Social Media Lead Generation: Best Practices and Tips

Social media platforms are one of the best digital marketing channels for businesses, especially when it comes to brand awareness and lead generation. With it, you can boost your brand's visibility, online community and revenue. A culmination of these three elements brings us to this article, which is all about leads. Leads are valuable exchanges with your audience, which can result in long term loyalty. Here's a look at the best practices and tips for you to incorporate into your strategy.

Social Media for Lead Generation

Lead generation refers to an exchange of information between a potential customer and a business. Customers share their details in return for a valuable offer or to request a sales interaction. The potential customer thus begins their journey down the sales funnel with your brand. Meanwhile, the marketers expand their contact list, which is a valuable asset when it comes to retargeting and increasing future sales. 

Various marketing channels offer lead potential, but social media is known for producing high-quality ones. When planning a marketing strategy, leads need to be one of the goals, and campaigns should centre on ways to generate them. 

Lead generation is a relatively modernized approach in marketing since digital is what has fuelled this. It is part of what makes digital marketing so cost-effective. Building your base of leads is not just a numbers game though - that is, getting high amounts of leads needs to translate into sales. Hence lead generation is not a quick fix or guarantee, but rather the start of a process in developing leads. 

Tips for generating leads via social media

• Polls: Social media platforms are filled with creative and quirky ways to engage with your audience in an interactive way. Ask them a general question to see the kind of sentiments they have. Suppose it's a choice between a variation of one of your products, for instance. In that case, you're getting data on customer preferences and also gauging who would be interested in purchasing a particular item. Once interest is sparked, you can reach out directly to them and continue the purchasing journey. 
• Surveys: Surveys often include a lead form, whereby the entrants sign up with their basic contact information. Again, this method can provide you with valuable customer insights. However, it may need to include an added incentive, such as a raffle for those who complete the survey. This method offers more intel than the one above. 
• Offers, promotions and discount codes: Social media is the perfect platform to share exclusive offers and discount codes. These can prompt your audience to make a purchase or follow a link to your website where you can present them with a lead generation form. While these platforms may not always result in direct leads, it can be a useful tool that facilitates the generation of them in an indirect way. 
• Go live: By live streaming, you can elicit responses to your recording. These forms of communication can then result in numerous direct messages to your inbox, where further engagement can occur. You can offer to continue the conversation elsewhere, or ask them to opt in to receive email marketing from you, for example. 
• Valuable content: A primary example of this is gated content, where people sign up to receive an eBook. You can then promote this via your social media platforms by giving teasers in your Story, for instance. This is one of the most effective ways to draw leads in, with one source of well-produced and precious content. It is, therefore, an example of content marketing that cost-effectively assists in lead generation. 
• Contests: Social media is a great place to host competitions for your brand. With this, you can derive not only contact information as entries but also include additional requests, such as a tagged photo upload. By doing this, you are also building up your brand's visibility among new networks and increasing the amount of user-generated content associated with your brand.
• Advertising: Interactive ads with calls to action can also be an excellent source for cultivating leads. This option promotes your brand among new, yet highly targeted audiences who can grow your customer base. Leads derived from ads are also likely to be high-quality and pre-qualified for an eventual sale. 

Based on the above, it is evident that there are several ways to generate leads on social media. The best marketing strategy is to include a number of the above so that your lead strategy is optimized and diverse. Your target audience will inform you as to which approaches and which social media platforms to use.

Once you have the leads secured, it is necessary to deepen your relationship with them. Marketers often refer to this as lead nurturing and lead conversion. The key is to continue to provide valuable content or exchanges with your potential customer base and work on strengthening these relationships and communities for the long term. At these stages, the strategy shifts to become more personalized and relevant on a per-lead basis. Marketers are required to analyze their customers in-depth when targeting and will be needed to re-analyze their lead pool to ensure that their needs are met satisfactorily. The ultimate goal is then to convert these leads into customers who can become brand advocates. 

Best practices for social media marketing

• Bot Automation: Optimizing your response time and productivity can be highly beneficial. To do this, consider making use of the technology available to you, including that of automated responses. There are also helpful tools such as CRM software that can help you streamline the processes, manage your interactions and importantly, store and categorize your leads.
• Community: Social media is all about building online communities, and these are filled with potential leads. By interacting with these audiences and growing by reaching more potential leads, you are growing your business in more ways than one. There should also be a focus on becoming part of relevant external communities.
• Content: As mentioned, content is crucial for marketing. By creating content that your audiences appreciate and respond well to, you are inviting leads organically by making people want to know more and share with your brand. Work on developing various forms of engaging content. The more valuable and compelling it is, the more leads you will generate.
• Optimization: Optimizing your content and social media channels will contribute to growing your organic reach, which will then result in more leads. This requires digital marketing best practices and will ensure that your leads strategy extends to other marketing strategies as well. 
• Incentives: Valuable and enticing incentives are the difference between securing a lead and losing a potential customer for good. The value needs to be clear and genuine, as social media followers appreciate brands who care and go the extra mile, especially when it comes to sharing their details with them. 
• Personalize: Lead generation needn't be a mass appeal approach. Instead, focus on acute targeting and personalized offers among your niche audiences. This will result in higher quality and pre-verified leads. 

That marks Nexa's guide on how social media can generate leads for your business. With these tips and best practices in hand, you can increase your leads and conversions, resulting in business growth, not only in terms of sales but also concerning your customer base. Herein lies great potential and opportunity, which should not be overlooked when developing your social media strategy. 

Work with lead generation specialists

Nexa has worked with various brands to develop award-winning social media campaigns. Our focus and success in cultivating leads to yield high performing results. To find out about what we can do for your business, browse our portfolio of work or book an introductory meeting with us.