Viewers showing interest in your services are the potential buyers. These people have provided some contact information to the company to be reached out for getting more details about the offerings. Such potential customers are also known as business leads.
The leads are a crucial asset for sales. Through the correct marketing strategy, you can convert leads into buyers. If you have a sales team, passing the information of these potential customers to them is another option.
The process of collecting such leads is called Lead Generation. You can see this as a method to assemble important information about your future consumers. It will let you know:
- The interests of your target audience
- Products you can sell to them
- Ways to turn them into end-users
With the changes in the marketing techniques, it is now possible to make use of social media sites to generate leads effectively. If done correctly, it will actually give low-cost, and more fruitful results than cold-calling or plain emailing.
According to Hubspot, 9 out of 10 decision-makers simply do not respond to cold-calls anymore. Whereas more than half of the number of marketers stated by spending as little as 6 hours per week for social media marketing gave them better results than other marketing methods.
Moreover, buyers readily prefer to have a conversation on social networks compared to that on phone calls.
This article will help you learn to get leads with social media marketing.
Table of Contents
#1. Limited access to useful content
This is one of the most effective methods of lead generation. Sharing gated content on social media means providing links to picture, videos, blogs or other kinds of information with limited access.
To uncover the hidden information, the viewers are asked to provide certain personal details. These can include a contact number, email id, occupation, educational information, age, etc. If the information you are offering is of value to the audience, they would not mind sharing such details in exchange for access.
As you can see, the site is asking for an email id to send the free report. This is a very subtle way to ask for an email id that the viewers would not have provided otherwise.
Similarly, different approaches can be adopted to get a hold of the details you need to take a step forward in lead generation.
But be sure that you be specific and ask for only the information that will benefit your sales team. Moreover, take care that this content is targeted to only your target audience. Or you will end up with piles of information that is not usable.
You will waste time in sorting out the useless information later.
So, choose the audience before you market the gated content.
#2. Conduct Contests
In recent times, various brands are relying on contests to better sell their products, make themselves recognizable and earn trust and credibility among customers. Most of these contests are carried out on social channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Among several advantages of social media contests including increasing followers, brand awareness, building trust, and attracting new buyers the last is an important one.
With the help of this tool, gathering information will be hassle-free. In addition to this, promoting new products can be done too.
For the contest to get you more sales lead you must take care that the prizes are relevant to your niche. If you are a digital marketing agency, you can reward the winners by giving them free service for the first month or a discount for your service.
However, if you offer physical products, the winners can be prized with your product or a discount coupon for your products. It is up to you to decide. But avoid giving away a generic prize that your company doesn’t offer.
This contest on Myntra that rewarded the winners with Nike goodies for the best sports story is an apt illustration for product-specific contests. Myntra is an online fashion brand selling apparel, shoes, and other wearable accessories this works best for targeting people looking for sportswear.
Remember that your end goal here is to get sales leads and not just brand awareness.
So, filter out the audience that is in need of your offerings. As they can be easily convinced to buy from you. Employ the most suitable competition from the various categories available.
In sweepstake competition, the contestants need to provide some details in exchange for the prizes that are randomly given away. It is a great tool in getting lead generation data for sales.
Filtering the audience according to demographics is as important as the content of the post. This can help people to become aware of nearby shops or required services.
It is obvious that Indian buyers would not want to know about cake shops in America (it would be crazy to travel across the globe for a piece of cake!)
Targeting helps to advertise only to the most relevant audience based on location, age, gender, marital status, financial status, education, religion, and other such traits. Social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn provide customized targeting options to make your marketing more efficacious.
This is a targeted Facebook ad for a mobile application providing resources for the Islamic Rituals. Thus, countries with a majority of the Islamic population, and those with relevant interests in the above the age of 18 years have been set as a target audience. Also, users who have already liked the page have been excluded to avoid repetition of the same promotion.
By learning from this sample, you can filter the viewers for social media ads for your business. This will assure you a greater percentage of sales leads and lower bounce rates. (Bounce rate is when a potential customer visits your website but does not stay to check other pages or make a purchase).
#4. Social Listening
When you are active on social media, you will be constantly getting likes, comments, and shares on the posts. Monitoring this feedback along with mentions of your brand name, specific tags, and keywords are essential for social media marketing.
This activity of monitoring mentions of the brand-specific words on social networks is known as social listening. It helps you to analyze the results. Gain more insight into the posts that work best and create more opportunities for attracting fresh buyers.
Wisely quoted by Frank Tyger, “Be a good listener. Your ears will never get you in trouble”. It is always better to listen before you speak. Hence, social listening will help you in rectifying errors along with avoiding future mishaps.
You can alter your marketing plan or modify the products itself. Making the aim to be the most useful to the end-users. You can earn reliability and eventually become a favorite. Enabling you to enhance your profits. And increasing the footfalls without the expensive traditional marketing approaches.
48% of potential buyers make a purchase when the brands are responsive as per Sprout Social. So, it would be best if you can immediately respond to the comments on social media handles.
Tools like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, and HubSpot can assist you in social listening.
In a nutshell, social media marketing is a productive way to amplify your business leads and get more profit. Not only more effective but social networking is also a pocket-friendly medium to earn fresh buyers.
Share with us some of your social media contests or other content that helped you in getting a high number of business leads.
Author Bio:
Krunal Soni is the founder and CEO of Thrillax Private Limited, a digital marketing company. He holds expertise in diverse fields. His 15+ year spree in this field has earned him clients, and their faith in his tactics. His intelligent strategies have put Thrillax among the leaders of Digital Marketing as per the Clutch report of 2019. A systematic approach, transparent processes and friendly mentoring have allowed him to prioritize and manage a work-life balance.
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