3 Essential Ways to Generate Leads on Social Media

Social media is the easiest and quickest channel to generate quality leads for your business. By using paid social media advertisements you can be collecting leads 24 hours a day (even when you sleep).

But what are the most effective techniques to generate leads? In this article, we share 3 essential and proven ways to generate leads on social media.

How to Collect Leads

A social media lead generation campaign can collect lead details in one of two ways:

A Landing Page

Use social media adverts to send people to an external landing page or a dedicated page on your website. This page must contain a form where people can submit their email address and any other contact details that you require.

Lead Forms

When running adverts on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, there are options to run ‘lead advert’ campaigns. These types of adverts collect user details on the platforms in a pop-up lead form. There is no need to create a landing or website page.

Both of these methods have advantages and disadvantages.

Using a landing page often generates leads of a higher quality. If somebody is willing to click through to a website and give their details they are showing a higher level of interest.

Lead adverts can generate cheaper leads but because the process is very easy, lead quality can be an issue. Some lead forms are pre-filled and the user does not have to visit a website.

3 Essential Lead Generation Techniques

At ZoomSphere, we have narrowed down the 3 best ways to generate leads on social media.

Use Gated Content

The most popular method to encourage leads on social media is by using gated content. This basically means providing a free piece of content in exchange for the lead’s details (commonly their name and email address).

There are various types of content that can be provided:

• eBooks – Offer ‘how to’ guides or industry insider tips in the form of an eBook.
• Case Studies – In-depth examples of how your product or service helped past customers.
• Online Tutorials – Give away specialist knowledge via online tutorials or courses.
• Free Software – Can you provide software that makes your customers lives easier? This can be a great way to attract email signups.
• Webinars – Zoom or Skype webinars often outperform other gated content methods. Be sure to provide a landing page or lead advert where people can sign up to attend the webinar.

The crucial element to a successful campaign is to make your gated content desirable – this means investing time and moneywhen planning the lead generation campaign.

Be sure to write enticing and informative copy on your landing page to attract customers.

Hold a Giveaway Competition

If you want to collect a lot of email leads in a short period of time, then holding a social media competition is an excellent idea. Depending on the prize, it will be possible to generate hundreds or even thousands of email leads.

Again, it is essential to make your prize desirable. Here’s a few ideas for successful campaigns:

• Free Accommodation – Offering a free stay is a good tactic for hospitality businesses, especially on key nights of the year such as valentines day or new years eve.
• Dinner Giveaway – Restaurants and cafes can generate leads by giving away a free 3 course meal for a couple or family.
• Win a Membership – For businesses that provide membership packages or subscriptions, a ‘win a 1 year membership’ competition can prove very successful.
• Product Freebie – Choosing to offer one of your most desirable products in a contest should attract a lot of interest and competition entrants.

Remember that the more attractive you make the prize, the more leads you will generate. You should really be looking to give away products or services with a minimum $100 value.

It’s also important to push awareness of your competition with boosted posts or adverts, targeting people who are relevant to your business. By doing this you will get leads that you can market to on a long-term basis, and not the ‘competition junkies’ that plague social media.

The adverts can either direct people to your landing page or you could use Lead Adverts so they can enter the competition instantly. ZoomSphere’s Lead Manager module will let you know every time a new person enters the contest via Lead Adverts.

Offer Customers a Discount

Discount codes and coupons are a smart technique to boost your email list.

The great thing about this tactic is that even though customers may not immediately use the coupon to buy from you, they are giving you their email address in return for the coupon. You can then remarket to them via email and try to push them further towards a sale.

Send people to a quality landing page where they can obtain their coupon. The offer should be the main focus of the page.

Here’s an example from Crocs:

In addition, you could make the availability of the discount time-limited and add a countdown timer next to the sign-up box. This creates an additional sense of urgency, which may further increase the number of leads you generate.

Making Lead Generation GDPR Compliant

Since the GDPR regulations were introduced in 2018, all landing page sign-up forms and social media competitions collecting the data of EU residents need to be legally compliant.

This means that the rules of any competitions should be totally transparent and the way data is used should be explained on any landing pages you create.

These are the key points you need to address:

• Competition start and end dates.
• How the winner will be notified.
• Conditions of entry fully explained.
• How lead data will be used (added to email list and sent promotional material).
• Use a consent box for email marketing on the landing page.
• Use an additional consent box for agreeing to terms and conditions/use of data.

Being GDPR compliant is actually a very good thing – not only will it help you to avoid hefty fines, but people who sign up after being given fully transparent information are much less likely to unsubscribe from your email list at a later date.

To find out more about how ZoomSphere can help you to better manage your social media leads, please visit our Leads Manager Module page – your 31 Day Free Trial is waiting  😊