Tips & Guides — 25 Apr 2022
How to Get More Leads on Social Media?
With 5.27 billion users, social media platforms are a great way to engage with potential customers and generate leads. But what is the most efficient strategy for that? First of all, let’s keep in mind that quality is more important than quantity. Offering meaningful content and building relationships with potential customers are key components to attract new leads.
When a brand is trusted, customers are more likely to engage, fill out forms, and take any other actions expected from them. This article will discuss strategies to generate more leads and find a qualified audience. Below, you will find out:
Let’s start!
Think about social media as an opportunity to promote products and services while collecting relevant information from your potential customers, which has several reasons to be there according to Global Overview Report 2021:
While performing these activities, people may get interested in specific products or services. Each time they share personal information with a brand or small business through social media, a company gets a new lead.
Attracting people to a brand, incentivizing them to share their information, and nudging them toward the purchase through social media is called lead generation. It has become crucial to marketers as an invaluable resource for finding potential customers, increasing brand awareness, and boosting growth strategies. So, let’s go further and understand each part of the lead generation process in marketing terms.
Social media lead converting: This step refers to a key part of the process when potential customers become actual buyers. After all, if marketers can’t move social media leads down the sales funnel, collecting them is not worth the effort. That indicates that the strategies used need to be revised.
Undoubtedly, the efficiency of a social network for a particular type of business will depend on the product or service. There are various possible strategies for each social platform. Essentially, quality leads are generated by using customers’ favorite platforms. Below, let’s look at the most popular social media channels.
Currently, Facebook has 2.39 billion monthly active users. For many marketers, the platform is the most-used channel for generating social media leads, especially when it comes to ad campaigns and sign-up forms. For instance, Facebook allows managing offers more precisely and syncing leads directly with the company’s system or downloaded as a .CSV.
An example illustrated by Hootsuite
Although many marketers have sidelined this platform in the past, it has been working to improve its features. One of the examples is the Twitter lead generation cards, which allow users to securely share their email addresses to connect with businesses without leaving Twitter.
LinkedIn is the favorite social network of B2B marketers for lead generation. At least for 89% of them, the number of leads accomplished on LinkedIn is more than twice that of other platforms for b2b leads. This way, brands quite often use the platform for sharing gated content or content marketing.
Brands use Instagram ads and content to accomplish their business goals by driving traffic to their websites. According to the statistics, 72% of users from social media platforms make purchases based on Instagram content.
To succeed on this platform and accurately collect new leads, make sure you complete your bio, employ a call-to-action on your profile and posts, use hashtags, and have a strategy in place to engage with your followers.
Each of these platforms may drive tons of leads for one business and be useless for another. Thus, you need time and effort to figure out what works best for you. Here are the main points to analyze before deciding which social media channel to use next time you are planning a campaign:
For instance, you need to target an audience between the ages of 16-24. You know that this age group is more likely to search for specific brands, products, or services on social media. Particularly, young people tend to spend time watching videos. Thus, to reach younger social media users, you should invest in social media specializing in video content, such as TikTok, for short tutorials, or Youtube, for in-depth content.
An in-depth analysis of GWI shows that at least 98% of customers often use more than one social media platform. Thus, it’s easy to assume that to reach more people and get more leads through social media a brand should be present on more than one channel.
While social media platforms have become increasingly diverse, each one appeals to a specific audience. Content that works on Twitter may not necessarily work on Instagram. So, find the right tone for each social media platform and optimize it.
Further, diversity makes your brand less dependent on one platform and gives a chance to test lead generation tactics across several channels. Testing is crucial to adjust and find the correct format for your audience. For instance, you can share Youtube videos on Facebook or Instagram to build a lead generation strategy. Thus, you can see how each audience will react and adjust accordingly.
Since last year, we have seen many more online events, such as live videos or webinars shared by brands and companies. One of the benefits of online events is that social media platforms notify the participants when the stream begins, making it easier for brands to gather the audience. This way, many people have attended one of those for the first time. Additionally, when your audience gains direct value through learning something new on your channel, they develop trust and loyalty towards your brand and products.
