8 Effective Social Media Tactics for Generating Qualified Leads

Social media has revolutionized how businesses interact and communicate with their customers. And with these changes, new opportunities to expand business have arisen. Not just for raising brand awareness, but social media marketing can now be effectively used for generating genuine leads that are eager to hear about your products or services. 

However, it can be done only when you know how to start with effective outreach. In this blog, we’ll take you through 8 tips and strategies that will help you generate qualified leads using social media. They include both paid and unpaid strategies used to attract high-end buyers. 

Let’s get started.

1. Optimize your profile

This is less of a tactic and more of a necessity. Before you put effort into lead generation, make sure all your social media profiles are optimized and provide people means to contact you and discover more about your products or services. Here are some things to keep in mind while optimizing your profiles:

• Make your contact information readily available. Put up your customer care number and email address in your bio so that people can know how to contact you directly from social media.
• Create call to action buttons like ‘Sign up’, ‘Book an appointment’, or ‘Order Now’. Every social media platform has unique features to add CTAs to profile.
• Add a link in your bio which points people to your website and other relevant landing pages.

2. Curate gated content

It’s a straight fact that without compelling content, you won’t be able to generate leads from social media. With attention spans getting shorter day by day, the visuals you design need to be sharp and the copy you write needs to be sharper. 

Creating gated content is all about providing insanely valuable content to your audience. And to be able to get access to that content, you can ask for their contact information. This can include anything from research papers to newsletters, e-books, and case studies. The leads that you obtain by giving away such free engaging content can further be nurtured and converted into customers.

3. Collaborate with influencers

Influencer marketing is on the rise for the past few years. Partnering up with people who have a highly engaged audience can help you reach a massive number of people in very little time. Do some research, find out influencers that are relevant to your industry, and reach out to them to promote your brand.

You don’t always have to spend truckloads of money by collaborating with macro influencers with millions of followers. Target micro and nano influencers as they not only charge you less, but also have a more engaged audience. Send them a few samples of your products and offer an affiliate commission. Once they start promoting, you’ll start getting qualified leads as well as followers.  

4. Hold contests and giveaways

Another tactic to bring in genuine leads in a short span is through contests and giveaways. It is an overused method, but still works wonders. Make people want to participate in your contest by keeping a compelling reward. You can give away any of your most popular products, entry tickets to your upcoming event, or discount coupons. 

Just make sure that the prize is relevant to your brand and makes people interested in what you have to offer. For entry, you can ask people to provide whatever information you’d like to earn. This way, you can collect information, raise brand awareness, and compel people to share the contest with their friend circle.

5. Run social media ads

Social media platforms store extensive user data which can be utilized by marketers to run precisely targeted ads. Every social media site provides unique targeting options through which you can reach your target audience. There is a special category of running lead generation ads that help collect information of people who’ll be genuinely interested in your products.

The best part is that users won’t have to leave the social platform and move to a landing page to fill a form. While creating ads, you can choose to target people on the basis of their geographical location, age, gender, profession, interests, etc. This lets you collect leads from a highly specific group of potential customers.

6. Launch a referral campaign

Creating a referral campaign is all about expanding your business by converting your current customers or followers into salespersons. Incentivize your followers for referring your products or services to their friends and family members. 

To make this work, encourage your customers to share about your products on their social media profiles, provide them a unique referral link or code, track signups or purchases made from those links, and then reward them accordingly. Some rewards can include coupons, freebies, and loyalty discounts. 

7. Use social listening

Social listening can provide you with great lead generation opportunities. There are a lot of social media monitoring tools that allow businesses to track brand mentions in real-time. You can join conversations relevant to your brand and find if someone is looking for products like yours. 

Also, keep a track of industry related keywords and mentions of competitors. It can help you find opportunities to reach out to your audience, know about them, and promote your brand. People will definitely love your proactive approach when you step in to address their concerns.

8. Host a sign-up only virtual event

By hosting virtual conferences, webinars, and events, you will be able to attract a highly relevant audience, especially when you include a pre-registration process. You can either host live sessions or provide people with a pre-recorded video link after they share their contact details. However, live videos are the best way to appear more authentic and flaunt your industry expertise.

You can conduct such events to discuss industry updates, provide actionable tips, collaborate with influential speakers, and answer questions of your followers. If your content and presentation are strong, you can easily earn new leads. What’s more, this content can also be repurposed later into white papers, short videos, interviews, or infographics. 

Final thoughts

No doubt, social media is a way to generate high-quality leads at the lowest possible costs. When you use the correct combination of the above strategies, you are bound to receive a plethora of authentic leads and queries for your offerings. Meanwhile, you should always keep your marketing goals top-of-mind,  keep experimenting, try new ways of promoting your brand, and explore new features of new social media platforms to keep the ball rolling!