Social media holds countless opportunities for brands. Marketers leverage social media to create brand awareness, gather data about their audiences, and most significantly, generate leads. To learn how to foster lead generation with social media, you’ll need to identify personas, create a content plan, and gain knowledge of attracting strategies.
What is a lead?
A lead is any person who indicates interest in your company in some way. The more leads you get, the more likely those leads will convert to potential customers.
How do you generate leads?
HubSpot defines lead generation as “the process of attracting and converting strangers and prospects into someone who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service. Furthermore, HubSpot also states that 61% of marketers say generating traffic and leads is their top challenge. The lead generation process can be frustrating for marketers who don’t know where to start or what strategies will work.
Start by asking yourself these questions:
- Who am I targeting?
- What content am I creating?
- When am I distributing this content?
- Where am I reaching these leads?
- What strategies can I use to generate leads?
Creating Personas
Before planning a content strategy, you must identify who your audience is. Start by identifying three or four personas, which are audience groups that are differentiated by interests, personality, habits, tendencies, demographics, goals, etc. Once you’ve identified who you’re targeting, think about and note what kind of content each persona would be interested in viewing. Then, you’re on your way to planning a content strategy.
Planning and Creating Content for Leads
Hubspot put it best in that they describe content marketing as the art of communicating with leads or prospects, without selling to them. Content Marketing is intended to empower potential customers, build long-term relationships, and create valuable content that entertains as well as educates. Planning your content helps you stay organized, stay efficient, and stay on-brand with what you’re posting.
When creating content, detect the lead or prospects’ potential problems and then come up with possible solutions to aid in their decision making. Your content should be the answer to their questions or inform them of something they’d be interested in. Personalized content is a crucial part of content marketing.
It will also help to have tools that aid in content creation at your disposal, such as the Adobe Suite, Canva, or Animoto that allow your content to be diverse, stand out, and compete with others.
Timing
Proper preparation and assets are required before you can start generating leads on social media effectively. Your business must allocate the time necessary to produce quality content on a consistent basis.
Choosing A Channel
Determine what social media channel would be best for your lead generation initiative based on the personas you’ve defined. For example, if your audience is typically older, Twitter would not be the best place to reach them. Or if your company sells products targeted towards millennials, it would not make sense to advertise your products on LinkedIn.
Pay attention to what each channel is typically used for and who is on it. Make sure to start out with one or two channels that make sense for your business, rather than spreading yourself too thin across multiple channels and running the risk of getting sloppy delivering quality content.
Lead Generation Strategies
A social media marketer should follow the Inbound Marketing Strategy when planning and posting their content.... Attract, Engage, Delight (& Repeat). The main goal for this strategy is to deliver a successful user-friendly experience that converts leads to customers and keeps them coming back as brand advocates.
Turning visitors into leads happens at the Attract Phase. Two notable strategies for generating leads organically in this phase are Call to Actions (CTAs) and Blogs.
Blogs
A blog is a great place to publish content regularly as well as help you to stand out and build trust. Blogs allow you to promote offers for your business, share educational content about your industry, and optimize your post so that your blog can get as much organic traffic as possible. Moreover, “Marketers who prioritize blogging efforts are 13x more likely to see positive ROI” (Hubspot).
CTAs
CTAs are often included once or twice within a blog. A Call to Action button is meant to entice the reader to click the link or button to read more, get a discount, subscribe, etc. An effective CTA is built up by engaging content so that the reader feels inclined to act.
This is an example of a CTA. The question before "Learn where to start" sets up the Call to Action with the intent that an employee at a B2B company will want to learn more.
Quality Leads
Hootsuite explains, “A quality lead will include useful information and clear signs of intent to engage with your business.” As with most things in life, quality matters more than quantity. If quality leads aren’t coming right away, or you’re wanting to gain more leads, it is imperative to analyze and adjust your lead generation efforts and strategies with data.
Analyze and Adjust
Tools such as SEMrush provide insights into users’ tendencies, likes, and dislikes. They tell you what strategies or pieces of content have worked well based on engagement metrics, and what hasn’t.
Learn about more tools that help with lead generation.
Measuring your marketing efforts will always be an efficient use of time to see what’s working the best for your business when trying to gain leads. Following these steps will guarantee you’re on your way to generating leads with social media.
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Personas,
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