Finding Leads For Your Branding Agency On Social Media
Should you invest your time and money on social media to get leads for your branding agency?
That is the million dollar question that we are going to be dissecting.
Should you be investing a significant portion of your time and money into Instagram or Tiktok or Facebook to get leads?
I would say the answer is clearly, absolutely yes.
And absolutely not.
The truth about social media
Wait, what?
Yeah, there’s a right way and a right time to do this.
And it’s a butt tonne of work - it is so much time and effort to do it right.
If you are starting from scratch and you have no audience, you are a long way my friend from having enough of an audience to actually get substantial leads out of your social media.
Building an audience takes time, it takes effort. And when it comes to any sort of marketing effort where you are speaking to a crowd, you're going to need that crowd to be pretty big, because you're going to want a lot of people going through the experience of your content.
To get them from ‘top of funnel’, right?
I don't know this person, and now I'm starting to get to know them.
Through nurture, I'm starting to build trust with them to the point where they are trusting you enough to buy from you. And that has to align with the fact that they actually need your help.
So all of these things have to happen together, and you need a lot of people to go through that experience with you in order to have clients come out the back end.
And when it comes to something like social media, the people who are watching need to be engaged enough to get all the way through all of those steps, so that they become a paying client at the end.
Now in order for this to work, you're going to have to be very clear about what you offer, who you work with, all the pain points that you solve and all the problems you solve for your clients.
You're going to have to get good at being on camera, or writing posts or both and you're going to have to be good at articulating how you are better and different than everybody else.
And you're going to have to do that over a long period of time.
Social media is not a quick fix, it requires a consistent commitment. And even when you are committed to creating content on a regular basis, you're gonna be beholden to the algorithm anyway - not everyone is necessarily going to see your stuff.
The way social media platforms have set it up is that they want you to pay, so there might be a need to start paying for ads at some point, so that more eyeballs get on your stuff.
The social media game is a long play, and there is a lot of upfront, mental work of actually figuring out why somebody should watch your reels or pay attention to your posts or watch your videos.
Why they are going to look at you over anybody else is both something that you're going to have to spend some time figuring out upfront, and you're going to have to be constantly working on and perfecting as you create content, see what kind of reaction you get from your audience and then continue to edit, alter and uplevel whatever you're doing.
Okay, I just made it sound really awful, right?
I just want you to know what you're getting into, because when it comes to getting leads, if you're starting from zero, social media is absolutely not the first place that I would go.
The first place that I would go is real life. People that already know, like and trust you - the low hanging fruit that exists in your network and the people surrounding your network.
That is a much faster path to paying clients, and if you need to bring in income in a short amount of time, and you don't have a decent audience or social media presence, then you're going to find a paying client much faster by talking to people in the real world by connecting with people.
The right way to use social media
Okay, so all of that is the reason that you should not invest your time and money on social media to get leads.
But I also said absolutely, yes, it's an amazing place to go, and here's why.
That whole customer journey I laid out for you, where you've created all of this content that connects with your ideal clients, very clearly tells them how you help them and why you're different and why they should want to work with you, builds trust.
It builds authority, it nurtures people, and it eventually brings them to a place where, when they need your services, you are top of mind.
They've been watching your reels, they've been reading your posts, they've been reading your blog articles - those people are bought into the idea of hiring you.
Those are the people that you don't have to sell, because your social media efforts have sold them already.
That is an ideal situation. When you use social media, which is really about doing content and authority building, your effort is focused on developing your point of view and communicating that with the world.
And every new person that comes into your sphere is going to be able to get nurtured by content you've already created.
So it's a great way to leverage your time. You make these videos once and for months or years, people will continue to look at them, get value out of them, go down the sales pipeline with you and eventually buy from you.
It is a huge value for a business to have a strong social media presence.
If you are able to invest that time and energy into building your social media, and you're able to stay consistent with it, at first very little is going to happen. But if you stick with it, the effects will snowball.
And the benefit of that snowballing is that over time, more and more people will come into the top of your funnel and more and more people will start to hear about you or get to know you. And then all that work that you did will nurture them to the sale.
It's a beautiful thing and it’s an amazing way to get leads and clients.
Putting social media into your bigger lead generation strategy
So, should you invest time and money on social media to get leads?
