One thing you should know when using social media or any other medium to get leads is that not all leads are created equal.
You could get a 100 leads without converting any of them into a paying customer.
On the other hand, you could get only 10 leads and still convert 2 of them into paying customers. You should never put the quantity of your leads in front of the quality. You should be as specific as you could be when asking people to join your email list. If you try to target everyone, you’ll end up acquiring no one as a customer.
That being said, here are some tips to get more leads from social media:
Design The Perfect Lead Magnet
The messaging “Join My Newsletter” isn’t going to get you lots of leads anymore. It’s true that it can work in rare cases when everything else on your website is optimized, but doubtful that this is the case for you!
A “lead magnet” is a gift that you give for free in exchange for someone’s email address. The quality of your leads depends on many factors, but the type of lead magnet plays a major role in targeting those who you want to be your customers. This requires some research as to what your customers are struggling with the most, what motivates them, what type of content they prefer to consume (ebooks, video series, podcasts, webinar…etc). Designing a lead magnet that solves a specific problem for your prospects will ensure that you get quality leads that you can convert into paying customers.
Optimize Landing Pages For Social
Social traffic isn’t the same as email or search traffic. If you want maximum conversions, then you need to optimize the landing pages that contain your lead magnet for social traffic.
How are you going to do that?
Simply by simplifying your messaging to meet your prospects expectations!
You should know that people have different levels of readiness when it comes to taking action on each medium. Many people will buy your product from an email you send, but not as much will do the same from a status update on Facebook.
On social media, people tend to lean towards discovering new things or people, not to buy your product. When they log into their Facebook account, they don’t expect that you bombard them with your sales messages. They also don’t expect you to ask them to perform heavy actions such as buying your product or reading your 300 pages ebook. A 3 minutes video on Facebook that explains how your lead magnet is going to solve their problem can do wonders for your business.
Post At Optimal Times
Despite all those stats and case studies that each claim they stumbled on the perfect time to post on different social platforms, experiment and see for yourself which time is better for conversions. Remember, your audience is unique and general stats probably won’t apply to it.
There are many tools that tell you when most of your audience are on a given platform, but you should experiment for yourself and see when you get the most clicks/opt-ins. However, one thing you should keep in mind is to never exhaust a time slot so much, because the same people will see the same message over and over again since they have similar habits of logging in specific times on social media. Instead, try to post as many times in the day as possible to make sure you reach other people with different logging habits as well.
Post Consistently
On social media, you should promote your lead magnets consistently. A recent experiment showed that promoting lead magnets consistently on our Twitter profile resulted in a 250% increase in opt-ins!
Many people are hesitant to promoting their free ebooks, videos… etc. on social media more than once, but it’s perfectly fine to do that because stats don’t lie. The experiment above shows that our opt-in rate has increased and that means more people are opt-in into my email list. If they were annoyed by my tweets, then we would expect a decrease not an increase in conversions.
The other thing, people on social media decide whether they should opt-in to your email list, or buy your product or service after multiple exposures. Research seems to support that social traffic needs to get exposed to your message 7 times on average before they decide to perform a particular action.
Use Different Messaging
Different people are on different social platforms for different reasons. In order to ensure the most conversion, you need to customize your messages on each social platform to meet your prospects expectations. On Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram, you should post light content that could be consumed easily. On Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn, you can get away with heavier content. The key is to understand the behavior of each segment on each social platform.
The other thing, do not post the same message over and over again. You should change the wording so people don’t get used to it. You can post about the different sides of your lead magnet that solve different problems for your prospects. Changing your propositions will make your lead magnet appeal to more people which will result in more opt-ins and eventually more sales.
Key Takeaway
While it’s perfectly OK to promote your products and services on social platforms, it would be better if you divide your buying cycle into multiple levels of commitment. You should learn that social traffic responds very well to minor actions, but not so much to heavier actions. Email is proven to be a great medium for direct sales, so you should try to leverage your social following to build a solid email list that you can market to consistently.