To understand this we need to dive a little deeper into the intent of a lead, understand their mind frame, and treat them not as a number in a spreadsheet but as a real human on a buyers journey – hopefully on a journey to buy our service or product. 

With search, we can target a market segment that is both PROBLEM and SOLUTION aware. This means, for example, they know they are overweight, and they think their solution is to join the gym. So they actively actively ‘gyms near me’. 

But that sounds great why don’t we just stick with search-based ad platforms such as Google right? 

The reason comes down to your market segmentation and the awareness stage of your customer. Eugene M. Schwartz, the legendary advertising Practioner and writer of the book Breakthrough advertising breaks it down into 5 stages

1. Most aware – your prospect already knows your product, they just need to know the deal. 
2. Product aware – they know what you sell, but is still considering if it is right for them
3. Solution aware – your prospect knows the results they seek, but they yet know your service provides the solution they need.
4. Problem aware – they know they have a problem, but they do yet know the solution
5. Completely unaware – they may have a problem, but they are not aware of it

But for the sake of this article, at the top of this pyramid we have roughly 3-5% of the market which is problem and solution aware. This means they are actively searching for a solution on google or other search platforms. 

But this is a very small part of your market segment. 

This becomes more of a problem for B2B companies who have services with LOW search volume OR even harder for B2B software startups.Or B2B SaaS companies which are in entirely new market segments with low or even NO search volume. 

Very few or no people even know there is a solution out there, so are not actively searching for it

This is the majority of the market, and the only way to target these people is with social media – not search. But what does this have to do with follow-ups?

So with social media advertising, we need to take them on a journey from problem aware to solution aware, and the way we do this is with the follow-ups. 

The business owners who are not aware of this, and are looking for a large number of customers who are ready to buy now from Facebook ads, often leave paid social thinking it is a bad channel

But this is because they treat paid social like search – a big mistake. 

we need to get the lead at an earlier stage in the buying process i.e. the person may know they are overweight, but they do not know if they should join the gym, get a personal trainer, or buy nutritional products to help them lose weight. 

We need to speak to the problem in the way we communicate to them, then nurture and educate the prospect towards thinking your solution is the right one for their problem.

This is done with the follow-up and nurture sequences. 

So let’s assume we are already getting high quality leads off from Linkedin, Facebook Instagram 

I have a video in the pipeline on how to get leads so subscribe to my youtube channel here. 

Now, these people are probably downloading or signing up for some gated content. This content is targeting the problem very specifically which when they choose to take the action to sign up to it, they are in theory putting up their hand to say they have this problem. 

Great, so we now have people with the problem you have given their information to you and become leads. Now we need to FOLLOW UP with them, nurture them, educate them about the solutions and your service, then convert them into a scheduled call, a demo or free trial if you are a SaaS company.