How To Generate Leads With Social Media Campaigns
According to Statista, “Almost 4.54 billion people were active internet users as of January 2020, encompassing 59% of the global population.” Among them, 3.48 Billion users are on social media; equates 45% of the world’s populations. Most of them are active daily, providing a significant amount of data to the world. This data has proven to be a gold mine for generating leads and designing social media marketing campaigns. The reason is, marketers can utilize it for direct targeting of audiences.
Today, most businesses are using social media platforms for building brand trust and due to their low-cost of marketing with high accuracy of customer segmentation. Also, they have remained an integral part of every digital marketing domain.
Fortunately, the adoption of social media has already beaten all previous estimates, suggesting brands having a massive opportunity to reach out to considerably more substantial audiences. This creates a significant new trend for generating leads as a solid audience base.
Social media lead generation vs. Social media lead nurturing
A lead is basically a phone number, address, email ID, or contact that helps to target audiences that marketers ask their targeted users. Social media is highly relevant to gather good leads. Both organic and paid campaigns are useful to promote contents via optimization and sponsored ads. That is called social media lead generation. Alternatively, leads can be nurtured via social media by funneling them and segmenting for customized strategies. Smart marketers can turn those cold lead warm by remarketing to nurture them. Polls, videos, contests, and infographics can be utilized to craft and send personalized messages. All of them help to nurture leads better.
Connecting Social Media & Lead Generation
Today’s marketers are mostly satisfied with the outcomes they are having with social media for lead generation.
Good news is, there is still so much to explore. Let’s see what to expect when designing a social media lead generation campaign.
Social listening lead generation
As we mentioned above, lead generation is all about bringing customers to your sales channel. It can be done by not just selling, but via listing to your customer. Lead generation can serve as gathering customer intelligence. You need to know the below fragments as a must:
- What are the pain points of your audiences?
- What your targeted customer is interested in?
- What are your products you could sell them potentially?
- How can you turn your audiences into regular buying customers?
Organic vs. paid
Today, the internet has entirely changed the way businesses get leads. It’s all about video marketing, gated content, opt-in, and sponsored campaigns to get a potential paying customer into your sales funnel.
Since it is all online, it’s easier, quicker, and authentic to track down collected data amazingly. Here social media comes into play with a number of organic and paid options to take you rightly in front of your prospect, including hash tags, trends, and posts. You need to focus:
- Audience targeting
- Increased reach
- CTA options
Picking up leads through social
Despite social media lead generation and nurturing, it is incredibly essential to pick up leads from the right social media platform for your business. It’s all about knowing your prospect in the right way. For example, Facebook may seem like the best option for any business with 1 billion users. However, it’s not always the case. While for most B2B marketers, 44% of the leads generated via LinkedIn, 39% by Facebook, and 30% via Twitter. Hence, you may need to:
- Search out for individual leads
- Promote gated content
- Promote your products/services
- Generate inbound leads
How To Generate Leads With Social Media Campaigns: 10 Tips
Create Content around Trending Topics
Content is undoubtedly the king. More than 80% of B2B marketers use content marketing around trending topics as a lead magnet. People crave satisfying, useful, and unique content every day. By crafting fresh content around trending topics can get a fair chance of you being in the front of your targeted audiences. Also, if you are consistent in generating stuff that becomes viral and sharable, more opportunities are to be the eye candy of your client pool. The most important strategy for highlighting your content is to make it visual. For the purpose, you can use keywords. Choose SEO keywords wisely, to get more visitors to your content.
Moreover, relevant knowledge and including the solutions to the pain points of your customers in your content can help to build trust and authenticity for your brand. So, when your audience needs a reliable source to get an answer, they will surely get back to you and will recommend you to others as well.
Share links of gated content
After content creation, making it smartly available for the visitors can get you the edge. Gated content is precisely what it sounds like; it is basically the hidden content behind a virtual gate. Most probably, if the content is valuable enough, interested readers will willingly give some necessary contact information to access. Below is an example:
You can promote gated content using social media for generating leads. All it takes to share the link to the landing page with an attractive CTA where potential clients provide information in exchange to gain access.
Keep in mind that you will get 3 kinds of visitors;
- The one who may click through your landing page and instantly click away without accessing the content
- The one who may have a mild interest in the content but not bothered to provide contact information or feels that content’s worth is not sharing contact info with
- The one who’s genuinely interested in the content by understanding the significant value they will gain and willing to overcome the little obstacle of providing info and qualifying more than other casual readers.
Hence, make your content relevant to your industry for those who complete the landing page process to reach it, finding worthy and become great leads.
Pick the Right Channel
As we mentioned in the above section, selecting the channel to funnel up your audiences to become your buyers is the most critical step for generating leads. There is every kind of social media that is proven to be suitable for specific industries, products, and businesses. Select the right one for your business and get the most out of what it offers to help you ripe the fruits of targeted investments with the uncounted benefit outcomes.
Run Contests
Contests are proven to be massive hits on social media for years. The reason is, they draw a lot of audience’s attention and are like to be shared. You can offer free product samples, discounted vouchers, or premium jackets to winners. However, the other side of the coin is not very bright. They may not get you the most qualified leads all the time because you may encounter several freebie seekers as well. However, you may get a good number of followers just like the example below:
Still, contests are the favorite to gather a significant number of emails, numbers, and subscriptions. There are a number of tools to help you set up social media contests by integrating primary email marketing tools. Hence, giving marketers a clean ground to play and win.
Utilize Social Media Advertising
Despite organic social media post boosts, social media advertising takes lead targeting to more laser-focused ability to get potential customers and an entirely new level of ROI. Utilizing hyper-specific targeted leads to promote gated content is excellent to keep low costs for advertising, and assuring leads to meet the desired criteria of segmentation. However, social media advertising has evolved more beyond simple targeting by including custom-designed lead generating tools and formats to help marketers collect direct leads from specific platforms.
