Lead generation through social media is an essential part of every marketer’s strategy – whether they know it or not.
For marketers ready to move beyond engagement and brand awareness, social media lead generation is an excellent next step. Gathering leads on social media helps you to find people interested in your company. These leads also help you keep in touch with potential customers – be it making a special offer or sharing the news.
This article is for anyone to take their social media marketing up a notch. If you are new to social media, consider this article a primer. This article offers several up-to-date strategies on how to earn more quality leads for everyone else.
Most marketers have agreed that social media marketing is the best way to go when it comes to improving lead quality.
Why You Need Leads?
A lead refers to any information you can use to identify someone interested in your products or services. It can be anything from name and email address to business and employer details. Therefore social media lead generation is the process of gathering new leads using social media.
Leading on social media can benefit both B2C and B2B marketers as it helps you identify social media audiences interested in your business. It gives you the necessary benefits to target relevant content and offers and then convert them into paying customers.
In other words, lead generation helps to establish your business as your invaluable resource for potential customers. And social media increases your leadership efforts by helping you raise brand awareness, increase website traffic, and improve community engagement.
Facts Related to Social Media Lead Generation
Here are some cool facts about social media marketing that you need to know to create an outcome-oriented social media strategy for your business.
- Social media marketing has reduced costs for 45% of businesses.
- Businesses using social media for lead generation grew by 24%.
- About 68% of businesses are using social media to generate leads in 2018
- The most significant social media barrier for 77% of businesses is a threshold in lead improvement.
- Average lead prices are $ 2.50 on Google and $ 0.80 on Facebook. This is 32% cost efficiency through social media advertising.
What is Social Media Lead Generation?
Lead generation through social media is all about implementing a strategic marketing strategy specifically designed to capture qualified leads and pull them into your sales funnel.
Generating sales on social media helps businesses identify the people who are interested in them. More importantly, these leads act as a bridge for potential customers to make special offers and convert them into loyal customers.
The main objectives here are how businesses use social media as part of their generation creation process.
- Increase brand awareness: By 2021, there will be 3.02 billion social media users worldwide. With more and more people doing research on social media and sound on brands, it is easy to create brand awareness to attract the attention of your target audience.
- Reach new customers: The best way to build an active audience on social media is to focus on the people who already know you best. By sharing relevant content, interacting with them immediately, and accepting their feedback, you can expand your audience and strengthen your relationships.
- Increase website traffic: The social media sector has over 3.4 billion active users. Hence, it’s a great source of driving traffic to your website. They bring enough opportunities to receive business visitors and convert them into leads.
How to Generate Leads Through Social Media
1. Run a Photo Contest
If you’re an active social media user, then you have probably seen your fair share in the online photo contest. If not, the basic idea is this – submit a photo according to the theme or guideline of the competition and be entered to win the prize.
Its visual and interactive appeal is making photo contests well-suited for social media lead generation. Your fans get the opportunity to practice their creativity and contribute to a brand they love. Participating is half the fun (winning the other half).
To make your photo contest faster reach a larger audience, encourage all participants to share it on social media. If they do so, they are rewarded with bonus entries for a greater chance of winning.
In addition to the leads you have created, you will also get user-generated content (UGC) -photos. Not all businesses have the resources to create excellent visual content, so why not help your fans? UGC can be shared on your other social networks or used on branded assets such as your website. I like to think of a photo contest as a two-party type of marketing initiative.
2. Optimize Your Profile
Before you plan your next social media lead campaign, make sure everything is organized for you. Your profile should provide a simple means for customers to contact you, sign up for your newsletter, shop, and more.
3. Create Lead Magnet Offers
The right incentive can often force people to share your information freely. For this, you have to provide seductive lead magnets that people want. This can be anything from a research report to a free tool. You can offer discount codes, case studies, webinars, whitepapers, and more.
