it, onto your own Website, etc.
• Ideas of meaningful communication:
1. Any new service offer or product offer you have, you should build a social media announcement or blitz around other traditional announcement/marketing campaigns;
2. Any new customer endorsement, testimonial, or affirmation can be communicated;
3. Celebrating another person’s accomplishments, accolades, awards, notations can be communicated;
4. Any urgent call-to-actions; any celebrity engagements for your industry, business, space should be communicated;
5. Have a regular communication update or blog or bulletin board of posts or re- posts from individuals within your organization with exciting messages that your prospects and advocates could become addicted to following;
6. YOU could spread around the content development for posts by assigning a regular brief from key constituents within your organization, so the message is not always coming from you;
7. The ideas are endless, so let the creative DNA flow here …

Why you need to be proactively in this space … If not, your competition will be and they will make the sells your miss. And not necessarily because they have a better value proposition, it is because the market can’t find you, does not see you, or you are not easily accessible!

Keep in mind that once acknowledged that the social media space was a place for Generational X/Y and Millennial’s to hang-out within, today the reality is if you do business with Generation Z, this is their norm address. And some research is even revealing that a ghost demographic and possible new explosion in traffic is actually with the BabyBoomer Generation – so if you have prospects and customers here or even influencers here now you have a means to reach their mindshare.

Once widely accepted that on-line internet traffic and website access was through traditional computers, social media today is an on-the-go instant connectivity reality via a range of virtual mobile devices. And these devices while not always accessible for live phone conversations, can be used in signal (text/picture) transmission 24/7.

If you want to know how to connect with your market and what messages grab their attention, simply watch, observe, and ask. Play where the market is. Better yet, predict where the market is evolving and be there when they arrive!