Social media isn’t probably the first thing that comes to mind when you hear about lead generation, but maybe, it’s about time that it should. Knowing your prospects and establishing relationships is an integral part of the sales process. It turns out that social media can help you accomplish these things quickly and easily.
According to Hubspot’s latest marketing statistics for 2017, 92% of marketers reveal that social media is important for their businesses while 66% says social media is beneficial for their lead generation campaigns. Thus, social channels are now one of the powerful arsenals in building a relationship with customers and prospects throughout every stage of the customer’s entire lifecycle.
Sales in Social
The majority of marketers associate social media with brand building and not sales. After all, no one purchases a product due to a like or share, right? Or is it?
Social media, for what it’s worth, is more than just a seeding ground to connect with your current customers and grow your brand. It nurtures sales too. You can use social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn to produce authentic leads for your business. What’s more, lead generation in social media is cost effective!
The companies who use lead generation strategies on social media manage to obtain better results across the funnel. It only proves that this approach is efficient in generating conversions, building brand awareness, accomplishing productivity in sales, generating higher revenue growth, and building a sense of community for followers and advocates.
So, the big question, how to use social media to boost sales leads for your business? Check out the 12 effective approach to incorporate social media and fill in the sales funnel for your team.
Share Links to Gated Content
Gated content by definition, is content that hides behind a virtual a gate. If the content is highly valuable, the interested readers will freely give their contact information in trade for access.
In using social media for lead generation, you can showcase a gated content through sharing a link to a landing page where prospective readers give their information before obtaining access to the content.
Some people click on the landing page but click away without trying to access the content. It could be that they’re interested in the content but not to the extent where they’re eager enough to give out their information. But for those who are more than willing to know, they’re ready to pass through this minor barrier just to qualify themselves as casual readers in the process.
Say, for instance, your content is pertinent to your product or industry (as how it should be), the interested readers who completed filling out the landing page form turn into great leads. Gated contents may come in several forms, that’s why it’s best to do some experiments to find out what’s best for your targeted audience.
For example, B2B marketers, using webinars, white papers and case studies are effective strategies according to eMarketer.
Give Special Offers
Everybody loves freebies, so why not consider offering giveaways or hosting a sweepstake on social media. These strategies are something that people will enjoy sharing on their social channels. And by incorporating an entry form, you’ll have the chance to seize important lead data.
Be sure to include a way for the users to share the offer through their social channels at the end of the form. With this approach, participants will be able to spread the word in their community and with every mention, you’ll be able to continue nurturing the relationship by acknowledging and engaging with their posts.
Stage a Contest
A better way to draw the attention of your target audience is to organize a contest with worthy prizes. The prize should satisfy two important criteria. First, it must be valuable enough to persuade people from entering the game. And second, it must be valuable, particularly to those with high potentials to become one of your customers.
So, what kind of prizes should you offer? An upgrade to a higher tier of your service or an extended trial of your product are good options, after all, those prizes are only valuable to people who are interested in using your product. You can also provide some giveaways if you are selling physical products. If you lack the budget to do so, you can use solicitation or crowdfunding schemes to produce a budget.
There are some methods which you can use to allow people to join your contest on social media for lead generation. Check them out below.
Enter through sharing, liking, retweeting or following. These options are the easiest that people can join. You’ll likely get a high number of participants. But this isn’t a great option for a lead generation since participants only share the information that’s already publicly available on their social media profiles.
Click a landing page. You’ll get few participants for this method than for a contest that only requires liking or retweeting since this involves an extra step. Nevertheless, you can collect information via a contest entry form that will convert your participants into qualified leads.
Conduct Polls and Surveys
Instead of playing a guessing game of what your audience wants and cares about, just ask them directly. Your followers can give you a valuable knowledge, and surveys and polls are the best ways to extract their opinions.
Surveys and polls are also excellent in getting feedbacks of how people use your product, what they’d like to see on your roadmap, as well as their pain points. You can even give incentives to raise the response rate.
Utilize Social Media Advertising
Advertising in social media doesn’t only takes targeting to a whole new level. It also augments the ability of your campaigns to gather leads from specific groups of potential customers. Promoting gated content through specific target audiences is an excellent way to keep the cost of advertising low while making sure the leads that you gather to meet the desirable criteria.
Social media advertising evolved beyond targeting to incorporate specific lead generation tools such as ad formats designed to help marketers directly collect leads inside social networks.
