Social media lead generation is very common with marketers. Every business person wants to identify, attract and keep his or her target audience. That is why, it is only natural for a business owner to continue to device strategies that aim at bringing him the highest percentage of his target audience. While social media is a great means to do that, it is not easy to use it.
According to a report released in 2015 by SIIA on software marketing industry, it stated that about 96% of marketers that use social media for lead generation usually struggle with getting the revenue that is commiserate with their effort. SIIA equally reported that only 46% of the 100 marketing executives that they surveyed believed in the power of social media based campaign. Your success will be determined by the decisions you make and the strategies you apply.
To avoid mistakes that destroy your social media lead, so as to improve your chances of achieving success, we have put together 7 common social media mistakes that you make and how you can correct them.
1. Not knowing your target audience
It would be most unusual for a strategy to work if not targeted at a particular audience. If a marketer wants to attract a particular set of audience, that marketer needs to identify that audience first. A marketer must know who to attract before devising means to attract them. You must know what to sell to a particular audience before devising means of selling to them. You need to get your lead right, then, try to understand your target audience, their needs and how your offering will service those needs.
Finding answers to such questions will help you create the right content, use the right keywords and choose the right multimedia to use.
2. Lack of communication
Some online marketers identify their audience, seat back and wait for their lead to reach out to them before communicating with such lead. It is a wrong approach.
As soon as you identify your target audience, you should begin to communicate with them immediately. Your audience would want to start communicating with you, the earlier you open yourself up to such communication, the better for you because the higher chances of converting them to your customers.
How do you reach your audience? You don’t need to wait for them to start up a conversation with you or use only email to reach them. Rather, it is recommended that you post regular and quality content on whatever social media channel you have targeted. Whenever they ask questions, try as much as possible to answer within a short space of time in-between them asking. From time to time, it is fine that you conduct question and answer sections, do surveys, conduct twitter, Facebook and Instagram giveaways.
3. Not targeting the right audience
Don’t believe that because someone like your Facebook page, is following you on Instagram, twitter or any other social media platform means that whatever you have up for sell, they will buy. Some people might just like the quality of the contents you put up on social media and would always want to comment on them, but it doesn’t mean that they would turn to your customers automatically. Don’t get your hope up without evaluating everything. It is imperative that you do internal analysis of your leads and customers so as to create the right kind of expectation of the actions that could qualify a lead as being profitable to your business. That is what it means to target the right lead. It equally involves researching possible leads that what you are offering suit, then segment them in accordance with their interest and other demographic metrics.
4. Not using the right social media lead generation tools
You might have done everything right in terms of lead generation, people are visiting your site but you don’t know the number of people that visit per day, how much time they spend on your site when they visit and what they usually visit your site to do, then you are a long way to go. You need to be constantly up to date with the number of visitors to your site, how much time they spend and what page they usually like spending more time. You cannot do it on your own, there are various excellent tools made specifically to help you learn about your visitors and subsequently convert them into sales. The issue here is finding the right combination of lead generation tools that can be able to give you an adequate amount of insight into generating enough traffic through your social media post hence qualifying such traffic as leads, then potential conversions to sales. There are many social media lead generation software companies with lead generation tools, which provide services as content calendar templates etc.
5. Not generating leads organically
Once more, lead generation doesn’t just happen overnight.so many online marketers after trying for some time to generate followers organically but fail to, turn to buying social media accounts with much followers. They buy followers, likes, even share. In their perception, they have people to market to. I can tell you authoritatively that it is a short term fix rather than a long term solution. Bought lead doesn’t really translate to true lead. Granted, you might be having more likes, comments and even share but that would not translate to meaningful lead. Amidst your myriads of followers, you might not really have the right kind of people that you can go into a meaningful engagement online with, which would translate to them buying from you. Also, it is equally worthwhile to point out that when you buy social media accounts or followers, you are most likely going to buy accounts with so many fake followers. In this case, it is highly difficult for you to get engagements that will truly lead to selling to those followers. Growing followers organically takes time but, at the end, it will surely worth the effort.
6. Not having a well-defined social media strategy
Sometimes you make a post and that post goes viral. It is important for us to note that, it could be as a result of the interest the post generate which could be a one-off situation or it could even be a post that feed on serious negativity. As we say here, negative stories generate lots of headlines.
For you to consistently make interesting post, you need to have a well-defined social media strategy, which will help in defining your social media marketing effort. As a company, one of the first things you should have is an editorial calendar, which will help you to maintain consistency around your effort. The editorial calendar should help to guide you on what to post, when to post and what social media channel to use. It should equally contain further strategies to make sure that the published content gets maximum exposure and engagement. It is not wise for you to post anything, anytime and at whatever social media handle your mind ask you to post on. Choose your post, images and content wisely, have a particular time that you regularly make post and tailor-fit your post to social media channels. In generating lead with a social media channel, it is extremely important that you ensure that your targeted audience are reached, which could turn to lead and then converted to sale.
7. Seeing social media as a means of making sales only
Social media is most effective when you use it as a means of brand awareness and for generating curiosity which will lead to your target audience carrying out a specific action. It is imperative that you learn how to use features on social media channels which are specifically designed to help you to generate lead. On Instagram, you should create a business profile which will help you to monitor how people interact with your page and always post a url below your captivating post which will take the interested lead into a call to action page with a form on your site. The same applies to twitter, make a curiosity generating post, insert a picture and then attach a url that will take the individual to a landing page with a form.
Facebook is a little bit different. For you to fully utilize Facebook marketing tools, you have to create a Facebook page. Facebook pages contain call to action buttons that will enable you to insert a url to a landing page with a form.
There are so many social media lead generation mistakes that people make but these ones listed are the most prominent. If you follow the suggested corrective measures pointed out here, we can assure you, you will be more effective at using social media to generate lead which you would always convert to sales.
Egbo Jerry C
Staff, Bizmarrow Technology.
