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You have a business with a unique product to sell. But you don’t know how to generate leads. Sounds like a perfect story gone wrong, doesn’t it?
Today, the easiest way to generate leads is by using social media lead generation strategies. That’s because a majority of your audience are active social media users. And the best part is there are multiple social media platforms that you can leverage.
You can harness the power of social media to identify, connect, and engage with your target audience. You can not only promote your products or services organically but can also make use of paid ads.
If you create ads using repurposed UGC, they can help you generate greater leads and drive more conversions as well.
Social media lead generation is your best bet if you want to generate qualified leads. All you need to leverage it effectively is a little patience and some effective social media lead generation hacks.
Let’s look at 12 of the most effective, tried-and-tested social media lead generation hacks.
People mostly use social media as a source of entertainment and to socialize. However, a large fraction of social media users also use it to make purchase decisions. That’s why it is important to get your posts and products in front of the right people.
Social media lead generation strategies require you to show relevant items to people who want to buy them. If you end up targeting an audience that’s not interested in your products, you might not get any decent leads. However, targeting the right audience can get you truckloads of quality leads.
So, your first step for social media lead generation is to first figure out who your target audience is. Identify your buyer personas and refine your posts based on them. All of your content should be tailored to the interests of this target audience.
You can also utilize ads to reach out to your target audience. All you need to do is enter your target information based on interests, demographics, and locations. Based on the responses, you can further optimize them and get more leads.
Let’s say you sell men’s shoes. You should exclude women from your audience set. If you serve a particular area, you can choose to target men from that area. For local businesses, this is extremely helpful.
To get more people to your landing pages, you need to make your brand more popular. For this, you can utilize brand advocates. Essentially, they are the people who are likely to spread positive things about your brand.
The best part about this social media lead generation hack is that you needn’t do anything out of the ordinary. If you can impress your current customers with your products, they may become your advocates. And they may share good things about your brand and products in their circles.
You can leverage your brand advocates to create testimonials. Along with the testimonials, you can embed a link that takes people to your landing page. You can promote such posts and drive traffic to your landing pages. Those who see such testimonials have a greater chance of converting into leads.
Okta uses testimonials from their happy customers to promote themselves on social media and to generate leads.
The real power of brand advocacy can be unleashed when you pair it up with influencer marketing. You can use influencer marketing for social media lead generation too. Influencers are experts in their niches who have a healthy fan-following on social media.
Search for influencers who post content that’s related to your niche. You could collaborate with these influencers and send them your product samples. You could then ask them to post a review of your products on social media.
When their followers see them endorsing a particular product or brand, they will trust it. This is because they really value the views of influencers and believe in them. You can ask your influencers to share links to your landing pages in their posts along with a call-to-action (CTA).
You can reach even more people by running ads with influencer-generated content. Influencers are great for social media lead generation and cost less than other modes of marketing.
Each social media platform has their own way of showcasing branded content. If you use Facebook for influencer marketing, you can ask your influencers to use Facebook’s Branded Content tool. You can run ads on these posts directly if they use this tool.
Repurposing old content means essentially using your old content again for a different purpose. If you have content which has performed well in the past, you could use it again. This time, you could use it for social media lead generation.
If your fans have liked the content in the past, there are good chances that they will still like it. When you add a call-to-action with a link to your landing page, they may end up clicking on it. If the post receives high engagement, there are good chances of getting more leads.
You could even create an advertisement using your old content. Using the analytics from that content, you can showcase it to a completely new audience. This social media lead generation hack is simple and saves you a lot of time. It also ensures the effective use of your content.
Remarketing is essentially a hack to show your products to people more than once. Only a small number of visitors to a website are likely to make a purchase the very first time.
Some of them need to be reassured before they can become leads. This process may take time, and they may move away from your page by then. To convince them, you can create a custom audience to run ads on. This should consist of people who’ve visited your landing page but who did not buy.
They visited your landing pages because they have an interest in your products. You can leverage that interest to generate leads. Such leads could very well turn into conversions later.
You can offer discounts to this audience set as well. Not only will this help with lead generation but also your conversions.
Another hack to make this even more effective is to run this type of campaign at the beginning of the month. This is the time when people get their paychecks and so, they are more likely to make the purchase.
Some social media platforms like Facebook provide added benefits for social media lead generation. You can harness the power of your customer lists to generate more leads and conversions.
