When people envision social media, they think about building your brand and increasing your audience. Business owners forget about generating sales leads. We hear it all the time: “Who’s going to buy my product or use my service with a single Tweet?”
We are here to tell you that using social media, when done the right way, will lead you to sales. Using sites like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook is the premiere way to cut costs and generate leads for your company.
According to recent statistics, social media marketing cuts costs for about 45% of companies. Furthermore, business revenue jumps 24% when business owners use social media marketing to generate sales leads.
So, how can you use social media tools and marketing campaigns to generate the right leads for your business? Here’s how with our guide and tips.
Generating leads is about bringing customers into your sales range. It’s not entirely like selling, per say. Think of lead generation as getting to know who your target customer is and what they want. You want to find out the following:
So long are the days where you need to send surveys out or spend thousands of dollars on advertisements. The internet has revolutionized the way companies and brands can generate leads. Today, it’s all about your content, email opt-ins, social media marketing campaigns, video content, and leads generation. Since 95% of these marketing tools are done online, it’s faster and cheaper than ever before to gather data on your customers.
Here’s how to use the best marketing tool out there and how it works. Social media is a place where users agree to share content around. If you target customers who are excited about your brand, you know they will circulate a post or a video about your brand or products. Did you know that average people and teens spend about 30% of their time socializing and sharing content on social media? Therefore, social media is the best place to target users and turn their interactions into direct sales leads.
Once you get you know your primary customer or customers, you will know the channels they interact with the most. After all, using a social media app like Twitter when most of your clients use Instagram is not a smart social media marketing move. Business owners like to play it safe and think they can skip on conducting research. Therefore, they assume that everyone uses Facebook. While Facebook gains a vast audience, you need to find your target demographic. Not sure how to find your exact target demographic? Read this post about how to understand users on various social media sites.
When you want to use Facebook to generate leads, you will need to factor in running ads. Facebook recently changed their algorithm to make it harder to get an organic fan base or following. But the good thing about Facebook ads is that they are relatively inexpensive. Here are some tips about Facebook ads:
Creating a custom tab on your Facebook page is a good place to start. Apps like Pagemodo and Static HTML help you set up these custom tabs. Once your tab gets created, link it inside your company’s posts. Also, include your tab when you run an ad so that your customers can access it.
Many people think creating a Facebook page is all about getting likes. Wrong. Treat your page as a business website. In other words, when you treat your page as a way to generates sales, you will alter the kind of ads you run and the kind of content you post. So, how do you create a Facebook page that is built to generate sales leads? Include your business address and frequent call-to-action phrases like, “Call Now,” and “Sign Up Today.” And lastly, treating your page as a website shows customers that your Facebook page is about more than just building your brand.
Twitter released a new lead generating tool called the Twitter Card in 2013. To give you an idea of how well Twitter Cards worked for an outdoor clothing company, Rock/Creek received over 1,700 new leads via email in less than seven days. Here is one image example of a good Twitter Card by @baristabar
Here are some ways you can use Twitter Cards for top sales leads generation.
When using Instagram for your marketing strategy, you cannot ignore the comments your followers make. Getting hundreds of likes on a single post or photo is a good thing. However, if you don’t interact with the people who leave you comments, you can lead your audience to think you don’t care about them. Therefore, when customers take the time to follow your account and share your content with others, show them your appreciation by responding to some users’ comments.
Sometimes you see one hashtag everywhere on Instagram. Once you click it, you might notice that a lot of Instagram users that follow you are using that hashtag. Furthermore, that hashtag will almost always be connected to a type of brand, personality, or business. When you create individual hashtags for your company’s products or services, you present the opportunity for a lot of your followers to post about it. Furthermore, you allow outside users with similar interests or needs to find your account directly because they can click the hashtag.