The Next Step
Going a step further than the brand awareness and engagement stages of marketing, it’s a good idea to take a look at social media lead generation. Collecting leads on social media has huge advantages. For one, it will aid you in finding people interested in your company, but what’s more, it will ensure you can keep in touch with potential customers.
You might be asking what a social media lead even is? Good question. In fact, let’s take a look at some key terms that will be useful to know before we go any further.
Key Terms to Know
Social Media Lead
A lead is any information someone shares that you can use to follow up with them. This may include names, email addresses, occupations, employers, or any other information that a social media user shares with you.
Social Media Lead Generation
This is simply any activity undertaken on social to collect new leads.
Social Media Lead Nurturing
This includes taking new leads through the customer journey, or as marketers would say: ‘through the sales funnel’.
Social Media Lead Converting
This is the process of turning potential customers into paying customers. Naturally, this is the final stage of collecting social media leads.
Quality or Quantity?
Your specific industry, campaign and goals will all contribute to what can be considered a quality lead. As a good rule of thumb though, quality leads will include useful information and clear signs of intent of engaging with your business. Try to think quality over quantity.
To Facebook and Beyond?
Of course, generating leads can be done most effectively on the platforms being used by your potential customers. As well as having the sharpest tools to collect leads on its platform, Facebook’s 2.45 billion user network stands alone and so is the natural first place to look. But is it the only place? Certainly not. The golden rule here is to ensure you are familiar with the demographics of the different platforms available to you before starting your campaign. Do they line up with your target market?
Let’s now turn our attention to how we can generate more leads on social media.
Tactics to Get More Leads on Social Media
1. Optimize Your Profile
Make sure you don’t shoot yourself in the foot here. Everything should be in place to collect leads organically. Consider the following as a checklist:
Contact Information Provided
Supporting customer enquiries is essential, so ensure your contact details are available on your profile.
Call-to-Action Buttons Created
With different platforms offering different profile features, make sure you use the ones that fit your specific goal. Own a restaurant? Make use of a ‘Reservation’ button if the platform has one available and so on.
Link in your Bio Added
Along with the likes of “comment down below” and “don’t forget to like and subscribe”, “link in bio” seems to have been added to the current cultural vernacular. Easily and often taken advantage of on Instagram, try to add a call-to-action so people know why they should click and what they should expect to find.
2. Create Compelling Content
Whether it is brands looking for sales or like-hungry selfies, everyone’s competing for attention on social media. Furthermore, once you factor in diminishing attention spans, your content will have to be as click-worthy as possible. It’s really the only way to collect leads. Think sharp images, sharp copy. With the likes of Shoppable Instagram Posts, just make sure they have a place to click!
3. Create User-Friendly Landing Pages
Great! Someone’s clicked on your link. But wait! You’re landing page is a mess, so they’ve clicked again, but this time straight off. Keep things seamless, relevant, easily scannable and as personal as possible. If forms are vital, pre-fill as much as you can and keep things as unsensitive as possible to reduce the obstacles to completion.
4. Use Social Lead Ads
Facebook Lead Ads
These are pretty much promoted forms, through which leads are collected and synced either straight to your customer management system or to you sales team. Facebook’s retargeting tools are especially handy when it comes to lead nurturing. Just make sure your website has Facebook Pixel installed to facilitate lead tracking and cost measurement.
Instagram Lead Ads
Partially filled in forms (email address, full name…) can all be pre-completed in these ads designed to aid marketers collect information.
LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms
According to Wordstream, the typical website conversion rate stands at 2.35%, whereas the average LinkedIn Lead Gen Form is as high as 13%. Now available as Message Ads and Sponsored InMail, the platform again uses pre-fill sections. What’s more, to help generate leads, LinkedIn Dynamic Ads feature direct call-to-actions.
YouTube TrueView for Action Ads
Loaded with prominent call-to-action buttons linking to a site of your choice, these ads were designed to help advertisers drive a specific action, not least generating leads. Simply select “Leads” as your goal.
Other Options
While other sites such as Pinterest and Twitter, don’t have specific formats for lead ads per se, both platforms offer ad options that can boost social media lead generation.
5. Incentivise Appropriately
People need a reason to share their information with you. Depending on the type of lead you’re after, here are some incentives that could do the trick:
Contests or sweepstakes
These can work especially well when teaming up with a relevant influencer or brand partner. For entry, just ask participants to share whatever information you want to know.
Discount code
Newsletter sig-up for a discount code. Sounds simple enough. Just make sure you have a strategy in place to convert your newly nurtured leads.
Gated content
Industry depending, the likes of invite only webinars and access to private Facebook Groups provide compelling incentives. The information exchanged, such as emails and job titles, can be invaluable in your marketing and business efforts. There are many great incentives at your disposal along with the aforesaid webinars. How about email newsletters, leadership articles, whitepapers, sales emails or customer content like case studies? Just make sure that whichever route you go down, you always remember to tell customers what’s specifically in it for them.
6. Personalize Your Offer
With a Heinz Marketing study showing that personalized content helps with lead generation more than any other marketing goal, be sure to make the most of the targeting tools available on various platforms. Taking gender as an obvious example, why not run two campaigns for different audiences in tandem, tailoring the message accordingly? As well as pre-filled in forms, LinkedIn Dynamic Ad format takes a user’s name, picture and job title to ensure they can be addressed directly, well worth it when we consider that it results in a 19% higher click-through rate and 53% higher conversion rate than those that don’t.
7. Measure and Refine with Analytics
Collecting social media leads is all well and good, but you really need to be collecting analytics insights along with them. You can monitor which social platform is the best source for your business, once you’ve set up goals in Google Analytics to track leads on your website. It’s then simply a case of adjusting accordingly. Be sure to keep an eye on social analytics tools to help you identify the type of creative and messaging that perform best.
Whether they know it or not, social media lead generation is part of every marketer’s strategy. To ensure yours stays on the right track, be sure to keep these seven tactics in mind and, as always from the Byter Team, good luck!