Lead generation is all about bringing your audience to your sales funnel. This is not the same as ‘selling’. It is all about gathering customer intelligence; such data can then be used to follow up with more specific information. The leads can be passed directly to your sales team or used for tailored content marketing programs. Social media has gone beyond brand building in so many ways that it can be used cost-effectively to generate leads. Companies must understand that social marketing is shifting towards peer-to-peer influence marketing, which could be defined as a digital pull (over 70% of buyers trust brand or product recommendations by friends and family).
So, how can you turn those social media “Likes” into leads?
The following 5 ways can give you some food for thought:
1. Special Offers
People enjoy sharing campaigns offering a giveaway on their social channels. By ensuring you include an entry form, important lead data can be collected. Make sure that a user has the ability to share the offer at the end of the entry form. With every mention and acknowledgement you will continue building an engaging relationship
2. Bank on the Trust of Friends
92% of buyers trust the recommendations of their friends and family; if you create compelling offers for both the referrer and referee, engagement between your brand and followers will be increased. By extending the campaign across several networks and ensuring that you have set up links for appropriate tracking, you will be able to follow the progression and effectiveness.
3. Provide Discount Codes/Coupons to Generate Demand
Providing discount codes or coupons as a call-to-action will increase brand awareness and can create a sense of urgency to your campaign. Additionally, this tactic could be utilized as an advertisement when your customers are approaching the online check out. Consider this tactic when formulating strategies related your shopping cart and the abandonment rate.
4. Go Live! Hangout, Webinar, Live video.
Real time engagement with your community can be achieved through live interactions. Interacting directly with your customers (or potential customers) by gathering feedback, answering questions, generating awareness of your products/services indicates an expertise in the knowledge-base you can provide. Some great examples have been seen by brands that engage in Facebook Live or Tweet Chats. Such campaigns must be carefully managed with applicable landing pages and call-to-actions.
5. Social Media Paid Advertising
Social media networks are continuously updating their algorithms and advertising on the platforms has become extremely important. Organic posts should be supplemented with suitable paid online advertising, where the ads can micro-target the demographics of interest. The audience you are looking for is there and your marketing team should consider the methodology to be used to engage with your current and potential audience. Once again, don’t forget to construct strong call-to-actions that will add up to the investment you are making.
In February 2017, the global statistics published were indicating that 2 billion people use Facebook, 1 billion use WhatsApp, 1 billion use Facebook Messenger, 317 million use Twitter, 600 million use Instagram, 850 million use WeChat and the numbers are growing. The world’s business and retail customers are connecting to platforms to engage with individuals but also with companies. Gathering leads (i.e. potential customers) for your company through this medium is a strategy to include in your marketing mix. And what can we do with these leads? Understand and analyse consumer behaviour, listen to customer needs, better our products/services and give us an indication on new business formulation.
Since 76% of buyers are ready to have conversation on social media and we are certain the number will increase, it’s about time you are providing your sales team with leads generated from social media platforms.
