An excellent product or great service’s accountability is directly proportional to the amount of sales it makes. Higher the usage of a product, people tend to trust the product more and opt for it, in fact in many cases even upping their budget margins for great returns on investment. To make sure that your brand makes enough sales to be the best choice of their customers, you need to acquire leads from all possible sources. In today’s day and age, social media plays a key role in lead accumulation. In fact, if your content is doing well on social media and reaching the target audience, your lead sheet will be automatically populated.
However, lead generation through social media initiatives, requires special attention be paid to the kind of content being published, the kind of audience being targeted as well as the target region and most importantly the tactic being used. Social media comes with its own set of content publishing facilities. Here’s a list of what one can do to generate more leads using social media:
1. Gated Content Strategy:
This form of sharing typically works for high value content. If your content is interesting, people wouldn’t hesitate to fill in a few basic details about themselves. The process is simple: you already have a piece of content you consider high value, create a dedicated landing page for the content and share the link to the landing page on your social profiles…preferably with an eye grabbing image.
This also helps you understand the kind of audience you should be targeting your high value content to. Once your content is social, there will be specifically two groups of people who will visit your webpage, ones who are not very interested in reading your content and will eventually drop out when they see a “fill in your details” form. The other form of audience who will fill in their details and access the content are great leads for you.
2. Add a CTA button on Facebook
Facebook never stops to amaze us! Every time Facebook comes up with a new feature, marketers do a happy dance. This time over, Facebook has introduced a CTA button, which allows brands to choose from a list of seven “call to actions” like “book now”, “watch video”, “Contact us” and more, which is placed on the top of your page next to the like button. This allows you to redirect your social customers to their website or specific landing pages allowing you to enhance your inbound lead generation.
3. Run Contests:
Everyone wishes to fight for a good gift. In fact, when the gifts are worthy enough, the uproar is much higher than that for regular gifts. For example, if you decide to give away an iPhone at the end of your contest, it would definitely have a higher turn up than if you are giving out pen drives! But, here’s the catch; all those who participate in your contest needn’t be good leads. In fact, of them wouldn’t be. The idea of a contest is to increase awareness around your brand, while collecting leads which might or might not be valuable.
So, say if you are a product based software company, what’s a good reward for your contest? Maybe an extended free trial, a free upgrade to your latest features, a lowered package pricing and more. This will only bring in customers who are genuinely interested in your product and skim out the ones who would otherwise be a part of your contest for the reward. This leaves you with high value contacts, who are existing customers who wish to upgrade or potential leads who wish to use your solutions.
4. Targeted Ads
Targeting your generic social content is one aspect, however publishing promoted content and targeted ads is a whole different ball game. Targeted social ads, help reach out to your potential customers by interesting them with high value content, and features which might be of value to them.
In fact, Facebook has made it much simpler for the brands by incorporating social lead gen forms, which enables people who wish to download/visit your gated content to fill a few details and access the desired landing page. Facebook also further simplifies the process by automatically populating the form with data from your profile, making it easier for the visitors.
LinkedIn is one of the key sources of lead collection especially for B2B businesses. The content targeting capabilities of LinkedIn are effective and just like Facebook, LinkedIn lead gen forms also come with the ability to populate data being extracted from the user profile. In fact, LinkedIn leads are considered more high value, considering the professional attributes the platform is been used for. LinkedIn’s targeted ad facility is highly effective as well considering its ability to target not just based on location, but also designation, area of interest, qualification and more, leaving you with a list of high value prospects.
5. Listen and Engage:
Social Listening in today’s date is one of the biggest mandate for every brand. Whether you are a B2C company or B2B one, it is important to understand what your customers and your competitor’s customers are talking about. Social listening is important both from the perspective of “social care” as well as to understand the needs of the market.
Social CRM is inevitable, particularly considering the growth in usage of various social platforms. Your customers are going to judge you, make decisions related to you as well as spread a good/bad word about you based on the kind of response they receive to their complaints/queries on social media. Being real time on social media is another important aspect, more so for B2C brands. In fact, social listening also enables you to reach out to your competitor’s unhappy customers, which is a definite prospect for you.
As mentioned above, social listening also helps in understanding the industry trends and identifying the promising areas for your business. Staying relevant is the key to a successful business which can be achieved by understanding what your prospects/customers are looking for and living up to their demand. Social listening helps you identify those concern areas and access valuable data to facilitate substantial information around what you need to place your bets on, while keeping an eye on what your competitors are doing.
6. Share Presentations on SlideShare
If you are a brand who believes in working their way up by focusing on content marketing, you cannot miss out on SlideShare. In fact, the easiest to access and valuable content is indeed present on here. However, the mistake that most marketers make is trying to generate content dedicated specifically for SlideShare, when one can simply convert their high value whitepapers, case studies, eBooks etc. into cleverly designed PPTs.
SlideShare, just like other social platforms, allows easy inserting of forms, allowing your collect leads. These forms can be embedded in the middle of the presentation, in the beginning or even while one tries to download the presentation. However, bifurcating the leads accumulated through this process should be carefully done, as many people who are only exploring the area of interest might also end up filling a lot of those forms.
7. Audience Segmentation and Customization
Social media is one space which has still not be utilized to its optimum capabilities, and when one feels they have, another new feature opens the gates to newer possibilities. In fact, it never stops to surprise me how social media, which was once used to connect with your friends and relatives, is now crowded with news, advertisements, servicing and so much more. Facebook alone has evolved and made life a lot easier for marketers.
Facebook’s, targeted ads, can be made more effective by using the various audience selection options it provides. Long gone are the struggles of defining a new audience every time you launched a new ad, while making sure your content is repetitively not reaching the same audience group by using the “lookalike audience” option. This allows you to clone the set of audience which performed well during your previous endeavors and target only those customers who have not been previously targeted but are also high value, considering their resemblance with an existing audience group which showed interest in your product. This in fact is a wonderful way to generate inbound lead.
These were a few ways of generating and identifying new leads through social media, however with growing possibilities, the ways to increase the number of lead acquired through social media shall also increase.