If you have been tasked with spearheading your firm’s social media efforts, your responsibilities will include generating leads. In this context, a “lead” is a social media user – whether an individual or organisation – who could potentially purchase your company’s product or service.
As you gather leads, your company’s scope for sales can grow. First, though, you need to decide how to cultivate lead generation. Here are some expert techniques for doing so.
Provide value, not sales-y content
Remember the mantra “content is king”? It still applies – as in the case of using humour to brighten someone’s hard day or providing a step-by-step guide to attaching a screen protector to your phone.
Another mantra worth remembering is “show, don’t tell”; the right content will show your expertise and value, thus sparing you any need to state that you have these. If you did do so, you could risk coming across as sales-y and, by implication, self-serving.
Extend your efforts across various social media channels
It’s easy to look at the social media channels available and wonder which of them – including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – would be the best fit for your company. However, this can actually be an irrelevant question, as you shouldn’t settle on just one of these sites.
By instead establishing a presence on several of them, you can make your online brand more accessible and leverage unique merits of different social networking portals.
Be on form with… an online form
The most common tactic for collecting leads from internet users is providing a form into which readers can enter their contact details in anticipation of receiving a product or content of worth.
Whether you want a form that requests simply a name and email address or a longer form with more fields, form-building software can help you create it. You could embed your form into a social media campaign – and, at Webahead, we can direct you towards especially suitable software.
Add quizzes and surveys to make data input fun
While a stuffy, basic form might not seem like the most fun thing for your social media followers to fill in, it can be a very different matter with quizzes and surveys. Form-building software can help you make these, too; you wouldn’t need to drain time coding them from scratch.
The software would also let you use the same database to store information gathered from quizzes, surveys and forms. This can be a useful measure for streamlining your data-collecting operations.
Send targeted emails to lead prospects through the “sales funnel”
While it’s great to have more information about potential customers, you might not leverage it to the best effect. One way of rectifying that could be sending tailored email messages to contacts whose email addresses you have collected.
Some contacts might need to be educated about your basic offerings, while others could be closer to making a purchase. If you phone us on 01325 582112, you can learn how to encourage prospects to ultimately buy.
