Video Embedded in Social Media Marketing Drives Increased Revenues and Lead Generation

Sales lead generation is a cornerstone of marketing.  The Twitter social media network is testing “lead generation” ad units because generating leads drives purchases and revenues is what advertisers want.

In a perfect world, marketing works to generate leads that are handed off to the sales team.  The sales team, in turn, qualifies the leads and converts prospects to customers. A sales team’s arsenal uses an array of tactics including: cold calls, webinars, trade shows, and social media outreach to funnel leads through into the sales cycle.  The new darling of lead generation marketing is social media.

According to Jim Keenan, 78.6 percent of sales professionals use social media.  Social media marketers and sellers are 23 percent more successful than peers relying on traditional methods.  From a time management standpoint, sales professionals spend between 5 to 25 percent of their time using social media to generate leads and sales.  Today in the new media environment, sellers leverage social media for numerous tasks to save time and money, reach a wider, targeted audience, scale marketing efforts quickly, and obtain tangible leads.  These tasks include:

• Networking
• Prospecting
• Research
• Referral Building
• Closing

Among sales professionals, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are the most popular social media networks, and YouTube is fast on their heels.

Social media simplifies the art of connecting with people efficiently and cost effectively.  However, engaging in social media is not a one-way street of just taking and not giving.   In fact, customers are very savvy discerning what is a simple sales pitch and being offered something of tangible value along with a sales pitch. The goal of successful marketers and sales teams is to share value-added content that educates the customer and helps them understand the value proposition of your product or service.  Flimp refers to this as ‘value-added customer engagement’, and it often more important than just “getting a lead” or an “introduction.

A proven method to provide value-added engagement with customers is to use video communications as part of your sales process.  Video marketing, or as some like to call it video communications, being included as part of your sales marketing strategy results in increased customer engagement and social media relevancy as a trusted resource.  In fact, sales video generates the best ROI and is a top sales optimizer, according to many reports.

An example of how to easily execute an effective social media video communications campaign is the use of video postcards.

The portable nature of video postcards naturally aligns with social media.  Here is an example of a video postcard that was shared across Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter:

And, video postcards without analytics and tracking to see how the performed are worthless. FLIMP video marketing software and its easy-to-use platform provide any sales team with the essential element of real time lead generation tracking and updating.  One feature of the Flimp video communication platform is that as viewers interact with the video postcard, real-time prompts are sent to sales person empowering them to contact prospects immediately, and maybe even close the sale.

– – – – –

Jenn O’Meara is the Director of Client Services at Flimp Media.  With a diverse digital marketing communications background, Jenn enjoys working directly with Flimp Media’s clients.  A graduate of Providence College and Boston University, Jenn can be found rink side most winter weekends cheering on the PC Friars Hockey teams.  In the summer, look for Jenn at the beach.