Generating leads through social media might not be your first choice, but perhaps that needs to change. After all, over 3.6 billion people use this medium, which means 40% of the world’s population engages with different social media platforms proactively.
It is an ideal channel for creating new contacts for your business, provided you know how to leverage it. With social media campaigns, you can whip up a ton of buzz around your business offering and allow prospects to organically reach out to you. Once they do, you can engage with them in real-time and move them through your sales funnel.
But, all these things can happen if you use the right tactics to build your social media presence. So, rather than going about it haphazardly, align your social media lead generation strategy alongside the methods listed in this article. Use them as a starting point for drafting your own lead-gen plan harnessing the power of social media.
5 Effective Social Media Lead Generation Tactics
Don’t wait for your social media leads to find you. Take charge by finding them among a swarm of unqualified prospects with the help of these 5 lead-gen strategies.
1. Optimize Your Business Page Profiles
For starters, choose the right social media platforms to create your business profile. For instance, if you operate within the B2B space, you cannot generate qualified leads without posting regularly on LinkedIn and Pinterest through your profile handle. If you operate within the B2C space, posting engaging content on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter is non-negotiable. Simply put, your brand must have a robust social media profile page on the right platforms replete with your contact details, product information, and latest updates.
Source: ThePixel
Your profile page, be it on one or several social media platforms, must carry consistent information, along with buttons to nudge your customers to sign-up for your newsletter and visit your sales landing page.
Optimize your business profile on social media by including the following elements:
Provide contact details – Support customer inquiries by engaging with them on social media chat or Messenger. Also, make sure your page carries the updated phone number(s) and email addresses to reach you.
CTAs are your holy grail – Call-to-Action (CTA) buttons encourage your leads to not just surf your page but also take action. So, don’t forget to include buttons like “Buy Now,” “Request a Call Back,” “visit website,” etc.
Deck the Page with Pics and Videos – “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Use imagery to better explain what you’re marketing. This tactic works especially well for businesses that want to generate leads on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.
Use hashtags – Know that your prospects are not always looking for a brand, but often for a product through hashtags. Hashtags are nothing complicated. They are keywords users add to content on social media which categorizes it. Other users search these categories and find brands whose profiles contain the same hashtags.
This is precisely why you must include brand-specific hashtags on your social media profile. Doing this boosts brand visibility.
Provide a link to the website – This one is a no-brainer! Why would you miss out on the ripe opportunity of driving traffic to your website through your social media handles? So, do not forget to add your website or any other landing page’s link right in the bio. And, make sure that your landing page is as content-rich and aesthetically pleasing as your profile. A nondescript and lousily designed landing page will dent your business’s credibility.
Add Links to Bio – Use the space below the profile pic section on all social media platforms to add a link to your company website or whichever ecommerce website you’ve partnered with. Doing this will boost your landing page traffic, which will result in higher conversions.
Here is the simple yet effective LinkedIn page of Greenhouse Software. An attractive picture accompanied by a sharp tagline about what the software does. The profile provides everything the reader needs in a single snapshot – CTA to reach the website, a brief description of how Greenhouse helps enterprises, its location, and funding information.
Source: LinkedIn
2. Invest in Social Media Listening
The social listening strategy involves monitoring what your audience says about you on social media. It’s a way to pick up on what your customers think about your business and what more they need from you.
For example, suppose you own a bookstore. On a business day, one of your employees hears a small group of potential customers saying they find the book collection at your store inadequate.
They further talk about the lack of a self-help section, children’s books, or travel books at your store. Now you begin to wonder whether several other prospects think this way. Also, is this why many leads enter the store but don’t really buy your wares?
These are valuable insights that can help you shape your business in a way that appeals to customers. And, today listening to what your prospects are saying can be done online by monitoring various social media channels.
Social media listening involves a two-step process:
Monitor what people say about you on your social media handles. You can do this by looking at metrics like brand and product mentions, relevant hashtags, and competitor mentions.
Analyze the information and alter your practices if and where needed. Be it by replying to aggrieved customers or leads in real-time or making changes to your product. Either way, social media listening can generate newer leads now that your offerings are better tailored to their needs.
Both Slack and Coca-Cola are champions at social media listening and taking action. Both biggies have teams dedicated to monitoring the problems of their customers and prospects.
Coco-Cola goes a step further and asks its audience to directly message their opinions on their official page.
3. Generate Leads through Gated Content
Share valuable and relevant content with your leads through different social media handles. To access this content, your prospects will need to provide their contact information. Gated content on social media is indeed an excellent way to generate leads. However, it only works when your content is of exceptional quality. It can be:
well-researched reports.
case studies about your offering.
how-to tutorials.
e-books and whitepapers.
email newsletters.
webinars.
other content pieces.
When creating gated content, the key thing to remember is that it shouldn’t be easily and freely available on the internet.
Sharing shoddy gated content will turn away prospects who would’ve otherwise subscribed to your email list. Once you’ve got the contact details of your leads, nurture them through email marketing or whichever medium you deem fit.
Check out Forrester’s gated content about remote workers and artificial intelligence. In light of the pandemic, a blog on this topic is relevant but also hard to come by online.
4. Launch Referral Campaigns
Launching referral campaigns is a time-immemorial trick capable of doubling your social media lead gen efforts. Design and deploy great incentives through your social media profiles to reel in prospects through your old customers. And, why only old customers?
Social media referral campaigns are free to share by anybody. Even if non-customers like the campaign and feel it’s more appropriate for someone within their circle, you’re still earning an indirect lead.
Freebies, such as free online courses, discount coupons, and demo product trials, make for excellent referral items.
Here is an example of Masterclass who came out with a referral campaign, where they allowed you to gift a free annual All-Access Pass along with a paid one.
Once they came out with this campaign, they aggressively marketed it on social media through their own page and via sponsored ads.
Source: Facebook
5. Sponsor Targeted Ads on Social Media
Once you’ve exhausted all organic ways of generating leads on social media, there’s nothing wrong in paying to get featured on them. In fact, all social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc., provide ‘lead Generation Ads.’
These ads are cost-effective and allow for targeted promotions that help you collect direct leads. Out of all platforms that feature sponsored ads, Facebook has the lowest cost-per-click (CPC). Therefore, this medium is a hot favorite of several B2C businesses. However, when it comes to B2B lead generation, LinkedIn outperforms all other social media platforms.
So, invest in paid social media ads. In addition to equipping them with crisp product information, host giveaways, award free trials, and offer special discount codes. Doing this will attract a bigger chunk of leads that you can further nurture into conversion.
Check out Jasper’s sponsored ad on Facebook. It carries all the elements that work for its publisher. They provide an attractive discount for leads to sign up, a single CTA that drives prospects to fill up a brief form. Here they’ve quickly asked the lead their preferences, and all ad steps contain uniform striking imagery.
Source: REVE Chat
Parting Thoughts
Know that 59% of marketers around the globe are aggressively chalking out lead generation strategies via social media.
So, why should you stay put? Use these five social media lead gen tricks to amass the right following, develop apt buyer personas, deliver carefully crafted content and complete the cycle with organic as well as paid targeted promotions.
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