Social media platforms are perhaps the most important arena in which modern marketing takes place. If you can nail down your social media marketing strategy, you will notice a significant uptick in interest in your business and traffic to your website.
As well as providing a platform through which you can advertise products and services to customers, social media can also be a very powerful lead generation tool. If you can get one person interested in your profile, there’s a chance that they will share it and attract three or four other people. If just two of them do the same thing, you can very quickly build up a significant multiplier on that initial reaction.
Of course, this depends on you using social media the right way in order to generate leads.
Share Links to Exclusive Gated Content
If you want to use social media for lead generation, you need to provide your audience with content to make it worth their time visiting your page. One of the simplest but most effective ways that you can achieve this is to start posting content to your social media profiles that your audience can’t get for free elsewhere. If the content you are offering is valuable enough, you can even exchange access for information or money. For example, having your audience fill out a short survey before they can access gated content is a great way of gleaning useful information without having to worry about the costs or logistics.
If you are going to go down the route of asking your customers for some information or participation in a survey before you unlock content, it is going to be easier to have all that handled off-site. This usually means linking your audience to your main website, where they can find the content they are looking for. Hosting it and serving it up to the user on your own website not only gives you more control over how that individual piece of content is received but it also gives you the opportunity to put other content in front of them and hopefully convince them to see what else you have in store.
Run Regular Contests
The most popular social media profiles and those that are able to generate the most new leads are those that put on regular contests and giveaways for their audiences. Everyone likes getting free stuff, so it’s no surprise that so many people are willing to log in, visit a specific page, and like, share, or comment on content in order to be entered into a competition.
Of course, the effectiveness of this method will depend largely on what you are able to put up as a potential grand prize – uninspired prizes will receive an uninspired reception. That doesn’t mean that you have to be putting anything hugely expensive up as a prize, the monetary value of the prize isn’t as important as ensuring that it’s relevant to your audience.
Be creative with the prizes that you offer entrants and also try to mix them up as often as you can. If you are giving away the same thing every single time, then people are probably not going to enter more than a couple of times. On the other hand, if you can keep rotating the prizes and giving those who have already won the contest before a reason to keep coming back then you can continue to renew their interest and keep them captivated for the long-term.
If your business sells physical products, these are obvious choices for your giveaway. You might even want to consider producing some limited-edition variants specifically to be offered up as prizes. If your business provides access to services, a free trial or a reduced rate on their subscription can achieve the same goals.
It’s up to you to set the entry requirements for your competition. Obviously, the lower these requirements are, the more interest your competition will receive. We mentioned the option of taking your customers off-platform and directing them to your website in order to administer the competition. However, in some cases, it will make more sense to keep everything together in one place.
Keep Track of Your Key People
Every business will have a few key people who are especially adept at lead generation. Identifying these individuals and placing them in the most strategically advantageous positions will make it easy to supercharge your results. There are lots of ways that you can track your employees’ performance and a whole host of individual software options for doing just that. However, you can save yourself some money, and make keeping track of performance easier, by investing in HCM software for your business.
Human capital management software takes all the disparate tools that exist for managing individual members of your team and rolls them together in one convenient package for you.
Advertise Directly on Your Target Platforms
Finally, as a means of ensuring that interest in your profile remains high on the platform, you should coordinate your social media marketing spending so that your campaigns run in tandem with your competition. This will mean that any new users enticed in by your campaign will come across your latest competition and you will have the opportunity to cement the new relationship by encouraging them to interact with you.
Advertising on social media platforms while also maintaining an active profile will make your business feel like a part of the wider community. This will lead to an organic rise in traffic that could potentially include a significant portion of users who would otherwise never have stumbled across your profile. If you can reach beyond your usual target audience and diversify your userbase, it will pay off in the long-run.
Most businesses now realize the importance of social media marketing. However, the potential of social media platforms for lead generation is still severely underappreciated. With the right approach, your social media profiles can bring in new leads by the busload.
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