All your potential clients are on social media, in at least 1 or 2 platforms. So this is a great place to look at when you start thinking of where to get leads. Before I share a few tips and hacks, let’s get into context here…
The entire process of online marketing can be described as being a three-stage model where you first generate traffic to your website or squeeze page, convert some of this traffic into leads, and then turn these leads into paying customers. And social media would be a great place to start looking since all your potential clients are on social media.
Before we progress, however, we must discuss what leads are. Leads are those customers who have expressed a higher level of interest in making a purchase from you or have a very high level of interest in doing so. As marketing wisdom provides, the higher the number of leads you generate, the higher the number of sales you are going to make.
Social media is one of the best tools for generating high converting leads. In fact, there is one statistic that shows that 90% of top decision-makers never respond to cold calls but on the other hand, 76% of people are responsive to business conversations initiated on social media.
Now that you have some idea of how important social media can be for your lead generation, the question is, how exactly do you go about using it effectively? To answer this question, here are the eight steps you need to follow.
1. Create shareable lead magnets
Lead magnets are content that is designed to lure buyers into providing some extra information about themselves. For instance, you could offer a free ebook in exchange for email addresses. If the lead magnet has enough value, you will find that people will be willing to give up a lot of information in order to access it. Usually, these lead magnets will be uploaded on your website, but you can use them on social media by creating shareable links and then sharing them on your various social media profiles.
2. Run contests
Contests are generally very popular on social media. To succeed, however, the contest needs to meet a few basic criteria. Firstly, there has to be a valuable prize up for grabs, in order to provide motivation for people to actually sign up. Secondly, it has to be valuable particularly to your strongest potential leads. This is because your goal is not to create a high amount of traffic, but a high amount of leads.
Here is a list of 10 powerful online social media contest tools
Instead of offering some generic items such as cash prizes, or vacations or other things that would draw most people, your prize needs to be specifically enticing to the people who have maybe most likely to go on to make a purchase from you. So choose something like an extended trial version of your product, or perhaps a giveaway of some of your products.
3. Use social media advertising
Social media advertising allows you to really narrow down your focus to just the specific groups of people you want to target for your marketing. If you have done your research, which you should have by this point, all you need to do is use the demographic data of your target market to customize your ad campaigns.
4. Host a hangout, webinar, or live video
Webinars, hangouts and live videos are some of the best lead magnets you can offer. People just love them because they tend to be highly informative, or at least engaging. You can choose to either use these types of content as direct lead magnets or you could use them in an indirect manner.
What you do when you use them as indirect lead magnets are, you offer open access to the hangout, webinar or live video, but then go on to direct the audience to visit a certain landing page or perform some other specific option.
5. Use geotargeted search
Most of your strongest leads are going to be people with a high degree of geographical proximity to you, so it makes sense for you to deliberately target these people. That’s what geo-targeting is. Because social media sites differ with the way they are set up and the particular manner in which you can use geo-targeting, there is no one method of doing this, but the general idea is to use location tags in your social posts.
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6. Social media listening
As the name implies, social listening is just about keeping your eyes and ears open to stay on top of the developments in your industry. As such, your objective is firstly to find out what people are saying about you and your competitors online, and secondly to provide an adequate response that draws the audience to you. Social listening provides a great source of actionable data as it is coming to you right from the market itself. One particularly good way to pick up leads using social listening is to spot any topics that are trending and get involved in the discussion with expert advice.
Note:
The idea of lead generation using social media is usually based on a wider strategy that involves acquiring these leads and then converting into paying customers via a website. However, you should not rule out the idea of social selling. This is so because some of the leads you generate on social media will be people who are ready to buy immediately. Social selling is easy as there a number of social selling tools you can use to aid your social selling. These will be covered in subsequent articles.
