If you will talk to someone who is involved in cold calling and other traditional marketing methods, then they will tell you it’s a tough job.
However, if you talk to someone who uses new-age marketing techniques that are largely focussed on online platforms, then you won’t sense that much frustration in their response.
Old-school or new-age, lead generation is not easy — let’s be clear about that. This is because the process is always about convincing someone who may not have even heard about a brand to use their services/goods.
That said, there are ways to make it easier. For instance, you can capitalise on social media to get more leads and sales.
The following are six effective ways to go about it:
1. Take advantage of holidays
People are always excited about major holidays like Black Friday, Memorial Day, etc., and shop a lot this time around. This is because all the top brands give attractive offers and discounts to their customers.
Social media can be the perfect channel for promoting all your exciting offers during holidays. You can design display ads for different occasions and highlight the offers to attract as many leads as possible. It can be one of the best ways to use social media as a PR tool as well.
Image sourced from Tailor Brands
2. Run contests
Who wouldn’t like to win a prize? There is a reason why contests are fun and exciting — someone gets to win something in the end. Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram work well with contests, and hence, lead generation. However, you have to keep two things in mind about the prize:
- It should be valuable and attractive enough for users to take an interest.
- It should be valuable to those who are likely to be genuinely interested in using your products and services, and not much to others.
Remember, your main purpose behind hosting a social media contest is attracting leads. It makes no sense if a contest is successful but attracts random users that may not necessarily convert into paying customers.
You are free to get creative with the format of the contests. However, it will help to get some idea about how a viable and effective contest should look like. A good example of such a contest is asking the users to upload a selfie with one of your products and tag their friends so that the photo with the maximum number of 'likes' wins.
This kind of format just works because it encourages the users to share the brand with others. You can also create a contest entry form so that you can have the personal information of those who are participating in the contests. These can be added to your leads database.
3. Use live videos and webinars
You can generate leads on social media by conducting industry-specific seminars that your prospects can benefit from. This is a particularly good idea as you get to collect the contact details of the users who are interested in the webinar through a registration form.
Live videos are also something that are becoming popular on social media. They can be used to cover different kinds of events. For instance, you can cover a live event of your company’s 10
th-year-anniversary party, or broadcast a video when you want to launch a new and exciting product. The idea is to build hype, which can help in leads collection and also with the promotion of the brand.
Live videos are supposed to be non-professional and candid. However, that
doesn’t mean that anything goes. You should make the most of these videos to get the desired results. This is why it’s a good idea to read about live streaming video tips that can help make your brand more powerful.
4. Capitalise on social media advertising
All the popular social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter offer 'lead generation' ads. With these, you can collect direct leads from different platforms without even having the users visit web pages to fill out lead generation forms. They can fill the forms on the ads directly and are incentivised to do so through access to premium webinars, ebooks, or some other gated content.
5. Use geotargeted search
There is no point for a local business to search for leads across wider markets on social media. For instance, a professional dentist who has set up their business in Kansas City (United States) would only waste their time by advertising their services on Facebook in general.
Instead, they should look for high-quality leads, i.e., individuals who live in or around Kansas City and have a toothache or need dental implants. The good news is finding such people on social media is easier than you think, as the users love to tweet and post status updates about their social life — especially when there are interesting events involved.
Don’t you think someone who lost their tooth in a bar fight or when partaking in parkour for the first time would miss the opportunity to share the news with the public? People share the grossest and most beautiful details of their lives all the time. This is why you should use different techniques to find relevant social media updates shared by different users in your area.
If you want to find geotargeted leads on Twitter, then you can use its advanced search feature. For this, you can visit the page and enter the search keywords. You can then filter the results by selecting the appropriate location from the 'Places' section, which can be found by scrolling down.
6. Get into social listening
Social listening refers to monitoring social media conversions to learn what your customers and leads are saying about your brand and industry. It’s a great way to collect tangible feedback and record the mentions in comprehensive reports so that you can review and make appropriate changes to your marketing techniques.
There are many top-notch social media listening tools that you can use to identify and capture leads. You can also set up Google Alerts to send you notifications whenever someone mentions your brand or a rival online.
For more information, visit www.prchitects.com. You can also follow PRchitects on Facebook or on Twitter.
*Image courtesy of Vecteezy