15 Ways To Generate Social Media Leads

Wanting to generate more leads from your social media platforms? That's exactly what we will be talking about today! 

Hello, Summerville! Hello, readers! Welcome back to the Creative Consulting blog, your one-stop blog for everything you need to know about media marketing! Looking to add website and branding design, SEO, social media management, marketing analysis and consultations, and more to your company? Are you looking to learn more about each of these topics and apply them to your company? You've come to the right place! Not only do we offer all of these services to our clients, we talk frequently about these topics right here on our blog. We want to work with you rather than for you, and we want to make sure that all of your ideal clients know who you are. Thanks to thousands of hours of research, we have created a solid framework that allows us to grow your company's presence both locally and online, allowing your business to be known as the go-to experts in your field! We all know what social media is, and we spent our last two blogs discussing what social media and SEO are supposed to do for your company. Like you, and many of our clients, we know you want the time and money that is put into your social media and SEO to generate leads, but how best can you do that? Let's talk about it! 

What Are Business Leads?  
A business lead, in so many words, is an individual who has come across your company and they're interested in the products or services you sell. Sometimes these happen organically by doing cold social media searches (which SEO helps with) and sometimes they can come from ads and the social media you are posting out into the social world that grabs the attention of your target audience. Once a lead is made, companies (of all sizes!) will follow up on each of them to see if the interested party is part of their target audience and if they will continue to want what your company offers. Remember, it is very exciting to get a lead, but it doesn't always mean you will be a good fit for one another. That's okay! Sometimes these leads can turn into good professional relationships, situations where they will recommend you to others who will need you, or they won't go anywhere. You never know what might happen with each lead you get, so it's important to follow up on them. You've been putting so much time, effort, and money into your social media, how can you utilize these platforms to generate more of these business leads? 

Creating Leads on Social Media
When using your social media as a key component in seeking out and drawing in new clients, what should you be keeping in mind? Let's get down to the nitty-gritty of it!

• While this is one of the last things many of our clients want to hear when using a free app, investing in ads across all of your platforms is a sure way to get you more leads with your social media pages. 

• Think about the content you're creating right now. Are you just creating it to spit something out about your company or are you adding real value to the worldwide web? Are you adding to your target audience's lives, helping them solve issues in their lives, and answering questions they've never had the answer to? To key into creating this kind of content, you need to dig deeper into your target audience and pay attention to what they're asking, what they feel they're missing, and providing information that they can connect to on a personal level. 

• Remember to do more than just sell your products on your platforms. Post after post about what your goods and services are get a little boring after a while, and  your audience will get tired of them very quickly. To be the leader and authority in your industry, share information, facts, fun anecdotes antidotes, and let your audience get to know who you and your company are behind the product.  

• When you do connect with someone through social media, don't overwhelm them the moment your connection is made. We've talked about it before that you need to treat direct messaging and email with respect. When you connect with someone in the social world, send them a short and friendly note about who and what you are with a call to action, and don't forget to say thank you. Don't send your new followers a 12 paragraph essay with every reason why they have to buy everything you offer right now. Think about it, would you want that if the tables were turned? 

• More often than not, you and your product connect to, or are very similar to, your target audience. A lot of the time, you enjoy the same things and tend to respond to the same things on social media as your target audience does, so use that! Don't just be all business all the time, you want to show an authentic personality behind your brand. Make jokes, be fun, and show a smile or two. Share why you are so passionate about what you do and how you got to be where you are. Your followers are unique individuals just like you, and they want to connect with others' hopes and dreams, especially those they want to work with or buy something from! 

• Create eye-catching content that doesn't tell a full story, just enough to catch your target audience's eye and will inspire them to click on it to learn more. This will change and evolve, but what is your target audience responding to right now? What more do they need to know? What's exciting them? Use this information to pique their interest and turn them into interested and excited leads! 

• Know that there is a great advantage in staying local! Use your tools to search for your target audience locally and grow from there. Become their friendly neighborhood expert on your product and service first, and then look beyond your community! 

• Post consistently across all of your platforms, and consider adding a new platform to your pile. According to Forbes.com, LinkedIn is one of the most effective lead generation tools. Reposting your blogs and other news from your website and other social media platforms can help many others find you and your products, and it can introduce you to new vendors and service partners, too! 

• Remember the SOCIAL part of SOCIAL media. We say this a lot in our blogs because it's so true; to get a social response you must be social too. Engage and create a conversation with your followers and target audience on social media, even if it's as simple as saying thank you! 

• To get ahead and stay ahead of the competition, you have to be aware of the competition, too. See what their followers and target audience is responding to, take that, and expand on it! 

• Brag a little bit, you've earned it! There is nothing wrong with sharing a few customer testimonials every once in a while. This way you don't always have to be the one doing the talking. Sometimes introducing a real-life conversation can be the perfect level of authenticity that attracts your audience. It's proof right there that's simple and to the point and could be the tipping point that causes an interested follower to become your next customer! 

• Toss in a few freebies once in a while. As we mentioned above, don't drown your followers in constant posts about selling; give them something in return once in a while. Connect your freebies and giveaways to a landing page to get their email addresses or another call to action before they can access their free goodies. This way, even though you might not make a sale right away, you're still getting information that could lead to a sale later down the line. 

• Think about working with other local companies or companies that align with your brand and target audience to do sponsorships. This allows you to know that a reputable expert and a fellow content creator is talking about your brand and product in a way that you'd want them to right to a brand new audience who needs you. This can be very engaging and can introduce your products to an audience who has been waiting for you and they just didn't know it yet! 

• Are you optimizing your social media profiles? Are you providing as much information as possible right on the front of your profile so it is very easy to contact and connect with your business? Try and avoid making your audience have to work for any information. If they do, they probably won't even go searching. This should be one of the very first steps you take when trying to gain more leads. Make sure to take advantage of your call-to-action buttons, and add links to your bio.

• As simple as this might sound, create clickable content! Remember, your followers can't click on a link in your Instagram post. However, you can invite them to click on the link in your bio to view whatever site you want them to visit or invite them to your Facebook Business Page to view a post or link. Then of course, once you've reached that coveted 10K followers on Instagram, you can use the swipe up function on your stories that make it super easy for anyone to visit a website. The key here is to make your content appealing enough that they want to click on it and use the information you're giving right away. Otherwise, you are more than likely to lose their attention. 

How many of these tips and ideas are you using right now to generate your social media leads? Remember, each of these suggestions is fairly simple, and don't take the time you might think they do to add them into your workflow. Getting leads can happen organically, but that can take years before you get enough attention to become a profitable company. Why wait when you can have all of that right now? Don't overwhelm yourself, start with a few of these ideas, and begin to note how your leads increase. Even reading this blog, are you still not wanting to do this extra work for your company? We can help with that! Make sure to reach out to us now to get started! Until next time, stay safe and stay caffeinated! 

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