If you have a customer list, you can use it to create lookalike audiences. Facebook, in particular, allows you to do this. This lookalike audience will include people who are similar to your customers based on their locations, demographics, and interests.
As they resemble your target audience, you have a great opportunity to get them to convert. The lookalike audience will be based on the size of your customer list. If your list is a long one, you will be able to create a huge lookalike audience. Similarly, a smaller customer list means a smaller audience.
The accuracy of the lookalike audience will depend on the amount of data you have. The more data you have, the more accurate your lookalike audience will be.
A smaller lookalike audience usually has greater similarities with your target audience. In case of a larger audience, there is more variation.
Your customer list needs to include loyal customers and brand advocates. This will help to make your lookalike audience set more accurate.
You should use posts that worked with your customers on your lookalike audiences too. If they have worked on your customers, there is a better chance that they may work with the lookalike audience.
Finding brand advocates is an easy job, as already mentioned. However, you don’t need to limit your search for brand advocates to your current customers. Your employees can be great advocates for your brand as well.
In fact, employee advocacy can be pretty useful for social media lead generation for B2B brands. Employees, like your customers, have their own social circles. In these circles, they can help spread a positive word about your brand.
So you should create content that can be shared by your employees with ease. This content should ideally have a link to your landing page. When people in your employees’ social circles see them advocating your brand, they may click on it.
You should use all the help you can get to reach to more people. Only when you increase your reach, can you get more leads. If you simply rely on your own reach, you won’t be able to get the best results from your marketing efforts.
A great way to humanize your brand is to share the stories and experiences of your employees on social media. This can prompt many people to trust their words and become your leads.
General Electric often posts stories about their employees and features quotes from them, along with their pictures. Such posts can improve your brand’s image in the eyes of consumers.
When employees share your content, your reach increases, and so does engagement. This is because personal posts tend to get more engagement. A study by Bambu found that people are 16X more likely to check a post about a brand from their friends rather than from the brand itself.
So you need to encourage your employees to share their experiences on social media. This can help you a great deal in your social media lead generation.
While there are many strategies for social media lead generation without ads, paying to promote your posts just adds more fuel to the fire. It helps you increase your reach and flex your arms as much as possible. You can build a massive audience for your brand through advertising.
You can start running ads on your social media channels by paying a small fee. These platforms give you the option of targeting your posts to a particular audience. You can send these people to your landing page and get more leads.
Social media platforms provide multiple options to reach a particular advertising goal. Be it engagement, leads, conversions, or even more followers, you can do it all. You should set a budget for advertising on social media and then use it to generate more leads.
Based on the results, you can refine your ads by narrowing or widening the audience. This optimization can get you better results as well. If you can manage to achieve a low cost per lead, you will be able to generate high revenue.
Another brilliant social media lead generation strategy is to use live streaming to showcase product launches on social media. Many brands use it today to spread their reach and spread awareness about their new products. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube provide this option.
These videos can be short ones and should have a link to your landing page, if possible. If the viewers are given a direct call-to-action, you can convert your video viewers into leads almost immediately.
Live streaming gives a personal touch to your message. It is due to this that your audience will be able to remember your brand and your products longer.
Major brands like OnePlus use live streaming to launch their products.
You can showcase tutorials, testimonials, or even question and answer sessions in live videos. To increase your reach further, you can combine influencer marketing with live videos. Those who trust the influencer will get easily attracted to your products and may turn into your leads.
You can also share the live videos created by your influencers on your own profile. This can get you the attention of both your and your influencer’s audiences. So this is a social media lead generation hack that you should include in your strategy.
One of the best social media lead generation tips that anyone can give you is to leverage each social media platform to utilize their unique features.
Here are some of the most popular social media platforms and social media lead generation hacks for each of them.
There are some social media lead generation hacks that are specific to each social media platform. In the case of LinkedIn, maintaining an active presence is an important hack. You should ensure that you post content frequently. On an average, you should post unique content at least once every week.
This content, ideally, should be original. Additionally, you should maintain an active presence in the groups that are relevant to you.
To get good leads, you need to showcase a good history of engagement. This works, especially in the B2B industry.
What’s great about LinkedIn is that it provides you with an opportunity to showcase your thought leadership. If you post about industry-specific topics and showcase your expertise, people will start recognizing you as an industry expert. The more you attract people within your industry, the more traffic you will drive to your website.
