Lead generation is the most important step of any business. When someone agrees to give you their valuable and personal information (like name and email address) it means him or her has some interest in what you’re offering.
Whether you’re selling a product or providing a service you need to generate leads. When you capture a lead through your website you need to nurture them with valuable content, this is known as lead nurturing. Eventually, you will transform the lead in a customer.
It all starts with the lead and therefore it is important to learn how to generate a good amount of leads.
How do we generate leads online?
There are many ways.
The classic way is to embed a form on a landing page where we give something back in exchange for a prospect’s personal information. You can offer a free ebook, a free consultation, a discount, in exchange for name and an email address. Usually, the more the perceived value of what you’re giving “for free”, the more information you’ll be able to collect from the lead.
That is what we’ve experienced from inbound marketing and what usually works.
Now…What if I told you that there is an easier way to get a lot of leads in a short amount of time, and even without a landing page, a form or a website?
This method is with social media lead generation.
There are many ways to use social media for lead generation, and I’m going to cover them on future posts. Today I’m going to tell you the new ways to supercharge your lead generation by using social media ads.
How to use Twitter Ads for Lead Generation
Twitter is currently one of the best social media platforms for lead generation. If you want to try to generate leads for your business visit ads.twitter.com and start creating a lead campaign.
This kind of campaign gives you the opportunity to let users give you their contact details with one single click!
You will have to create a lead generation card with text, image and call-to-action. And your ad will have one button users will click to become a lead. It’s that easy!
Like every campaign, you will also have options to define target with location, gender, interests, languages, keywords, followers, etc. In other words, you’ll be able to identify your ideal target and ask for their contact details directly on Twitter.
How to use Facebook Ads for Lead Generation
Another great social network for lead generation is without any doubt Facebook. With about 1.5 billion active users on its platform, it is the largest community to generate leads.
Facebook offers two ways to generate leads through Ads: conversions and lead ads.
1. Website conversions are a way to track specific actions on a website. With a Facebook Ads account it is possible to generate a custom audience pixel and add it to any webpage on one or multiple websites; this will be useful in many ways (for instance for remarketing campaigns).
In this case, the conversion is going to be the lead generation. So we need a conversion tracking pixel to be added on a “thank you page” (a thank you page is where a lead is redirected to after they submit their contact details).
Facebook will optimize the campaigns in order to generate the maximum amount of leads (conversions) by showing the ads to a subset of people defined in our target, that are willing to complete the desired conversion.
2. Facebook Lead Ads will soon be a reality and also the best way to generate leads through Facebook Ads.
In a recent news the social network announced they will be soon launching lead ads, a “simpler way for people to fill out forms on their mobile devices.”
Lead ads will be similar to Twitter Ads, giving advertisers the ability to collect user data with one click.
Generating leads online with social media is much easier than traditional techniques such as SEO or email marketing and it will be soon the primary channel for lead generation.
Acting now means placing your company ahead of any competition, don’t waste time! Use social media for lead generation.