I think it really depends on where you're starting from, and how quickly you need to make money.
Now, can you do both? Can you go get clients now in the real world with the low hanging fruit and connecting with people personally, and be on social media?
100%. That's what most people do.
The in-person, live interactions are what will bring in the clients and referrals right now.
And then the work that you do on social media is going to nurture the people that you meet and probably help them along the pipeline. Maybe new people will come in, and cold audiences will start to get to know you because of the content you're creating.
But it's very hard to have enough time and space available to do both of those really, really well.
So that's why I think your best bet is to focus first on filling your pipeline through methods and strategies that are going to actually work in the short term.
And then once you've got that pipeline going, and once you've got that rhythm and a reliable methodology of bringing those clients in now, once you've got that set up, then you can start to invest in social media and do it the right way.
Because the last thing you want to do (which is what I think most people I see do) is kind of ‘dribble’ onto social media here and there, right?
You know what happens when your approach to social media is trying to do it here and there in your schedule? You end up kind of perpetually not doing enough, you end up always feeling like you haven't done the thing on your list.
Because you've always got to create more content, and it's never enough.
And when you're struggling for clients, having that hanging over your head that is not going to bring in clients immediately can be incredibly stressful.
So in my opinion, you want to go all in on the thing that you know can generate sales in the short term.
And then once you have a reliable or steady process for bringing those clients in, then you can do social media the right way. This means you have a process you follow, you’ve got processes and systems in place so that you're able to create one piece of content and you can put it into your machine.
I call it the Authority Machine - they can spit out many different pieces of content, it will post them over time, it will make sure that you are staying top of mind and showing up consistently without you necessarily having to think about it a couple of times a week.
That's really where you want to get with your social media posting so that it actually produces results. This is something I am constantly coaching people on inside the No BS Agency Mastery Program, because everybody thinks that if they need clients they need to start posting.
What they end up doing is just wasting a lot of time, posting stuff that's going nowhere, that is generic, taking a lot of time, not being read by most people, making them feel overwhelmed, and like they're not doing enough.
None of those things are good for your business mindset.
Playing the long game
I know sometimes we have to hear it over and over again.
Don't feel compelled or obligated to post on social media, unless you have a strategy.
Because posting on social media without a strategy is unlikely to get you the leads and clients are looking for right now.
And your time could be so much better spent doing much higher value activities that will bring in that cash.
Will you do social media in the future? 100%.
But let's do it with a plan. Let's do it with a strategy. And let's believe in that strategy so that over time, we can invest in it and know that we're building up to something that's going to bring long term value to our business.
Staying focused on the one activity that you need to do in order to bring in clients now is one of the hardest things that I find most small agency owners struggle with, because staying the course, staying the path, being consistent - that's really what brings success in business.
But it also feels a little boring sometimes.
Sometimes, as business owners, we're always looking for the next thing.
It's called ‘shiny object’ syndrome.
If things don't feel like they're going exactly the way you want them to be going at this particular moment, what do we do?
We just look for new ideas. And so we're constantly trying new things, but we're never committing to the thing that actually works.
What that thing is depends on where you are in your business journey.
So it might be social media right now. Or it might not be.
If you need clients, and you need high value clients soon, there are likely shorter paths to success.
What that path looks like and exactly how to execute it is one of the first things we do inside No BS Agency Mastery. It's a Program for one to two person branding agencies that helps you scale to $30k-$50k months without employees.
And really, the magic secret sauce to that is staying focused on the one or two things you need to be doing at any given time, and getting rid of all the other noise.
If you need help getting rid of that noise, ignoring those shiny objects, getting clear on what you need to do next, and following a step by step process feels like it would take a lot of the pressure off of you, then go to nobsagencies.com/apply.
Tell us a little bit about your business and where you are right now, and then hop on a call with my team to see if now is the right time to take the next step.
Get on the right train and stop wasting time doing things that are actually not producing any results for you.
Here’s what you need to get…
Using social media to generate leads is great. And it takes a lot of work to get it to the point where it feels like it’s running for you on autopilot.
So start where you are. Do the things that you know will generate new clients, and then, when you’ve got a reliable system in place, start to create great content and build authority that actually gets results.
P.S. Jump on a call with my team if you want to learn all my tools and strategies to scale up - just go here to get started!