Social media marketing tips for lead generation

With 4.6bn social media active users, serious B2C marketing departments find it difficult to ignore social media marketing. This aspect of marketing covers a huge chunk of digital marketing- the new age marketing.

Social media marketing entails all marketing activities carried out on social media.

One of the important marketing goals of most businesses in their marketing strategy is lead generation. Instead of assuming you know what leads are, let's define it.

Leads are people or organisations who have shown even the slightest interest in your service or product. By sharing their contact or making themselves available for you to influence  along a marketing path confirms their interest.

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Below are some effective social media leads generation marketing ideas for capturing leads and taking them through your sales funnel.

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1. Offer Free Tools

Offer a useful tool to your target audience in exchange for their contact information. This could be their email address or phone number. Be polite to ask if they would like to get subsequent marketing content from you before rolling out content into their emails. If your potential customers accept, you can go ahead and add them to your list and nurture them for sales over time.

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2. Offer Value Packed Content

Almost like the first tip, except this involves contents instead of tools.

To get their contact information, trade content that helps your target audience solve their problem. Promise to send your prospects more valuable content like the one they had to submit their email address to get. This will incentivise them to permit you to keep sending them more marketing content.

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3. Propose Free Trials

People are wired somehow to be attracted to free things, that's why giving out free trials (free experience) is a welcomed lead generation tactic.

Put the free trial of your service or product behind a registration gate to make sure only those who register get access to it. Only send relevant subsequent marketing offers to those who have permitted you to do so  via their contact information.

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4. Social Media Advertisement

Advertising on social media increases your reach beyond your followers and it precisely targets the audience you want to reach.

Facebook Ads is one of the most widely used social media advertising platforms to generate leads. It covers both Facebook and Instagram. Twitter and LinkedIn are platforms you can give a try depending on your target audience.This involves paying the social media platform and every penny will be worth it if done right.

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5. Use Social Media Influencers

Leveraging the influence of famous social media personalities that fit your brand image is another way to go.

To get leads for a product and service, ask (pay) influencers to tell their community or audience about it. You might want to give each of your influencers unique discount codes to share with their audience. This is done for easy tracking of the number of leads brought in by each influencers.

6. Leverage Physical or Virtual Events

If you've ever had to register for a physical or virtual event, they most likely implemented this tactic on you, especially if they communicated to you after the event via the information you registered with. This event could be as simple as hosting a Zoom session or YouTube Livestream.

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7. Social Media Contest

Start a contest with attractive prizes and require all contestants to register with their contact info alongside other activities that will help grow your brand awareness and reach. Things like retweets, likes and shares.

Ensure that the prizes are designed to attract your target audience. Don't offer a month of free ice cream if your business is all about electronic gadgets.

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8. Just ask or sell

Be intentional about serving valuable content to your social media followers. The trust and the love they develop for your business over time might make them receptive to receiving offers and updates from your company.

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Implementing these tips comes with other benefits such as increase in website traffic, increase in brand awareness and  marketing insights for creating subsequent marketing strategy.

If lead generation is part of your marketing goals, using social media to generate leads should be part of your marketing mix.

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