To make the most of your campaigns on Facebook, use your links effectively. Create links that take your users to a landing page. On this landing page, you can ask them to share some information about themselves.
Additionally, you should make sure that this landing page is designed well. It should not take too long to load or else you’ll end up losing visitors.
The form needs to be short and concise so that the visitors can fill it out with ease. The heading and the subheadings need to be attractive and encourage visitors to share information. The page should have some images or videos to make it look more attractive as well.
Apart from this, you should make sure that your Facebook page is optimized well. Your Facebook page is nothing short of a webpage in itself. You need to make it enticing and you should add some keywords to it. Facebook gives you the option of adding a call-to-action so use it to motivate people to click your links.
When more people click on your links, you’ll have greater chance of getting leads.
Twitter is a great place to generate leads and should be an integral part of your social media lead-generation strategy. While you can definitely use regular posts with links to generate leads, targeted ads are great too. Twitter has improved its targeting to compete with Facebook ads.
You have the option of promoting your posts to specific demographics and locations. You can even use keywords that are tailored to reach new audiences. This can directly translate to effective social media lead generation.
Twitter has even introduced lead generation cards. These cards allow you to circumvent the need for getting users to click on your link to go to a landing page. Instead, all the content is accessible right on Twitter inside the cards. This provides a better chance of getting more leads.
Pinterest is the melting pot of all art. With billions of images on Pinterest, you need to modify your strategy to get more leads. The profiles on Pinterest don’t allow hyperlinking, so users can’t click on them.
However, you can use links in each of your pin descriptions. Try to make your pins attractive so that you can get the maximum benefit from them.
Pinterest also gives you the option of creating boards. You can compile numerous pins and put them on a board. Users can simply click on these boards to view all the pins on them and even re-pin them to their own boards. This allows them to save your pages for later use and also increases their reach.
You can optimize your board names by making them creative and by adding a few keywords. This will help you get those boards to list higher up in the search results for your relevant audience. If your content is creative and interesting, there are good chances that people will click on the links. This increases your chances of generating leads.
Instagram is one of the best platforms for social media lead generation. It opens up plenty of opportunities through which you can get people to your landing page. The first thing that you need to keep in mind is that you will have to generate creative content. Second, you need to use Instagram hashtags well.
While Instagram posts don’t allow hyperlinking, you can add the link to your landing page in your bio. Additionally, you can mention the link in your posts to direct viewers to the link in your bio.
The best hack for social media lead generation from Instagram is to use their ads. While they don’t permit links in regular posts, they do allow them in ads. You can convert any of your posts into an ad and direct people to your landing page.
You can also use Instagram Stories to your advantage. If you have more than 10K followers, you can add links to your Stories as well. Even if you don’t, you can use ads on Instagram Stories to direct people to your landing page.
This may sound like a cliche, but there is a reason why it’s so popular. It has a real impact on social media lead generation as it brings more visibility and engagement for your brand.
By running social media contests you can increase the reach of your posts and get more followers. A lot of contests require people to follow their social media handles to participate and some also ask people to tag their friends.
Check out this contest by Zink where they have adopted a similar strategy to gain followers and maximize the reach of their post.
Just remember that this is a good way for social media lead generation, but these leads might not always be relevant. You will need to nurture these leads and weed out irrelevant ones to drive conversions.
This is another effective social media lead generation strategy that you can use to direct traffic to your website and collect valuable lead information.
You can use social media to share links to your gated content. Once people click on these links, they will reach a landing page where they will be required to fill out their details. This could include email address, name, and sometimes company name. The whole purpose of gated content is to get user data before you provide them with valuable free content.
So, you can use this strategy to direct people to your website and collect their data for future campaigns. Moreover, since these people are interested in your content, they are qualified and relevant leads that can be very valuable for your business.
This social media lead generation hack is extremely useful to get qualified leads that are likely to convert.
Social media lead generation is one of the best ways to generate quality leads for your business. You can utilize the large audience on social media to generate leads and increase your revenue. Consistency is the key to getting more leads.
Leverage the social media lead generation hacks mentioned above to grow your business. If you need a better way to keep track of your reporting and analytics for a growing number of creators in your programs, consider checking out our creator management software.
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