Social media is a powerful way of reaching billions of people. You can use it to drive traffic, increase brand awareness, lead generation, or sales. About 90.4% of millennials use it and 77.5% of people from Gen X are social media users too.
With the possibility of reaching so many people through social media, you can use it to generate leads for your business.
All you need to do is identify your target audience, connect and engage with them, and get them to your landing page. Sound complicated? Let’s look at how you can boost your lead generation efforts with social media.
People use social media mainly to interact with their close friends or family or as a means of entertainment. However, you can use it to get their attention and get them to buy from you.
But first, you need to find the right target audience for your brand. You can define it based on their demographics, location, and interests.
The reason for this is that if you target the wrong audience, you may end up marketing to people who aren’t interested in your products. This will not give you many leads. After identifying your target audience, you’ll have a better understanding of their likes and dislikes. This will help you create content tailored to them.
You can also use paid promotions to reach a larger target audience. Through the ad analytics, you can further optimize your promotion.
For instance, if you have a makeup brand like Sephora, your target audience will be mainly women. In such a case, it may make sense to exclude men from it.
2. Utilize Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing utilizes the power of influencers on social media to get people to take some action. These influencers are popular personalities on social media who have amassed large fan-followings and developed deep relationships with their followers. They can influence the decisions of their followers due to this reason.
You need to find influencers in your niche and reach out to them for collaboration. When their followers see them endorsing your product, they’ll trust their recommendation.
To generate leads, you can ask the influencers to include a link to your landing page in their posts. Many of their followers may click on this link and give their information to you, hence becoming your leads.
However, be careful while choosing influencers as there are many fake influencers on social media. These people buy followers and likes and collaborate with brands. However, as their followers and engagement aren’t genuine, the campaign will not succeed.
As many as 63% of marketers have had personal experiences with influencer fraud in the past. To find genuine and reliable influencers, you can use Influence.co. You can post your campaign on the platform and allow influencers to apply for it.
A well-planned and executed influencer marketing campaign can help you generate loads of leads. To help Somalia, Turkish Airlines collaborated with Jerome Jarre. He posted about the drought on social media, and his tweet was reposted almost 83,000 times in just a few days.
Through this campaign, he was able to generate over a million dollars in donations within just 24 hours. And the campaign generated $2 million within 5 days.
Image via Twitter
Remarketing is an excellent way of generating leads from social media. It involves marketing to those who have already shown interest in your brand in the past. Only a fraction of the visitors to your website are likely to become leads. The ones who don’t become leads are the ones you need to target in your remarketing campaign on social media.
You can create a custom audience on social media platforms such as Facebook and target these visitors. When they see your ad again on the platform, they may click on it and become leads.
However, many of them may not do so. Even for those, the ad is useful as it creates brand awareness. Canva, for instance, uses this form of marketing for generating leads.
Image via Facebook
Employees can be brand advocates and influencers in their own circles too. Employee advocacy can be beneficial when it comes to generating leads from social media. When they write positive things about your brand, they influence their own circles.
To boost employee advocacy, you should consider creating content that can be easily shared by them. In order to give a boost to your lead generation efforts, you can even put a link to your landing page in those posts.
To track the traffic that comes through them, you can add a UTM code to those links as well. Using a tool like UTM.io, you can see where the most traffic comes from without any hassle.
Through employee advocacy, you can not only reach more people but even generate a good number of leads. When employees share positive things about your brand, it adds a human element to it as well. This can improve brand trust too.
General Electric, for instance, uses employee advocacy to their advantage. They published interviews of their employees on Instagram. And although this didn’t directly target lead generation, it did help improve their brand image.
Image via Instagram
Coming up with new and unique content ideas can be a challenge in itself. However, you can repurpose your old content which has performed well in the past and use it to generate leads.
For instance, if you used an image to increase brand awareness in the past, you can use it now to generate leads.
All you need to do is insert a call-to-action (CTA) and link it to your landing page. It is also possible to create a paid promotion from your popular older content and use it to generate a massive number of leads.
This saves you valuable time, which would have been spent on creating new content. At the same time, you will be able to utilize your old content to its full potential.
Stories started out on Snapchat. However, Instagram and Facebook were quick to pick up on the idea. As many as 500 million people watch Stories daily on Instagram.
You can create Stories on these platforms and they can be seen by your followers and friends. They remain visible for 24 hours from the time they are uploaded and can include photos and videos.
It is possible to insert links in your Stories on Instagram if you have a verified profile. The other option is to have a business account with more than 10,000 followers.
You can insert links to your landing page in your Stories and get people to click on it. If you don’t have the option to add links, you can still create a paid promotion that is visible in Stories on Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram. This can help you generate a lot of leads.
Airbnb, for instance, uses this method to generate leads by posting Stories on Instagram.
Image via Instagram
Due to the sheer number of options and the ability to target a massive audience, social media is a great place to generate leads. By utilizing Stories and repurposing old content, you can get people to your landing page. You can also leverage the power of influencers and employees to convert more people into leads.
Remarketing can also help in the process. To give a boost to your efforts, you can also utilize paid promotions.
What other ways do you use social media for lead generation? Let us know in the comments below.
Further reading: What Is Lead Generation in 2019
2 Comments
Thanks for the mention of influence.co. We have lots of free resources your readers might be interested in such as industry rate data: https://influence.co/go/rates.
Thanks again for including us!
Flippa is a good choice as well https://flippa.com/