Lilach Bullock — February 22, 2018 — February 22, 2018
With billions of people around the world using social media, it’s becoming quite clear that this is where our audiences and leads are spending their time. The question is, how do you get all of those potential leads to engage with you and give you their contact information? How do you get them to visit your website and convert them?
In this blog post, I’m going to share 5 effective ways to use social media marketing for lead generation:
Set up a social media contest
One of the easiest ways of getting people to sign up is to give them a good incentive – and what’s a better incentive than a good prize?
Social media contests are very easy to set up – with plenty of free and paid tools to help you create one – and they can generate not only more leads for your business, but more followers and more engagement overall.
However, your contest doesn’t necessarily have to be on social media; at least, not directly. Rather, you could hold the actual contest (if it’s something like a quiz or trivia test) on your website, and use your social accounts as a means to promote it and for people to share their results.
Whichever route you choose to take, one thing is most important here: to get people to leave their contact information.
Next, there’s the prize to consider, which you shouldn’t choose lightly. If you pick a bad prize, people might not even be tempted to participate; or, if you pick a really good prize, like an iPad Pro for example, you’re probably going to get a lot of participants – but it won’t be the right ones, i.e. your target audience.
Put simply, there are 2 requirements that your prize must respect: it needs to be valuable enough that people would actually want to win it and it needs to be very relevant to your business, so only the right audience participates.
Direct your social media audience to your gated content
One of the easiest, most effortless ways of generating leads consistently via social media, is to use to your social channels to promote your gated content. All you need is the content and then, it’s just a question of promoting it to your social audience numerous times – or, if you’ve got some amazing content that could generate a lot of signups (such as e-books, whitepapers, industry reports, and so on), it’s definitely worth investing in some social media ads to drive more eyeballs to your updates.
However, you’re probably not going to get a lot of people clicking through. But, those who do click and leave their contact details are clearly very interested – which makes them potential prospects. I always advocate quality in this case – it’s much better to get fewer, but truly qualified leads, rather than a plethora of leads who really have no interest in buying from you.
Discover social media leads by tracking your website visitors
There are potential leads visiting your website right now that you probably don’t know about – and worse yet, never will either if you don’t take any action.
One of the ways to stay ahead is to use a tool that allows you to identify your website visitors so you can then start building a relationship with them via social media.
For example, you can use a tool like Jumplead, a tool which can analyze your website visitors in real time to give you their business information.
Even better, you can also find out whether you have any connections within the companies visiting your website on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Use social listening to uncover leads
Want to be more proactive with your lead generation strategy? Use social listening.
The way it works is simple in theory: you search for relevant keywords that your target audience might use, you uncover potential leads, and you start engaging with them to build relationships.
The thing is, people are using social media more and more to look for products and services; they use it to research companies, to ask their friends and followers for advice and recommendations, which makes social media monitoring a very practical way of generating qualified leads for your business.
Basically, they could be missed opportunities if you’re not actively looking for them.
To get your social listening started, you need a tool to help. Most social media management tools have this feature, or you can also get a pro social (and web) listening tool like Brand24 or Brandwatch. These types of tools allow you to create monitoring searches that are better targeted so it’s easier to find the types of conversations you’re looking for.
Once you’ve got the tool, it’s time to set up your searches. What keywords would your leads use to search for products or services like yours? It also helps to monitor your competitors; people use social media to ask about similar products and services and ask for opinions on specific products.
Next, it’s simply a case of keeping an eye on these social listening streams you’ve set up; as you discover conversations and potential leads, start engaging: follow them on social media, engage them in conversations, and in some cases, you can even reach out directly with your products or services.
Use live streaming to generate leads
Webinars are some of the most effective forms of content when it comes to generating highly qualified leads. You get to offer a lot of value to your audiences, give them something that they need, and you also get to demonstrate your knowledge and skill level.
So, why not use social media and live streaming to create a webinar?
There are 2 main ways that you can generate leads from this: either by asking for peoples’ contact information from the start (and ‘gate’ your content), or by directing them during the live stream and after to other gated content and landing pages from your website.
In order to get people interested in your webinar or live stream, however, you need to offer your audience a lot of value; there’s a lot of competition for their attention, so why should they join your webinar? What will they get out of it? What will they learn?
Even better is when you also offer another incentive on the back of your webinar; for example, you could set up a discount or another offer on your products/services for all participants – which is particularly great because it means you’re going to get people who are genuinely interested in your products and services.
You should also try to use your live stream as a way to get people to your website, and better yet, to your gated content. The best way to do this is to send them to relevant content and resources; for example, if you were holding a webinar on driving traffic to your website, you could direct them to a website promotion checklist you have on your blog.
Once the webinar is over, you should try to reach out to the leads you’ve generated during the webinar and touch base; this could be directly via social media or, if you have their contact information, shoot them an email.
Conclusion
As you can see, social media marketing can be a great source of quality leads; to sum up, there are multiple ways and methods to help you generate leads:
- Social media contests
- Directing your audience to gated content on your website and other platforms
- Tracking your website visitors
- Using social listening to track leads
- Using live streaming to generate leads
Are you actively using social media to generate leads? What methods are you using?
Digital & Social Articles on Business 2 Community
(26)
