Looking to generate leads for your company? Try out the following methods using social media.
Run A Facebook Giveaway
Everyone loves a freebie–including your potential customers. Offering goods or services as a prize on social media is a great way to generate leads, motivate your audience to engage on social media, and build brand awareness. Try these these easy to follow steps to run a contest or giveaway on Facebook.
1. Decide on the Prize
First, chose what you are going to give away. If your company offers products, a small gift card or specific item you sell is the perfect choice. If your company offers services, offering a free consultation or voucher for a free service will do the trick.
2. Contest or Giveaway?
Is this contest more focussed on lead generation or branding? If it’s about lead gen, a simple giveaway makes it easy for participants to give you their contact info for a chance to win. Since it is so easy you’re likely to get more participation than a contest with intricate rules.
A contest, on the other hand, requires a more engaged consumer. Making it more difficult for people to participate has the potential to provide greater rewards. For example, you could ask participants to share a few sentences describing why they need your product or service–i.e. “I need a visit from #cleaningco because I’m a busy mother to four cats!”
Better yet, you can ask participants to share an image. If your company sells organic dog food and you are giving away a year’s supply, ask fans to share images of their pets, then vote with their likes for the contest winner. Because the stakes are higher for the audience in this kind of contest, it works best for businesses giving away larger prizes.
3. Apply Yourself
Next, develop a simple Facebook application with custom graphics and a form fill. The more specific you can be with your form fields, the better you can qualify your leads. Common and necessary fields should be first name, last name, and email. Be sure to include a check-box on the email field so users can choose to opt into your mailing list. To further qualify leads you can include questions relevant to your business and target market.
Once the contest is completed, you will have a pool of qualified leads to reach out to and turn into customers.
4. Follow Up
Recognize your contest winner publicly. If you don’t, it can seem like the contest isn’t really closed–or worse, the prize wasn’t actually given away. A photo of the winner with their prize is a great way to prove the success of your contest. A brief quote or paraphrased quote on why they are excited about the prize can further legitimize the contest. For instance:
“Our contest winner, Cara, is a busy mother of four cats who also runs a successful bakery. She’s looking forward to coming home to a super-clean house, courtesy of The Cleaning Co!”
Additionally, thank all contest participants for their interest in the competition. Follow up both on social media and via email, if you collected email addresses. A coupon offering discounted rates is a great consolation prize–and one they may be especially eager to use, after seeing how happy your contest winner is!
Promoted Posts
Advertising on Facebook is essential to maximizing your reach. Many companies fail to utilize the extremely useful promoted posts feature. Using promoted posts, you can target viewers based on demographics, other interests, and more. Promote posts about a contest, sale, or special event to your existing audience, their connections, and beyond using the targeting feature.
Twitter Chat
Whether you are joining in on an existing Twitter chat, or creating your own, utilizing this feature is a great way to obtain quality leads for your business.
For those not acquainted with Twitter chat, it is a discussion held on the Twitter platform–simply created via hashtag. Using Twitter chat you will be able to find users interested in your goods or services. For a list of already existing and active Twitter chats, check out this awesome resource.
Below is an example of a Twitter chat that may interest someone in the medical industry. As a lead gen resource, it can be quite effective. Take a look at #LivingWellChat.
While these three tools are effective means of obtaining leads via social media, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many ways which your business can obtain quality leads to turn into loyal customers! Check back on the Ajax Union Internet Marketing Blog for more helpful tips, tricks, and advice!
