Looking to boost your sales through free social media leads?
Social media’s constant rise in usage and popularity make it a great platform for businesses to reach new customers and generate new leads.
It offers many advantages as a marketing platform: fresh content, great versatility, ability to reach a wide audience, and the ability to easily research your target customer are just a few.
Utilizing these advantages is a great way to find free leads for your business. Here are seven things you can do to get the most out of social media lead generation.
Research Your Target Customers
While this is important with any type of marketing or lead generation for your business, it’s vital to your success on social media. You don’t want to waste time on platforms that your customers simply don’t use.
Doing this research allows you to focus your time where it’s going to be the most lucrative. What times do they check their feeds? Do they react more to pictures? Do they prefer shorter posts? Where do they spend the most time?
The time you save by focusing on the right platforms will enable you to create the most fitting content possible. When you combine this time saved with the free leads you’re generating, your ROI will start to look fabulous.
Social media has another advantage for you, in the research department. It has never been easier to get an exact bead on what your ideal customers like, dislike, and follow on a regular basis. It’s all right there in front of you!
Combine that information with the content you’re already creating, and you’ll end up with something customized that stands heads and shoulders above the rest of the crowd.
Make Your Content Interesting, But Also Useful
When you start creating your content, you’ll want to consider these two points carefully.
In order to stand out among all of the other content on social media, you’ll have to create something that grabs your customer’s attention. By creating content that’s interesting, a potential customer will have a reason to stop and look further.
Now that you’ve got their attention, it’s time to keep them there. One of the best ways to promote your product or service is to be helpful to your future customers. By creating content that gives them useful information or solves a problem, you’re proving that you can meet their needs.
Take Part in Communities
When you’re trying to build up your free leads from social media, you probably won’t have much exposure in the beginning.
Even if you have exposure, you’ll want to enhance your presence among your target crowd.
One of the best ways to do this is to find communities that already exist for your particular business. You can spend some time hanging around and getting a feel for the group, then start making posts and make your presence known.
Another good way to introduce yourself and garner attention is to start answering questions you might see being posted.
You could also try asking the questions! By asking questions relevant to your business, you’re getting interaction with potential customers. Anyone who comments can end up being a good lead!
One last way to get yourself noticed in communities is by posting comments on popular sites and articles that are relevant to your customers. Since most of these sites require the use of social media to log in, your comments are going to show up on your profile. This is another way to bring potential leads to your profile, and from there to your website and product!
Be Interactive
A great way to engage new customers (and keep old ones interested), is by creating polls, holding contests, and giving things away for free. Who doesn’t love free things?
Polls can give potential customers one more way to make their opinion heard, which can offer a great introduction to your company.
Offering newsletters, ebooks, and whitepapers to potential customers is a great way to grab their attention and give them an idea of what you have to offer them.
Holding a contest can be one of the best ways to generate some free leads for your business. By putting a bundle of your services or products together for someone to win, not only are you snagging potential leads but you’re also brilliantly showcasing what you have to offer.
Share and Share Alike
You can’t be on social media and forget the main thing that it’s all about. By finding and sharing content from other reputable sources, you are keeping your audience engaged and bringing in new prospects. This also can help take some of the content creation burden off of your own shoulders.
Another way you can use this feature to your advantage is by sharing content you find relevant that’s posted by people you’ve pegged as potential leads. Sharing their content is a great way to break the ice, instead of just contacting them randomly! If you’re going the ‘contact good prospects directly’ approach, this can be particularly useful.
Consider Networking for Free Leads
Another great way to find free leads is to reach out to influencers and other people who can help share your content. By creating this network, your content can reach out much farther than you can do alone, and vice versa.
One perk of having profiles with more presence share your content is that prospects are going to find what you’re putting out more credible. If done correctly, this can boost your lead generation dramatically.
Don’t Forget the Hashtags
One of the biggest things you’ll find in social media is the liberal use of hashtags for everything. Using hashtags that are relevant to your business can help people find your content much easier than without them.
How many you want to use will depend on the platform you’re on, but trying 1-2 highly relevant tags per post should be a good place to start. Unless you’re on Instagram. In that case, go nuts.
If you’re a bit unsure of exactly which hashtags to use, try doing searches with the ones you feel would be the most fitting. Not only will you get an idea of which ones would be the most widely searched for, but you can also see what other kinds of content are attached to those tags.
What Can We Do for You Today?
While this list can help boost your free lead generation with social media, it likely won’t be enough for your business to survive on alone.
Feel free to contact us and let us work with you to find the best solutions to drive your business’s lead generation!