Social media is a powerful tool for reaching out to potential customers, building brand awareness, and ultimately generating leads. But you can’t just create a profile and post content – that isn’t enough to generate leads. Social media lead generation is when you collect new leads, which is information identifying someone interested in your products or services, from social media. This requires a real strategy. Here’s what you need to think about:

1. Create Compelling Lead Magnets

A lead magnet is an incentive which compels people to give you their information. These could be free tools, videos, training, articles, reports…anything which will entice people to give you their details. Even a discount code could do it.

2. Consider Targeted Ads

If you have the budget, paid social media advertising can be really effective. You can be really precise in your targetting to make sure that your lead magnets reach the right people, alongside increasing your audience beyond the people who already follow you.

3. Use Retargeting Ads

Alongside targeted ads, you can retarget people who have previously shown interest in your product or service. For instance, if someone clicked on one of your ads, or visits your lead generation ad, but didn’t submit a form, you can retarget them using social media ads to encourage them to finish the signup process.

4. Use Social Proof

Reviews are the greatest asset you have in marketing. We call it social proof, but you can think about it as word of mouth marketing. Social Proof is key to helping you acquire new leads by helping people trust your brand demonstrating your brand value.

5. Involve Others

Consider reaching out to relevant influencers, partners, employees, and customers to help refer new customers to your lead magnets. Speaking at conferences and summits, or having others share your lead magnets for you help you to build leads by leaning on other, already trusted, brands.

The next step…

The next step is how to use those leads, how to interact with them and take them further down the sales pipeline. This needs to be built into your strategy to make the most of all the hard work you’ve been putting in.