Lead generation is essential for any business. Without leads, you can’t turn leads into customers. Without customers, you won’t have a business. Check out the article Lead Generation in 2022 to find out why lead generation should be important to your business.
You can attract new customers without spending a dime.
You can use social media to attract new customers. Social media is a great way to build relationships, but it’s also the perfect tool for lead generation.
Whether you’re looking for organic leads or paying ones, social media is an ideal platform for generating leads. You can even do it without having money in your budget!
Here’s how:
Define your goals
Before you start, it’s important to define your goals. It’s easy to get lost in the weeds and make it all about numbers, but if you don’t have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish, it’s hard to measure success.
You should ask yourself: “What do I want?” Do you want more followers on Instagram? Do you want more engagement on Twitter? Do you want more leads for your business? Your answer doesn’t need to be complicated or exhaustive; sometimes just one word is enough (e.g., “more”).
Once that question has been answered, think about how long it will take for those results to happen—and then set a deadline for getting them done. A good rule of thumb is 3-6 months from now; this gives yourself time without making it so far off as to feel impossible (or not worth doing). You can always adjust these goals later on if necessary!
Identify your ideal customer
Identifying your ideal customer is one of the most important steps in lead generation. To do this, you need to first decide what an ideal customer looks like. If you don’t have a clear idea of who your ideal customer is and what they want/need from your brand, then it will be difficult for you to create content that resonates with them.
There are many ways for businesses to identify their ideal customers: demographics, psychographics and interests are some of the more popular ones but sometimes it can be more beneficial for smaller companies with fewer resources (like time or money) to go down a different path.
If you need help identifying your ideal customer check out my free guide:
Creating Your Ideal Customer Avatar.
Research your competitors
One of the most important things you can do is research your competitors. If you don’t know what they’re doing, it will be difficult to understand all of the different ways that people are responding to their content.
It’s also important to understand what your customers want and how they want it. To get this information, try doing a survey or sending out polls on social media and email listservs asking what types of content people are looking for in order to help them solve problems in their lives or businesses.
You should also pay attention when customers respond positively or negatively towards different types of content that gets posted by other businesses who compete with yours—this will give you some insight into what works, what doesn’t work and why certain types of posts resonate with consumers more than others.
Create a compelling offer
The next step is to create a compelling offer. What you need to know about creating a compelling offer is that it doesn’t have to be super complicated, but it does need to be relevant and valuable for the person who would benefit from it.
- Make sure you create something that your audience will want or need by asking yourself:
- What do I want them to get out of this?
- What do I think they’re interested in?
- What problems can my product/service help solve?
Create a landing page optimized for conversions (and mobile!)
- Use a landing page builder. You’ve probably heard of them, but what is a landing page? A landing page is the first thing visitors see when they come to your site. It’s meant to be an advertisement for something else (e.g., an offer or product), but it has no other purpose than that. Groove.cm offers free landing pages and so much more! Leadpages is another great site for building landing pages, with easy drag and drop features.
- Make sure it’s mobile friendly! According to HubSpot, more than 50% of traffic on Facebook comes from mobile devices, so you need to make sure that if people are using their phones and tablets, they can still easily navigate through all the pages of your site — especially if you have multiple sections or products listed on one homepage!
- Use a call-to-action (CTA). There should always be some type of CTA on social media: whether it’s clicking through from an ad or liking/sharing/commenting on something in order for someone else who sees those same posts later down the line will be able to contact them directly about whatever it was originally posted about earlier when I didn’t know what kind anything yet except where do I start?!?!”
Implement a call-to-action
The call-to-action (CTA) is the button that you want your visitors to click on. It should be clear and direct, and it should appear on every page of your website.
The CTA should also be in a prominent position, meaning it’s not hidden away or placed far down on a page where people might miss it.
It’s important to make sure that your CTA isn’t just relevant to the page—it needs to be relevant for what you’re trying to achieve with your organic traffic. This will depend on the kind of business you have and what kind of lead generation methods you’re using. For example, if you’re selling products online then perhaps an opt-in form would make more sense than a phone number or email address as part of your CTAs (you’ll learn more about this later).
Create an editorial calendar
- Create an editorial calendar
- Share your calendar with your team
- Use a tool like Monday.com to manage your social media calendar
- Use a tool like Metricool to schedule posts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
- Use Post Planner to find popular content
Experiment with content types
When it comes to organic lead generation, there are a lot of different content types you can experiment with. You can try some different formats, like videos or infographics. You could also try using different types of content that are more relevant for your audience. For example, if you’re selling insurance products, your audience might find a video on the importance of life insurance interesting—but they may not be as interested in an infographic teaching people how to budget properly. If you’re trying to reach people at different stages in their buying cycle (for example: researching information online before they purchase), then it makes sense that their preferences would change as well! Canva is an excellent resource for creating and easily resizing content to various formats for the different social media platforms.
Maximize the organic reach of your posts
Now that your plan is in place and you’ve got a rock solid strategy, it’s time to actually execute.
- Use hashtags
- Include relevant keywords
- Use a call to action
- Have good photos, headlines, descriptions and cover photo
Track and share analytics about what works best for your business.
With analytics, you can measure how your social media efforts are performing so that you know what works and what doesn’t. You’ll be able to identify which content is performing well and what your target market wants to see from you. Analytics will also help you understand what’s working best for your competitors, so that you can replicate their success in your own campaigns.
Generating leads can be done affordably. It can take more time than running paid advertising. But it also enables you to build relationships with your potential clients. When those leads to convert to clients, they will be loyal, repeat clients, and that is what all businesses need!
How do you generate organic leads? Do you have tips that would help other small business owners? Share in the comments!
If you need help with your organic lead generation strategies, or just want to talk about where you are, where you want to be and how you could get there, reach out…. I would be happy to chat!