• Facebook lead ads. This ad format provides a low-barrier, low-commitment way for prospective customers to interact with your business without the need to leave Facebook. For gated content offer, the prospect will give information in exchange for something valuable for them.
• Instagram lead ads. Facebook lead ads can also take place on Instagram for as long as the ads meet the design requirements of Instagram. You should only request additional information if it is critical for your initial sales efforts since the lead ads of Instagram only appear on mobile which takes about 40 percent longer to complete a form on a mobile device than on a desktop.
• LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms. This format is also an easy way for potential customers to give their information since they are pre-populated with details from the LinkedIn profile of the users. This pre-populated information may include work details such as company, job title, and status. It also includes educational background such as school, course or degree and field of study, all of which can give you a valuable set of data for each lead.
Use Referrals
Using referrals can be tricky, but if you play your cards right, your referral campaigns could be an excellent way to break the ice with prospects and give you massive followers. Take heed that 83% of consumers trust the recommendations of their family and friends, so you must take advantage of it.
Make attractive offers for both the referees and referrers such as cash incentives or gift cards. It could be the way to make your customers recommend your product or service to their network.
Use Custom Tabs on Facebook
Custom tabs are primarily menu items that you can see at your Facebook Page’s left column. The majority of the Facebook’s business pages already use at least some of the standard Page tabs such as Events, Photos and About. But only a few use customized page tabs which are a good way to highlight offers and contents used for lead generation on social media.
If you’re working with a web developer, you can make customized tabs from scratch. There are numerous Facebook Page apps also that will help you build custom tabs including lead generation forms without investing in social media lead generation software or knowing any code.
Host a Webinar or Live Stream
Hosting a webinar or streaming a live session on your social channels is an efficient method to interact directly with your followers in real-time. Live chats provide you the opportunity to place your brand as an expert in the industry by gathering feedback, answering questions and generating awareness about your products or services.
You can also generate a cross-channel traffic through directing the users to landing pages, branded contents, and offerings.
Offer a reward for participation to encourage live interaction. Make sure to do a follow up with those who leave comments. This follow-up could be as simple as encouraging people to reach out to your social media team with any further questions or directing them to resources related to their comments including gated contents.
Discount Codes
Discount codes and flash deals are another effective mediums to generate demands and leverage brand awareness. A lot of consumer companies adopt this method to fight the skyrocketing cart abandonment rates. It is also highly pertinent in the B2B sector.
Furthermore, these strategies also can help you, even more, when it comes to attribution reporting. You can track which platform yields the most traffic by assigning unique codes for each social channel.
Use Geotargeted Search
A geotargeted search allows you to find and reach specific individuals or group of people to direct them to a particular offer lead generation form or invite them to your business. It is beneficial to larger or online companies too.
For instance, you can use a geotargeted search to trace the shares that come from the venue of an industry conference, regardless if you’re there or not. Then you can reach out to those people who share with a customized offer like a trial of your app which you can just make a greeting and start building a connection to develop over time.
Use Targeted Social Media Listening
Social media listening is like keeping a virtual ear to the ground with specific goals which is to find out who’s talking about you and your competitors online and to comprehend what’s happening in your industry. It’s also a valuable wellspring of actionable insights which include potential leads who are interested in engaging in business just like yours.
You can use search streams to track the important handles and keywords in your industry. You can also monitor the sentiments of people about relevant products and services and even specific features. Then you can reach out to people to share information, make connections to position your brand as a go-to resource when they’re ready to make a purchase.
Engage in Social Selling
Social selling is a combination of lead generation, sales practices, and social listening, but it’s more about building and nurturing relationships.
According to the current study conducted by Seismic and CSO Insights, one out of three B2B professionals says social selling tools boost the number of leads that they had to work. Lead development, in fact, is the primary reason why B2B professionals use such social selling tools.
Takeaway
We’re now living in an era where 68% of people spend more time socializing on social media than having a face to face conversations. It’s the core reason why social media makes a vibrant ecosystem to look for potential customers and make them into new sales leads. It’s about time that you start changing the way you use social media. Stop thinking Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn as just tools for branding. Make it worthwhile for your business.
Patrick Panuncillon
Latest posts by Patrick Panuncillon (see all)
- 12 Dynamic Ways to Boost Sales Leads Through Social Media - October 3, 2017
