Nurturing Leads With Social: How to Warm Up Your Following

Do you engage with your customers and prospects on social media?

Want tactics to warm up your leads?

To discover how to move people from fans to customers, I interview Kim Walsh-Phillips.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Kim Walsh-Phillips, CEO of Elite Digital Group, a direct response social agency. She's also a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine. Her brand-new book, co-authored with Dan Kennedy, is the No B.S. Guide to Direct Response Social Media Marketing.

Kim will explore how to use social media to turn cold prospects into warmer opportunities that lead to sales.

You'll discover which types of content will engage your audience.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Nurturing Leads With Social
Kim's backstory

Kim says she has been doing public relations since before MySpace. Although she would get clients into the newspaper and throw great events, she was unable to show a return on investment. So when it came time for clients to renew, they would cancel. Kim spent much of her time going to networking events, meeting people, and trying to sign new clients. She knew she had to do something differently.

In 2010, a friend gave her Dan Kennedy's original book, the No B.S. Guide to Direct Marketing. Because social is a channel just like direct mail, television, and radio, applying Dan's principles to social media worked.

She could show clients how much money came from every dollar they spent, and was able to keep their accounts,which is something she was unable to do before.

Listen to the show to learn what Kim had to do one time to make payroll.

Direct response social media

Kim explains that people use social media to have conversations, not to read a brochure. Direct response is a marketing tactic used to get a click-through, an opt-in, or drive a purchase.

She shares that before social media, direct response tactics were used in direct mail, infomercials, print advertising, and even email.

Kim says that when you tie social media and direct response together, you have conversations with people to create a direct result that is measured.

Listen to the show to discover why Kim believes email and social media marketing don't carry a lot of direct response messaging.

How marketers can tap into social

Facebook is a cocktail party, Kim explains, whereas Google is a shopping mall (people are there searching for products, programs, and services). If you're going to interrupt their cocktail party with an "excuse me," you have to offer enough value that someone is willing to turn away from their best friend to pay attention to you.

To engage fans in this non-disruptive way, Kim suggests you make a list of the 10 questions prospects ask you most often. For example, if you're an orthodontist, you would use the questions parents ask when they're considering braces for their child.

If you're just getting started in business, she suggests using Quora to find questions people ask about your industry. Kim also shares that you can give services such as Textbroker.com a list of questions and their experts will answer them for you, creating copyright-free content really inexpensively.

Simply answering those questions makes for great blog content and social media posts. Each day in your social media content, post a link to one of those great blog posts. Alternatively, use it for the post itself. For example: "A lot of people are curious as to how much braces cost. Costs generally range between X and Y." Those types of posts, Kim adds,