A strong social media presence is not just an option, but a necessity for brands nowadays. According to the latest report by CoSchedule, 2/3rds of all Americans use social media, with 88% of businesses being active on various social networks. The same report states that customers spend 20-40% more money on brands who engage with them on social media.
While social media isn’t necessarily the be-all and end-all of your online marketing efforts, it can play a significant role in getting you substantial results, and that includes lead generation.
Why should your business be on social media?
Considering that 90% of B2B top decision makers give a blind eye to cold calls, with 76% of buyers ready to have a social media conversation, it makes sense for your brand to be super active on social media.
The main benefit of lead generation on social media is the ability to focus on qualified leads via advanced targeting. An analysis by eMarketer shows that one of the main goals of B2B marketers is improving the quality of leads.
Let’s now cut through the chaff and stick to some unique strategies to generate leads on social media.
1. Run Photo Contests
Running photo contests on social media allows you to generate new social fans and generate, eventually spreading brand awareness while engaging existing leads. A photo contest entails the participants to submit a photo related to a certain topic of your choice. In return, you get the personal information of participants, indicating new leads besides user-generated content (UGC) in the form of pictures. Not all businesses have the necessary resources to create eye-catching visual content, and asking your followers for little help doesn’t hurt. You can share the UGC across other social networks or publish on branded assets, such as your website.
Dia & Co, a clothing brand, once ran a photo contest on their Facebook page to discover their forthcoming style icon. The participants were stoked to share the contest in order to garner many votes for their entry. The winner was chosen from the entries with the highest number of votes. Finally, when the contest came to an end, it received 2,291 leads and thousands of shares in a few weeks. In the process, Dia & Co got some attractive photos from their followers who adored their brand.
An important takeaway here is to know the interests of your target audience. This was shown in both the quality and quantity of the entries they received. The prize chosen by the brand and the clear rules were some of the important factors behind the campaign’s success. Furthermore, the organic exposure of the content was greatly increased by the encouragement received by the participants.
Before you run a photo contest, write down your goals. What are the results you want? What theme will lead to the most engaging UGC? How will you get your fans involved? How can you make it a win-win situation for you and your participants?
2. Promote Gated Content
This is perhaps one of the easiest lead generation strategies on social media: Gated content.
Most of your social media followers are people who haven’t made a purchase from you. They are aware and remain on the top of the funnel. Maybe they are considering! Your next job should be to get them to act, and that can be achieved through gated content.
Gated content is content that can be accessed by users once they perform an action. This indicates they have to sign up, or like/share a post. A point to note while creating gated content is to make it EXCELLENT so that your target audience understands that their name and email is a tiny price to pay in return to what they’re getting.
Neil Patel used this strategy while announcing his recent blog post on Twitter.
On clicking the link, this is what they see:
On sharing the name and email address, the user can get access to the gated content. This is a simple and effective strategy. However, some brands do it the wrong way.
An important takeaway is to make your gated content of tremendous use to your fans. If you ask them to fill out a 10-minute survey, they will not be getting leads since the effort of taking the survey is not quite worth the benefit.
3. Leverage On Facebook Custom Tabs
Your Facebook business page can act as a magic wand for lead generation on social media. Based on a research by University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research from among US millenials who follow any brand on Facebook, nearly 66% do so to get discounts and coupons, while 37% do so to take part in contests. This can be a tremendous blessing for marketers, since contests, discounts and coupons are all different types of robust lead generation tools on social media.
Tabs are essentially menu items that appear on the left side of your Facebook page. A majority of business pages on Facebook use some of the standard tabs like About, Photos, Pins and Posts. However, very few use custom tabs, which can be a fantastic way to showcase offers and contests used for generating leads on social media.
If you have a developer in your team, you can build custom tabs right from scratch, but you can always find loads of Facebook page apps that can easily assist you in creating custom tabs, which includes lead gen forms. And the best part is you don’t have to invest in any social media lead generation software or know any code.
Conclusion
While trying to generate leads from social media, you can use any of the above-mentioned approaches. However, the technique you use should align with your marketing objectives and the audience you’re targeting.
Have you ever generated leads on social media? Share your stories in the comments below.
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