Social media has changed the way of doing business and acquiring customers; gone are the days when telemarketers were employed for advertisement. Nowadays, with the help of social media marketing tools, sellers strategically target their customers based on their interests.
A seller also needs to plan ways to acquire new and relevant leads for every growth strategy. So, what do leads mean? In marketing terms, a lead can be anything that can help you identify potential buyers or people interested in your products or services.
For example, a lead can be anything from name and email address to job and employer details. You can use different platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest to increase your reach.
Platforms and their specialty in lead generation:
Facebook: No business can ignore Facebook and its ability in lead generation. Facebook is quite good at generating leads through inbound marketing tools like targeted ads for B2B and B2C companies. However, it is not very effective for direct outreach strategies.
LinkedIn: LinkedIn is the best place if you are looking for B2B sales because business professionals dominate LinkedIn. According to some market professionals, four out of five LinkedIn members are entrusted with their companies for business decisions. The platform is not suitable for B2C businesses.
Pinterest: Pinterest works on images, and if your product or services have a visual touch, you can think about it. Mainly B2C companies in the DIY, food, or fashion domain use Pinterest for generating leads. Generally, B2B companies don’t prefer Pinterest unless their products lend themselves to graphics.
Twitter: Both B2B and B2C companies find Twitter the best place for interacting with their audiences. Twitter is mainly used for inbound sales, but you can also use tweets targeting leads.
Instagram: Instagram works best for B2C brands and primarily e-commerce stores. Businesses can target leads here with the help of photos and videos. Posts with good quality graphics tend to attract leads faster. So, don’t forget to employ a good video maker for your business needs.
Now, you have understood the Social Media platforms and their use in your business. Let’s see some effective lead generation strategies to get more leads on social media.
Lead Generation Strategies on Social Media:
1. Run paid ads:
Paid ads can help you reach the exact audience, increase engagement with your brand, increase the fan base, and much more. According to data from Gartner, a technology research and consulting company, companies spent 21% of their marketing budget on advertising, of which 66% was allocated for lead generation through social media.
With paid ads, you can capture the right data, important insights and use them to set your bars right. If done correctly, your social media presence will be more potent and effective than ever and can get you manifold more leads.
Before creating a new paid ad campaign, you must
- Specify your core objectives and Key performance Indices from the campaign. This will help you to create brand awareness and increase sales.
- Connect all your social media ad accounts in one place, and this will help you measure ROI (return on investment) and analyze it.
2. Use Chatbots to automate your social media lead generation:
The normalisation of business through instant messaging apps has created a surge in chatbots demand. You can’t expect customers to find you; instead, you need to find them wherever they are. Chatbots can do it better than humans at lower costs; at the same time, Chatbots can help your business with instant responses 24×7×365.
While interacting with new users, bots pull options from the website or show the pre-filled information according to the keywords entered.
Let’s see chatbots can help you with social media lead generation.
- Bots can help in deciphering the intent of your visitor. By knowing the visitor’s intent, you can easily plan your next course of action for converting the lead into a sale.
- While interacting with the old visitors, Chatbots can pull up the previous interaction data to create a specific user profile for each visitor. It can help you deliver curated messages, content, and sales suggestions.
3. Social Media Video marketing:
Though Video marketing on Social media is relatively new, businesses adapt pretty quickly. At present, more than 60% of brands are using videos on their social sites as videos are the perfect tools for building brands.
Videos can be in any format ranging from updates, stories, or videos on social profiles. Here are some crucial steps for creating a solid video marketing strategy.
- Have an objective in mind:
It would help if you had clear goals about your videos’ performance.
- Choose Video types:
Choose your video types according to the message you want to convey. For example, you can choose a short video for a product demo about us and an event information video. Similarly, create slightly long videos for how-to and product descriptions.
- Have a plan for Content production:
If you want to perform your marketing videos better on social media platforms, allocate enough funds for production.
You would need a good video maker for making quality videos.
4. Use Social media for content deployment:
Content is the king, and there isn’t an iota of doubt in it; however, creating good content is not enough for marketing. You will need to distribute it wisely also. With a strong social media marketing strategy, you can increase your brand power overnight, where your followers will be fans of the brand.
Here are some suggestions to fine-tune your content deployment strategy.
- Identify your business goals:
Having a clear vision of your marketing goals can get you better ideas for creating brand content and deploying it platform-wise. For instance, on Twitter, your posts can’t cross the 280-character limit. Similarly, you can use Facebook for long posts.
- Plan your content wisely:
While social media can turn your name into a brand overnight, it can also turn your brand name into dust with a single wrong post. So, it’s better to proceed with caution while creating your content. You can also make a content audit to see which content is performing better and boost it for even better reach.
- Content distribution strategy:
It would help if you had a content distribution strategy to run a paid ad campaign or not. Having a content distribution strategy helps you in getting maximum reach.
- Analyse the result:
Last but not least, you need to analyze the results with proper analysis tools like google analytics or Mixpanel. It will help you track KPIs and ROI and optimise your strategy over time.
5. Run Contests on Social Media:
Contents can help you brand recognition and association, which in turn help with lead generation. Contests act like a chain reaction where participants invite their contacts, sometimes making the contest viral. However, you must have a good social media fan base for organising a successful contest. For this, you can build social media communities and fan pages.
Here is how you can organise a contest and acquire new leads through social media.
- Using the Like, retweet, share, and follow buttons:
You can use these features of different social media platforms by making them compulsory for participation. It is the easiest way to acquire social media leads.
- Forms through landing pages:
Though most customers don’t feel okay filling out contact forms, you can still participate through landing pages. You can promise exclusive rewards for filling out the contact forms, and it may help you increase participation.
Conclusion:
Lead generation through social media depends upon how you utilize your marketing budget. Investing your funds in chatbots can save you money for deploying paid ad campaigns and video marketing.
Apart from the tools, it would help to focus on the person who runs the lead generation campaign. While a skilled marketing officer can utilize the funds responsibly, the unskilled will only deploy tools without a strategy.
Social media has changed the way of doing business and acquiring customers; gone are the days when telemarketers were employed for advertisement. Nowadays, with the help of social media marketing tools, sellers strategically target their customers based on their interests.
A seller also needs to plan ways to acquire new and relevant leads for every growth strategy. So, what do leads mean? In marketing terms, a lead can be anything that can help you identify potential buyers or people interested in your products or services.
For example, a lead can be anything from name and email address to job and employer details. You can use different platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest to increase your reach.
