Newspapers and magazines are “put to bed”. Television goes off into that fuzzy snow programming in the middle of the night, and most people stream music now rather than twirl the radio dial. What’s a marketer to do? Don’t worry, you can still generate leads and the good news is, your users are looking all day, every day!
Your prospective target audience has never been more voluntarily captive. They sign into their social media sites constantly. Now your company just needs to harness things like digital marketing, paid search, and SEO to get better return on investment from social media.
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Think About Your Platform
Remember how there used to be just one “social media?” Maybe you remember it as MySpace, or even just a time when Facebook was everything before things like SnapChat and YouTube and Instagram split off and blew up big.
Figuring out how to generate leads back then was a little easier, of course, because you had just the one site and the one way people used it.
Now that there’s more, you have to change the way you use social media. You can use is as a valuable tool to help your business grow.
Crossing the Platforms
Since people are now accessing multiple types of social media across multiple types of platforms (think: cell, computer, tablet, “wearables,” bioengineering), you now have quite a calculation at hand.
How can you make sure you’re using social media to generate leads via all these channels?
There’s one way, for all ways!
It’s called cross-platform marketing or cross-device marketing.
This is the process of thinking that your customers and those in your target demographic are on the move. They’re accessing their social media on the go – possibly right from one to the other – so you should make your lead-generation work accessible in the same way.
Here’s an example. You and your staff spend a large amount of time, effort, and resources to create the most engaging, exciting video of your company’s product or service. You added in special effects, checked for errors, and crafted the best call to action.
It even looks amazing when you uploaded it to your company’s YouTube channel and projected it from your PC in a board meeting.
Except for one problem: You didn’t code it in the backend for how it may be viewed on the tiny screen of a cellular device. Now no one can read your end “credits,” which has the most important part of the video – how to contact you!
Cross platform isn’t just about posting your lead generation efforts on multiple sites. It’s ensuring the content can be understood and consumed in an originally-intended way each time, each site!
Don’t Fake Out Facebook
Social media, especially Facebook, can seem like the Wild West. Are there really rules? Or can you just throw caution to the wind and do whatever you need to do to generate leads?
If you want to live in infamy like other businesses who have tried, failed, and gone on to be ridiculed on indexed and archived website pages, you can. We don’t recommend it.
Examples of things to avoid when using social media to generate leads:
- Badly lit, fuzzy, or obviously Photoshopped imagery
- Images that are not perfect and exactly sized for that specific site’s image guidelines
- Text that has not been proofread and run through foreign language checkers (especially slogans)
- Offers for prizes, perks, and other things that you cannot deliver on
- Buying likes, retweets, forwards, or comments from automatons or bots
Consider making it a rule to get a second pair of eyes on anything you post, because sometimes we can be just too close to the content.
Weigh the Costs
Just as you’d pay to take out advertisements the “old” way, social media has its channels for this type of on-the-net networking, too.
Through things like search engine optimization and pay per click advertising, you can generate leads through the social media sites.
Instead of thinking about paying for the clicks, think about how you’re smartly advertising where your target audience is around the clock.
And there’s good news!
As of January 2017, the average cost per click in the United States was actually cheaper than the global average. Seven cents may not sound like a lot ($0.28 cents per click versus $0.35 respectively). However, once you multiply it by the entire click package, you’ll seehow you’ll be able to afford quite a few clicks for quite a low price.
With social media pay per click, you can reach prospective customers on their time. And because social media is fairly new to paid ads, you can find great deals to generate ROI.
Generate Leads with a Lead Expert
Sometimes, doing everything with the same effort and drive can be exhausting.
One person can’t do it all. It’s that jack of all trades, master of none slogan. You want to focus your work on what you know and excel at.
Leave things like how to generate leads to people who have honed the craft as their main skill set.
Consider it like bringing in a pinch hitter. Lead experts know the top industry secrets on generating leads. They study it, work with lead generation every day, and leverage the successes they’ve seen with other clients.
When you’re ready to talk with a leads expert, click here. We can have breakfast on us! Contact us today!