4 Methods For Generating New Leads From Social Media

To build a successful online presence, businesses need to have a well-formulated sales funnel. This is how you effectively turn a visitor into a customer.

But inbound sales funnels only work if you are getting website visitors.

In today’s digital environment, consumers are inundated with options. This means that driving traffic and getting those visitors to take a desired action is much harder than it used to be.

The advent of social media, however, has given businesses and marketers access to larger and more targeted audiences. If your service or product fills a void in the marketplace, it’s easier than ever to reach your audience in turbo fashion.

Through these platforms, companies have a nearly endless pool of sales prospects to draw on to consistently fill sales funnels. What makes this even more powerful is social’s cyclical nature; with each new lead you generate, you stand the chance of increasing your social profile, which in turn enables brands to pull in more leads.

If your business’s sales pipeline could use a bit of a jumpstart, look no further.

Here are four effective methods for filling your sales funnel with social media.

1. Promote Ungated Premium Content

With so much content everywhere we look, today’s consumers have become more discerning, seeking value in their content. They want tips, tricks, tools and resources that will enable them to be more effective in their careers and lives.

Through this paradigm, businesses have found opportunities to create leads by providing valuable information in the form of gated content like eBooks.

This is a great strategy that works quite well at building email lists. What works even better, however, is providing potential prospects with free, interactive video content, as video is much more appealing and engaging than any form of text.

Leverage your co-marketing and influencer relationships to maximize distribution of your webinar invite posts via social channels. You can even prepare a teaser preview short video to attach to these posts, and you can also promote them using social ads to custom audiences.

Using a webinar service like Clickmeeting, marketers can leverage social media to promote an information-packed video presentation on a specific topic that your audience will find valuable.

There are two ways to utilize this content format for lead generation. The first is to promote the webinar as a gated content offering and send users to a dedicated landing page to sign up using their contact info.

The second technique is to require no pre-registration to capture the largest audience possible. During the webinar, you can then point participants to various offers, landing pages, contests, or other lead generation utilities that offer the promise of further value and reward.

Using the former approach is likely to garner you a smaller, yet more qualified catalog of prospects, while the latter will help you acquire a less refined, yet more sizable list of leads.

2. Hunt Down Qualified Prospects

If you live in the B2B space, LinkedIn should be your social network of choice.

Considering that the platform houses over 500 million business professionals worldwide, LinkedIn is the ultimate resource for tracking down high-quality leads from every industry to pump into your funnel.

Using LinkedIn’s search function, businesses can compile massive lists of potential prospects as you’ll often be able to uncover tens of thousands of matches with just a few keywords. If you upgrade to a premium Sales Navigator account, you’ll be able to access more search results, along with some additional snazzy features.

For best results, you’ll want to refine your search by including your ideal prospect’s industry, title and location. With that information entered, you can start building a spreadsheet of potential prospects.

Since many folks won’t willingly list their corporate email addresses, however, you’re going to need a bit of assistance from email finder tools like Voila Norbert. It’s extremely simple and effective, as it only requires an individual’s name and domain to track down a professional email address.

Combining these two platforms, businesses can create a wealth of potential buyers to enter into sales funnels and nurture into valuable customers.

3. Conduct a Contest

Contests are often an irresistible lure for attracting new leads. People love the interactive nature of contests, and it’s always enticing to have a chance to win an awesome free product or experience. Platforms like Wishpond can help streamline the process of launching a contest and promoting it across social networks.

But to run a contest that benefits your brand’s sales funnel, the prize needs to meet two specific goals.

First, your offering needs to be valuable enough for people to care about winning it. Second, it must be valuable to only the specific prospects you are trying to reel in. If your prize isn’t valuable, all efforts around the contest will be in vain. If you offer up something like a new iPhone as your grand prize, you’re going to collect a broad range of email addresses, which might result in an unqualified bunch of prospects.

If you run a SaaS business, consider offering an extended trial of your platform or a year’s worth of service at a higher tier. If you sell physical products, give away some of those instead. This ensures you are gaining qualified leads.

No matter your offering, you are going to need to drive users to a dedicated landing page to provide their contact info. And since this requires an extra step, you’re naturally going to lose some potential prospects in the process.

Instead of sending users outside the walled garden of social media to sign up for your contest, however, you could combine this tactic with my next tip.

4. Utilize Facebook Lead Ads

This tactic works especially well in tandem with methods one and three, considering that it helps create less friction in the registration process. Facebook Lead Ads offer potential prospects with a low-barrier way to connect with a brand as they never have to leave Facebook.

Just like signing up for a webinar, downloading an eBook, or entering a contest, your business is requesting information in exchange for value. What makes Lead Ads particularly effective at initiating this exchange is Facebook automatically populates the lead form with the user’s contact information, enabling them to convert in just a couple of clicks. It really is that simple.

On the advertiser’s end, brands select the information they need to collect from consumers, so be sure to keep this at a minimum; if Facebook can’t auto-populate certain fields, users are less inclined to enter it themselves.

Wrapping Up

Social media is possibly the most useful tool ever created for filling a sales funnel with qualified leads. Don’t let all the necessary tasks overwhelm you, though. Try one campaign at a time, measure your results, and continue to expand and grow your audience with the tactics that are right for your business.

It’s never been easier to boost a business at light speed. All you need are the crafty techniques above and the willingness to get to know your demographic’s specific wants and needs.

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