The power of social media platforms is not just limited to raising brand awareness and getting engagement on your content. Your social profiles hold the potential to generate qualified leads that you can turn into sales.
Sales is a lengthy process where, as per factoHR, nearly eight interactions are required to finalize a meeting with the prospects, and guess what? Social media can work as a great supporter in this entire journey.
Brands that use social media lead generation techniques generate superior outcomes throughout the sales funnel – building brand awareness and driving conversions, improving sales productivity, achieving higher revenue growth, and building a community of social media advocates and followers.
Thus, after observing the most successful campaigns, we’ve outlined 10 tips and strategies that you can use to kick start your social media lead generation journey.
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1. Run targeted ads
Running sponsored social media advertising entails gathering the necessary information, analyzing it, and putting it to use to make your paid social media more powerful and successful than before. If done correctly, it may be a wonderful social media lead generation tool that saves businesses time and money.
When running social media ads, first understand your customer, set clear goals, and identify your main KPIs. Additionally, bring all your ad accounts together in one spot. One of the biggest challenges is showing marketing ROI, and to achieve this, you need to combine data from different channels into one place and then track and assess it all together.
2. Maintain a consistent posting frequency
People tend to trust brands that are active on various social media platforms. If you only post now and then, your audience won’t recognize your brand, engage with you, or ask about what you offer. By regularly sharing quality content, you can draw in your target audience and encourage them to visit your profile.
Every social media platform requires you to maintain different consistency levels. For example, on Instagram, you should upload a minimum of 1 post a day. Facebook requires you to post at least twice or thrice a week. While Twitter demands 3-4 tweets a day to show up in people’s feeds.
To maintain the desired posting frequency, you can use a social media scheduling tool like RecurPost that helps you streamline your content across multiple social media platforms by enabling you to schedule bulk posts in advance.
3. Create more video content
Now more than ever, video content is dominating every social media platform. With the introduction of Instagram reels, TikTok, Facebook watch, and YouTube shorts, people are interested in scrolling through video content rather than static image posts. Thus, as a brand wanting to generate leads through social media, you need to jump on the bandwagon too.
As per recent research by the Web Marketing Video Council, 60% of businesses are now leveraging video on social networks. If you are a startup and not willing to spend too many bucks, leverage video editing software and create the best videos for your products and services. These videos can be updates, stories, profile videos, or comments on social posts. You may design several tiny snippets that serve as brand-building tools for your company and share them across various platforms throughout time.
4. Collaborate with influencers
An effective social media influencer marketing plan will assist you in increasing brand visibility, establishing authority, and connecting with new audiences. It attracts visitors to your website and introduces new clients to your products and services. Find out influencers that belong to your niche and contact them to promote your brand.
Request that they carefully include your product in their photographs or videos, or tell a unique and interesting anecdote about your company. And while your goal is to generate leads, provide influencers with unique discount codes that their audience can use while shopping from your brand.
Daniel Wellington is an excellent example of this. The brand sold one million watches in just 3 years by leveraging micro-influencers and generated revenue worth $220 million, which was a 214% increase.
5. Host contests and giveaways
People love getting free stuff from brands! This is why running a social media contest or a giveaway is a great way to collect leads. To enter the giveaway, ask people to contribute any kind of information you’d like to earn, like filling a form or submitting an email address.
You can ask participants to tag their friends in comments, follow your account, and share your giveaway post in their stories. This will attract more people to participate in the contest.
Always keep a prize that’s related to your brand – it will make people aware of the kind of products that you have to offer. The people who participate will be the ones who are interested in your products and even if they don’t win, they will still remember your brand and turn to your profile when they need to purchase.
6. Launch a referral campaign
Word-of-mouth marketing is one of the strongest and most effective ways to get leads. Launching a referral campaign can help you take advantage of this as almost 92% of buyers trust the recommendations of their friends and family.
You can provide enticing offers, such as gift cards or cash incentives, to both the referrer and the referees. In order to make this technique work for your brand, you will have to encourage your existing customers to share their experiences on social media, track new signups using their referral link, and reward referrers. A social media ads analytics tool like Social Status can help you analyze and report on all your social ad campaigns.
7. Create user-friendly landing pages
If you’ve persuaded someone to click on your link, don’t let them down with a lousy landing page. To begin with, the landing page must be relevant. Whenever someone clicks on your link, they should find the information that they are expecting.
An excellent landing page will be aesthetically appealing and easy to scan. It should provide consumers with a clear route and if possible, you should make the landing pages personalized to take the user experience to the next level.
8. Set up an Instagram shop
Instagram allows businesses to set up a shop right on their profile. This means that people can visit your profile, search products in the ‘Shop’ tab, make payments, and complete purchases all without leaving the platform!
The checkout on Instagram feature is available only in the U.S. currently. For businesses in other countries, a button to drive people to the website will be provided. To set up your shop, you need to first ensure your eligibility by reviewing the commerce eligibility requirements.
Then, your business should have its own website domain and must contain product listings that are available for direct purchase from the website. You’ll also need a Business Manager account to set up your shop in Commerce Manager. To check all the other requirements, you can visit business.instagram.com.
9. Share links to gated content
Gated content is any form of content that people can access only after providing certain information – the most common being the email address. You can also ask people for their job titles or other information that will help in your marketing efforts.
Gated content, such as whitepapers, invite-only webinars, or even access to secret Facebook Groups, might be appealing incentives depending on your business. While you want to leverage gated content, make sure to focus on the quality and keep them as precise as possible.
When you develop content that diverts users to a landing page and asks them to fill a form to access that content, you can generate new leads and nurture existing ones in your marketing database.
10. Conduct polls and surveys
Instead of just assuming what your audience is interested in, simply ask them. Your followers can offer you a goldmine of information, and polls are a unique method for people to voice their thoughts.
This is an excellent method to gather feedback on how people are using your products/services, what their pain points are, and what they’d want to see on your pipeline. You can even provide incentives to encourage people to respond.
Final thoughts
Now, you’ve got a complete playbook on how to generate qualified leads from social media. Start by providing value to your audience in the form of quality content and keep working on the above-mentioned tactics. Also, remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day – it will take some time and consistent efforts to turn your social media profiles into lead generation machines.
So, keep trying. Be consistent. Experiment. Try new ways of promotion. Explore new aspects of social media marketing to keep the balls rolling!