4. Conduct Polls and Surveys
Instead of assuming and thinking about what your audience cares about, just ask them! Your followers can tell you a wealth of experience and data, and polls provide a unique way for people to express their opinions. It’s a great way to understand how people are using your product, their pain points, and what they want to see on your roadmap. You can also give incentives to increase response rates.
5. Prepare a List
For social media lead generation, the first is to find out which social media platform to use. To do this:
- Create a target audience.
- Set goals that you want to meet with social media marketing.
- Also, create a financial plan that formulates the strategy.
6. Run Social Media Paid Ads for Generating Leads
Businesses running paid advertising campaigns bring benefits such as reach, engagement, growing fanbase, and more to the right audience. But what about a paid social media advertising strategy?
Running paid social media advertisements involves capturing the right data, making payments, and using important information to make social media more robust and effective than before. If done properly, it will be a great social media lead tool in saving business time and costs.
7. Some Essential Tips to Drive a Successful Paid Advertising Strategy
- Define your paid social media objectives and critical KPIs – is it to increase brand awareness and initiate conversations or increase purchases that can be directly attributed to your social efforts.
- Connect all your proprietary advertising accounts in one place. One of the most crucial challenges marketers face is proving ROI marketing. They have to connect data to channel data in one place; then, All must be measured and analyzed simultaneously.
8. Build Your Following Effectively
With a low number of followers, it can feel like shouting in the void. You’ve agreed to get those numbers, but you also want the people you can actually sell to follow you.
Therefore, make sure that you are advertising your social media posts on your site and other communications. Then, stay on topic. You don’t have to be too strict, but talk about what’s really relevant to your target audience. Also, connect with others in your industry to reach your network.
Also, contribute something new. People don’t want to follow you because of retweeting other people’s tweets or posting external content. Bring your own content and voice to the table. Once your audience arrives, you can start taking leads.
9. Share and Promote Links to Gated Content
Material procurement is one of the essential parts of the cycle. Sixty-five percent of buyers feel that materials have an impact on purchase decisions. So if you are not producing content to bring leads in sales with you, you are making a huge mistake.
The best way to grow your email list is with links to gated content – that is, content that requires the first signup. It is estimated that up to 80% of B2B content marketing assets are getups.
To view the information, you must complete a multi-part lead form. It’s a bit longer than some, requiring only one email (and because of this, the prospect converts to a more spartan short lead), but it is still a great example of gated content.
You can (and should) get gate content like white papers, videos, reports, and research. Then, you can share links to these pages on social media, as Brees did with his mobile marketing FAQ.
10. Run a Contest or Giveaway
Running a giveaway or competition is a great way to both engage and entertain your social media audience. And with over 3 billion social media users worldwide, you don’t have to worry about enough contest participants.
People like to win things for free, especially from the brands they like. If you cater to the needs of your audience, they are liking joining your competition and spreading the word to family and friends.
Collecting leads through giveaways works because it is a great incentive to encourage action. To enter, you can ask users to present the information you need to make through the sales funnel. You can also require them to tag others in your posts or follow their account to increase their social media conversions and engagement.
As long as you know what your goals are with your campaign, you can track your progress to ensure that you are close to reaching them. Before creating your competition, set the goals you can measure. In this way, your next giveaway will produce better lead generation results than the last one.
Conclusion
You can’t ignore social media when it comes to generating leads and sales. Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are swarming with prospects eager to buy from you – if you know how to find them.
Now, you’ve got a playbook for creating high-quality leads on social media. Start by looking at the social selling mindset. Instead of just cold-pitching, work on various channels to provide value to those who are most interested in buying from you.
Raise awareness of your company or brand with resources such as white paper and reports. To generate leads from these tasks, offer gates that construct methods of contact.
Promote the content you create and your social media channels through paid advertisements, live events, and even referrals. Keep in mind building relationships before the sale.
With a solid social media lead strategy, you will tap into a highly effective pool of prospects that can change the face of your business forever.
If you need to learn advanced social media lead generation tricks for free, write to Zytak. Our experts will give you during strategy through a free consultation call. Contact us today!