Generate leads through social media

Most marketers think of social media solely as a brand building and social awareness tool however they could not be more wrong. More frequently social media is becoming a place to generate leads. When used correctly site such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram are becoming places to generate leads for your business. As an added bonus social media is easily more cost effective in comparison to traditional marketing strategies with social media reducing marketing costs by up to 45%. Now we pose the question of how to utilise social media to generate leads and business for your business.

Understanding social media and lead generation

First lets understand a lead generation, lead generation is all about bringing people into your sale funnel. It’s not the same as selling. Think of a lead generation as gathering intelligence on your customers. We are trying to understand our target audience and what they are interested in. Which products we could potentially sell to them. What their struggles are and how we could turn them into customers. Using tools like video marketing, e-mail opt-ins and paids ad campaigns are aimed at getting customers into your sales funnel. Since everything is online it is much easier to track what content is the more popular as well as making it easier to collect data for a lead. Such as an e-mail address. Social media takes this a step further. As people are willing to share their information on social media. In addition the sheer number of users on social media platforms give your content vast audiences. This makes social media the perfect place to find your target audience and turn them into new leads.

Picking the right platform

One of the biggest mistakes is to choose the wrong social platform. We have to know our target audiences and with over 1 billion users on facebook it’s easy to assume that its is the best option, however this isn’t always the case. Some quick statistics to use are the fact for B2B marketers: 44% of them have generated leads through Linkedin, 39% have done so through Facebook and 30% have done so through Twitter. If you are not sure which site has your demographic on this infographicshould give you a great starting point to see where your potential customers lie. There are various techniques used to generate leads. Stay tuned as we look at ways to generate leads on specific platforms in the next few days. The social media outlets we will be looking specifically include: Facebook, Twitter Linkedin and Instagram.