Although social media may not be your first choice for lead generation, it may soon become your best option. Since more than 3.6 billion people already use this medium, that means that 40% of the global population actively participates in various forms of social media.
If used properly, it can be an excellent method for expanding your company’s network. You can generate a lot of interest in your product or service and have potential customers reach out to you through social media campaigns. After that, you can have a live conversation with them and help them along the sales process.
The 5 Most Powerful Strategies for Generating Leads on Social Media
Don’t sit back and hope that social media leads will come to you. Find them among a sea of unqualified leads using these five tried-and-true methods.
1. Make Your Company’s Social Media Profiles Stand Out
Creating a profile for your company on the wrong social media sites can hurt more than it helps. If your business is focused on the business-to-business market, for instance, you need to be active on social media platforms like LinkedIn and Pinterest in order to attract qualified leads. Engaging content on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter is a must if you’re in the business-to-consumer sector. To put it plainly, you need to have a well-developed profile page for your brand on the appropriate social media platforms, complete with links to contact information, product details, and recent updates.
2. Spend money on social media monitoring and analysis
Using a social listening strategy entails keeping tabs on what people are saying about you online. It’s a great way to learn what clients like and dislike about your company, as well as what additional services they might require.
Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that you run a bookstore. While at work today, one of your employees overhears a group of potential customers discussing how unsatisfied they are with your store’s selection of books.
In addition, they complain that your bookstore doesn’t have a section dedicated to self-help literature, books for kids, or books about vacation destinations. You may be wondering if other potential clients have similar thoughts. Also, do you think this is the reason why so many potential customers visit your store but ultimately leave without making a purchase?
These are priceless nuggets of information that can inform how you develop your company moving forward. The modern equivalent of “listening” to your customers is online monitoring of various social media channels.
3. Bring in Prospective Customers with Locked Content
Communicate with your leads by using various social media accounts to share information that is both useful and relevant to them. Your potential customers/clients will need to sign up for access to this material. Yes, social media with gated content is a great way to get new leads. But remember that this strategy is only successful if your content is truly exceptional. It might be:
- Meticulously compiled reports.
- Examples of how your product or service was used.
- Instructions on how to do something.
- Publications in digital form, such as books and white papers.
- Newsletters delivered to one’s inbox.
- Webinars.
- Other content pieces.
The most important thing to keep in mind when making gated content is that it should not be freely accessible online.
Distributing low-quality gated content will discourage potential customers from signing up for your email newsletter. Once you have your leads’ contact information, you can use email marketing or any other method you see fit to cultivate them into customers.
4. Create Referral Programs
Referral campaigns are an age-old strategy that can multiply your social media lead generation efforts by ten. Create compelling offers and disseminate them via your social media channels to attract new business from your existing clientele. And why focus on the past clients only?
Referral campaigns on social media can be shared without cost. You can still gain an indirect lead if a non-customer likes the campaign but thinks it would be better suited for someone in their social circle.
Online courses, coupons, and free trials of paid products all work well as referral gifts.
If you want to see an example of a referral campaign, look no further than Masterclass, who recently released a promotion that lets you give away a free annual All-Access Pass when you purchase one for someone else.
When they finally released the campaign, they promoted it heavily on social media through their own page and paid advertisements.
5. Advertiser-Supported, Geo-Restricted Social Media Promotions
There is nothing wrong with paying to get featured on social media once you have tried all the free methods of generating leads without success. In fact, every major social media site, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc., offers “lead generation ads.”
These advertisements are efficient in that they help you gather direct leads at a low cost via targeted advertising. Facebook has the most affordable cost-per-click of all the ad-supported sites (CPC). Thus, many business-to-consumer companies see great success with this channel. When compared to other social media sites, however, LinkedIn is the most effective at generating leads for businesses.
Advertise on social media for a fee. As well as providing them with clear product details, you can also host giveaways, give out free trials, and provide promotional codes. If you do this, you’ll get a larger pool of potential customers to work with.
Final Reflections
It’s important to be aware that 59% of all marketers around the world are actively plotting out lead generation strategies via social media.
Then why don’t you leave? Take advantage of these five social media lead gen hacks to attract the right audience, create accurate buyer personas, distribute high-quality content, and close the loop with both free and paid promotions.