While cold-calling is a practice still implemented by many businesses, it's been shared that unfortunately cold-calling prospects only has a 2% success rate.
When used and implemented correctly, social media is the perfect place to raise awareness of your business and generate new leads.
What is a lead?
To put it simply, leads are your potential customers who have an interest in your brand, product or service you provide.
These leads will have given you access to certain contact information which allows you to either pass on info directly to your sales team, or gives you an opportunity to deliver a bespoke marketing campaign for.
Sitting within this marketing campaign, should, if not already, be your social media strategy.
Lead Generation vs Lead nurturing
While the two terms sound similar, there are several key differences between lead generation and lead nurturing.
Lead generation is the process of attracting potential prospects and converting them into individuals who have an interest in your product or services.
Lead nurturing is the process of building trust with leads with the intention that they will one day convert into a customer of your business.
5 Lead Generation tactics for Social Media
So with this in mind, we're going to run through some of the best ways in which you can effectively nurture leads through a social media campaign.
1. Offer valuable content to your audience
The most important step in generating new leads on social media is knowing your audience and knowing what content will appeal to them. Create in-depth buyer personas and create content that is relevant to your target audience.
To gather new leads information try producing 'gated content'. Gated content is any online material that requires some form of information from the audience to access the content i.e. usually an email address.
Allow your audience snippets of the content to entice them and gain their interest, and then encourage your audience to complete a form to receive full access to the content.
Over time, you can build email list's within your CRM which can then be used for lead nurturing campaigns.
2. Optimize your socials
Set your lead generation strategy up for success by ensuring it's extremely clear what action you would like your customers/audience to take. Optimize your social profiles by ensuring all the following elements have been considered and included:
- Ensure contact details are easily seen by the target audience, and they are kept up-to-date.
For real-time responses consider adding a Chat Bot to your website and create automated responses on your social media sites. - Use clear concise CTA's in your post's such as "Buy now" "Apply now" and "Visit Website" Make the CTA as eye-catching as possible, encouraging your target audience to take action.
- Use "link in bio" features and ensure that you've included your company website on all social media bio's that your company is active on.
- Carry out keyword research and know what keyword's your audience are searching for whenever they want to find out information about your product, service or industry.
3. Social Listening & Learning
Social listening is a great way to understand your prospects for effective lead generation. Using your ideal social media monitoring tool, take the following steps to use social listening for lead generation
- Try searching for your business using keywords and phrases your target audience might use. Use these keywords or phrases then within your marketing copy
- Look for questions/queries your target audience may have about a product or services. Comply these questions and create a Q&A social post series for your organisation.
- Draft a list of your competitors and know what their customers are saying about their brand i.e. what are they doing well and what areas are customers not happy with.
Social listening can also be used to find individuals who are already "brand ambassadors" meaning they already positively promote your product or service online. Engage with these individuals and continue to build a relationship, you could also ask if they would write a guest blog for your site which can then be shared on relevant social media channels.
4. Use targeted Social Ads
A paid social media advertising strategy will help increase the reach your content has on social media and also assist with lead generation.
Make the most of the targeting options on your paid social ads to ensure that your ads will be shown to users who have some form of connection to your product or service. For example, have they previously engaged with your posts, liked competitors page etc. Using the targeting options will help narrow down your target audience and leave you with a pool of individuals who are more likely to have genuine interest in your product or service.
Retargeting can also be used as part of a lead generation strategy, you can retarget users who have landed on your website but not subscribed or purchased your product or services.
Be aware that targeting options are continuously changing on social media as data privacy laws change so remember to stay up to date on social advertising best practices.
Social Ad's may have a 'Lead Generation' option where the ad comes with a pre-populated form, so individuals can fill out the form quickly and easily.
Lead Generation feature on LinkedIn Ads
5. Measure your efforts
Metrics are a vital part of marketing. They provide us with insight into what content has performed well and what has not, which ultimately lets us know what do our audience like and what do they not.
Without evaluating your efforts, how will you know if your lead generation tactics have been successful or not? Before diving into any marketing campaign, we would recommend that you set yourself some KPI's that are realistic for your organisation. An example of a KPI might be "Acquire one new lead per month from Instagram social ad campaigns"
Once you've set your KPI's this will give you a goal to work towards and will be the basis of how you measure your lead generation efforts.
For successful measurement of social media lead generation activities you'll also want to measure additional metrics like click-through-rate to landing pages, bounce rate, CTA click-through-rate. Platforms such as HubSpot and Salesforce will be able to provide you with the metrics you need for evaluating success.
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