Creating a Sales Outreach Strategy for the Modern Buyer
Creating a sales outreach strategy is a crucial part of business, which is why engagement on social media has never been more important.
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What are the Best Ways to Generate Leads on Social Media?
The Best Ways To Find Customers on Linkedin, Instagram, Twitter and Beyond.
Author: Chaz Van de Motter - Chief Executive Officer
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Social media has become a required part of any good marketing strategy. Often social media is utilized for vanity purposes or solely associated with posting content. This is changing as more tools and strategies emerge to help generate leads with social media. From organic growth to advertising there are many strategies that can generate revenue.
In this blog we will break down and score on a scale of 1-10 some of the top strategies used to generate leads with social media.
The effectiveness of each of these strategies is completely dependent on your business model and industry.
The scoring system combines aspects of reporting, scalability, effectiveness, required investment level for success and possibility of return on investment.
Using Content to Generate Leads with Social Media: 7.8/10
Content is the Yin to social media’s Yang. Social media is nothing without content. In fact there are over 350 million posts and stories posted every day on Instagram alone.
Benefits of Using Content to Generate Leads on Social Media
- Engaging content makes your brand sticky and keeps your audience coming back to you once they have followed you
- Great content serves as a reason for people to follow your brand on social media
- Collaborating with other creators allows you to tap into other people’s audiences and gain exposure
- Content can go viral and lead to huge gains in audience and exposure
- Insights into your audience, engagement rate and performance over time
Downsides of Using Content to Generate Leads on Social Media
- It is difficult to reach new audiences organically. Because of the sheer volume of posts and complexities with the algorithms, gaming the system has become nearly impossible.
- Creating quality content takes effort and planning. Creating content is time consuming and difficult to consistently create.
- Content is not direct response. Although content can build your brand, it is difficult to call people to action and to generate leads on social media effectively.
- Creating frequent and fresh content across multiple platforms and multiple dimensions (stories, reels, photos, etc.) is difficult and hard to do without help or a large budget.
Using Advertising to Generate Leads with Social Media: 8.5/10
Advertising is how social media platforms make money. Because advertising was built as a compliment to social media, there are many opportunities to generate leads with social media.
Benefits of Using Advertising to Generate Leads on Social Media
- Granular insights on advertising performance and return on investment.
- Multiple advertising formats that allow audiences to be called to action simply.
- Geographic, Demographic and creator based targeting that allow advertisers to only advertise to a hyper qualified audience.
- Advertising is scalable and can lead to immense return on advertising spend.
- Frequency. You are able to retain your engaged audience through pixel tracking and continue to show them more advertisements.
Downsides of Using Advertising to Generate Leads on Social Media
- Advertising is complex. It requires knowledge and experience to do it properly. Oftentimes the best education requires time and experimentation.
- Advertising is capital intensive. It requires an upfront investment in order to be successful. Experimentation and testing can also be expensive at first.
- Great advertising requires great content. Crafting video and photos as well as sales copy is time consuming and requires expertise, equipment and time.
A good social selling example is when the conversation flows naturally. The sales process turns into a conversation in which you are learning about each others businesses.
Using Influencers to Generate Leads with Social Media: 7.8/10
Influencers are an emerging part of social media. Selecting and collaborating with the right influencers can be an amazing way to generate leads on social media. There are many upsides and downsides to consider when deciding to work with an influencer.
Benefits of Using Influencers to Generate Leads on Social Media
- Influencers with loyal audiences will become evangelists of products that the influencer promotes or subscribes to.
- Influencers can spark virality and generate leads on social media further than their own reach
- Influencers can be incentivized to become affiliates or partial owners in the organizations that they choose to partner with.
Downsides of Using Influencers to Generate Leads on Social Media
- Finding the right influencers who are willing to partner with you requires time, precision and a well established brand. You can opt to use an influencer agency, however, these can be capital intensive.
- Oftentimes working with an influencer is not as simple as paying for a single post. Generating leads with social media by leveraging influencers requires multiple posts in order to appeal to and call to action an influencer’s audience.
- Many influencers create their own pricing structure that is arbitrary from the results that businesses can expect back in the form of revenue.
- Reporting is oftentimes unclear when it comes to the true value that a partnership with an influencer created.
Using Outbound Engagement to Generate Leads with Social Media: 8.5/10
Social media is supposed to facilitate conversation and engagement amongst its user base. Oftentimes simple engagements can build relationships with others whether it is a possible client, partner, influencer or recruit.
Social media provides an opportunity to connect with almost 4 billion people worldwide. Compared to a cold email or cold call, social media engagement is more personal. There is a face, description, and content to go with correspondence compared to a random email address or phone number.
Downsides of Using Outbound Engagement to Generate Leads on Social Media
- The personalized nature of these engagements lead to more quality relationships
- You are able to prospect and identify specific people you choose to engage with rather than rely on demographic targeting or influencer audiences
- Using Social Cycle you can organize the frequency of your engagements and monitor reporting metrics such as daily engagements, dm response rate and more.
Downsides of Using Outbound Engagement to Generate Leads on Social Media
- Outbound engagement cannot be automated and requires time and consistency to generate leads on social media. This strategy works best with small lists of prospects compared to trying to reach thousands.
- This strategy is difficult to organize and execute on without a tool like Social Cycle to help streamline and organize engagement.
- This strategy requires templates for what to say and when to say it. Creating templates for direct messages and frequency requires experimentation and concentration on reporting.
Generate More Targeted Leads on Social Media.
Measure their engagement to determine which ones are most likely to convert.
Using Follow/Unfollow to Generate Leads with Social Media: 6.2/10
Growing your followers is oftentimes synonymous with social media success and generating leads on social media. The follow, unfollow strategy involves connecting with targeted people you want in your audience long enough for them to see your brand and content and opt into following you. In terms of generating leads with social media, this strategy has some positive and negative implications.
Benefits of Using Follow/Unfollow to Generate Leads on Social Media
- Having more followers is a perceptual benefit to your brand. It shows that may accounts are interested in your brand and that consensus legitimizes your page in the eyes of your possible clients or followers.
- This strategy generates traffic to your page. If you have a link to a website or another page then this strategy will help send people to your brand assets
Downsides of Using Follow/Unfollow to Generate Leads on Social Media
- This strategy is transactional and can lead to damaging your brand in the eyes of your new audience members that notice that you have unfollowed them.
- Following or connecting with too many accounts can damage your account health regardless of the platform. Social media algorithms are able to detect outliers and exploitation in terms of following.
Using Account Automation to Generate Leads with Social Media: 5.5/10
Automating account connection and engagement activity is another strategy that many brands have utilized. This strategy is contingent on the use of 3rd party software. Although there are low effort benefits there are also downsides.
Benefits of Using Account Automation to Generate Leads on Social Media
- The scalability of this strategy allows for less time to be spent sending messages and connecting with accounts to generate leads on social media.
Downsides of Using Account Automation to Generate Leads on Social Media
- Automating interactions on social media will damage your account health score. Many softwares can be detected by social media platform algorithms.
- Automated engagements generally lack personalization. This type of engagement can be viewed as transactional and will not lead to genuine relationships.