Additionally, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are now offering “Lead Generation Ads” presented above, to allow companies to collect direct leads. It can be beneficial for marketers as it provides targeted marketing to social media users’ right on their favorite platform. Fortunately, users don’t have to click on the ads and fall on a landing page to fill subscription forms. The process has been simple as just a click on the way to fill it within 30 seconds.
Most of the time, users get a free e-book, gated content, or valuable access in return, which also benefits businesses; thus, saving time and rewarding both users and marketers.
Hangouts, webinars, V-logs, and live videos
The most casually yet professionally successful strategy to generate leads from social media is using webinars, hangouts, live videos, and V-logs. Nowadays, most businesses conduct webinars on trending topics with an advanced participation registration. This gives marketers an ideal way to collect leads. Since the registration is prior and mandatory, there is a considerable chance that most people may not attend the webinar. However, it can help businesses get potential leads and get them in the pool with post-event updates and shared materials.
According to Forbes, “90% of customers say video helps them make buying decisions, and 64% of customers say that seeing a video makes them more likely to buy.” Moreover, hangouts are proven to be useful for small groups of audiences interested in the same topic. The best example is “Google hangouts,” where the person who starts the conversation can invite around 150 people to join a single hangout at the same time.
Live videos are another useful way, especially for product launches, brand awareness, and important announcements to make for businesses. Also, to answer quick FAQs, you can go for gated content with an in-video promotion. Live videos are good to get audiences to the landing pages and contest forms as well. Social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook offer live video sessions in which you can add your desired links to convert viewers into potential leads.
Use geo-targeted search
To let marketers send promotions and advertise to geographically targeted audiences, social media platforms offers location-based user targeting option for ads and search. Hence, you can send content to hyper-targeted users to generate lead ads and polls for real-time feedback. Video blogging is also another better option for demographical promotions and shared affiliations for marketing. Nectar knows it well seen here:
Click through to a landing page
After talking much about landing page in the above sections, let’s get to know for a proper click through on the landing page. It is developed to convert leads into customers. Developing a useful landing page is a great way to attract visitors in case if you don’t have a piece of gated content or a valuable post that may not be available to share on social media platforms. Furthermore, social media users don’t like to have unexpected promotions; however, sharing landing pages fall into similar criteria. Thus, it is recommended to focus on sponsored or paid advertising while sharing SEO-friendly landing page links.
Go for Influencer marketing
One billion people use Instagram every month, and half of them use it every day. Thus finding the right influencer who can actively promote your brand can go a long way to boost your lead generation. They are better at mentioning backlinks to your desired website page. For exchange of that work, your company can proudly share their reviews to feature endorsement.
The best way to utilize the benefits of influencer marketing is to set a straightforward rule of tailoring your approach with specific influencers. Thus, you can directly market to influencers who are well-aligned.
Generating the attention of an influencer is the first step to reach the goal of tapping into the influencer’s audiences. This helps to build credibility and spread brand awareness. Fortunately, the ultimate hybrid of conventional and current marketing tools catalyzes the advantages of natural human interactions. With an emphasis on delivering authentic information, providing valuable data to new leads via an effective content marketing strategy helps as well.
Feature Your Customer’s Testimonials and share Stories
Word of mouth marketing is still the best form of marketing to gain the confidence of your visitors and nourish the loyalty of existing clients. The more you share good experiences of your customers, the more chances are of them becoming lead magnets. The best thing about social media is, it provides an open forum to like, comment, share, and subscribe with a room for discussions as well.
Real-time feedback and authentic connections can add relevancy to your reviews. Hence, don’t underestimate the power of your client’s feedback and share it without hesitation. Sharing stories can also get you in front of your audiences’ straightway. Make sure to create eye-catching content within a short time to convey the right message to the right prospect.
Top-rated Social media platforms- Determine the purpose
“1.62 billion Users visit Facebook daily, while 74% of people use the site every day.” Today, most email marketing software companies provide an app for Facebook to let marketers create an opt-in form tab for the official Facebook page. By this, you can design a customized form to promote lead magnets by asking your visitors to subscribe to you.
Alike from Facebook, Twitter offers two different types of ads to get you leads. Website conversions or clicks may allow visitors to get a squeezed page link or a contact page ideally. Also, “leads on twitter” will let you capture leads by following their procedure directly.
Instagram is the land of beautiful visuals and house of influential marketers as we discussed before. Thus, you may need to create beautiful images and great to watch videos to get the attention of your customers. Since there are no clickable links on Instagram, even for business, make sure to get people to your bio to find a clickable link to a contact form. Also, it is best to use hashtags customized with your brand, business, and latest trends. This will bring your post in front of your potential prospects.
LinkedIn offers users a few more places than other social media channels to link out a squeeze page and contact form. You can add 3 links to your contact info with the opportunity to utilize projects and publications with a direct link to your desired web page; ideal for promoting a professional lead magnet. Ideal platform for B2B marketing.
Final Words
Creating valuable content to convert leads to potential paying customers is a mountain that marketers have to climb must achieve brand growth and generate profitable sales revenues. However, producing high-quality leads takes the cake and cherry top both.
Also, lead-generating marketing trends change often. But the ability to innovate, update, and optimize thoughtfully to work enhances the experience to keep marketers ahead of time and trends.
Author Bio
Amanda Jerelyn is a brilliant digital marketer and an SEO expert. She has a rich work experience of social media and has a proud of conducting some blockbuster webinars. Currently, Amanda is working as Marketing Manager at Crowd Writer, one of the best assignment writing service in the UK.