As a result, many brands have already adopted this strategy by promoting webinars and live videos to explain solutions or make forecasts to their audience. To participate, users need to register by signing up for a form. Through the sign-up forms, companies collect user’s information for further nurturing. Usually, a registration form would ask for your name, email address, company and occupation.
Check the example of Asana, a SaaS solution for project management.
Promote Gated Content
Another common way to generate leads is by creating posts that direct the audience to download content from landing pages. Visitors seeking high-quality content are more prone to fill out forms and leave their contact details. White papers, webinars, case studies, industry reports, videos, and infographics are the most popular examples of gated content. Another common way that applies to many companies is to offer a demo of their product.
For instance, here is how Zendesk promotes its guides. Once users click on the guide of their choice, they’re directed to a page that prompts them to fill out the form asking for their information to access the content. After doing it, a person will receive an email with further instructions to download it.
Pay attention to the download form. If you want to get more leads, the general advice is to keep it short. People may discard the process if it contains too many questions.
Strategically, paid ads are used to direct traffic to product or registration pages; or any other pages that contain important for a company CTA. As a part of their strategy to generate more Facebook leads or Instagram leads, many companies started advertising with Facebook Ads, one of the easiest platforms to create paid campaigns.
In this case, demographic settings and preferences need to be adjusted separately, mainly because the algorithm’s behavior functions differently for each social media network. To work better, carefully add details about your target persona – a specific location, job title, age, industry, gender, and more.
No strategy will be better than offering high-quality content to your audience on social media channels. Content helps with lead generation more than any other marketing tool. In addition, 65% percent of buyers feel that content has an impact on purchase decisions.
A business will generate more qualified leads and improve the conversion rate by optimizing content. Start with analyzing which kind of content your audience is engaged in the most and offer them the content of this kind.
Social media posts should provide new solutions for your audience. Relevant content drives the audience’s attention and encourages them to take action. It generates more engagement for the brand, which is a great way to capture more leads through social media.
Recently, the data by Demand Exchange showed which content format is the most effective for lead generation. Looking ahead, case studies show the best results:
Discounts and special offers can be a great booster for collecting meaningful leads. As discounts are time-limited, people are more prone to fill in forms at the same moment and they are also more likely to share posts on social channels if they’re offered a discount.
Teaming up with partners is one of the most effective ways to distribute discounts or offers to a new audience expanding brand awareness and collecting contact information. The popular tactic brands use is partnering up with influencers to showcase products through their social media and add links with discounts or offer codes in descriptions.
Thus, promo codes become a powerful way to attract and retain customers, especially if you are ready to pather up with social media influencers. If you run a partner program, implement promo code tracking in order to track bloggers and influencers.
Leverage social media sponsorships
As an alternative for paid ads, think about content sponsorships: partnering with content creators that would promote your brand on their social media channels.
The advantage of this strategy is that you choose bloggers from your niche and thus tap into your target audience. Additionally, users will be more open to trying your product recommended by bloggers, who have gained their credibility and trust.
One of the ways to make a reputable content creator talk about a brand, product, or service is by creating an ambassador program. Many content creators or influencers are also partners in marketing, which means they are willing to sell by promoting products to their audience.
Generating quality leads through social media takes time, especially for new companies or brands. With partner marketing, you can speed up the process of reaching potential leads and increasing brand awareness, while applying a low-risk strategy that pays partners only for their results.
With the tools and services Affise provides, you can build a partner program, manage an entire network of publishers and partners, collect information about your product in one place, create and manage offers for publishers to promote across various online platforms.
For more insight about partnerships, we suggest that you take a deeper look into setting goals and choosing the most suitable partner program for your business in the Partner Program creation guide.
Written by
Affise Academy
Affise is a partner marketing platform for brands, advertisers and agencies to scale via all possible performance marketing channels. Synergy of technology and our long standing experience lets you expand your partnerships, automate every step of the campaign lifecycle and make data-driven decisions.
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