Social media platforms are excellent places to reach out to target customers, engage them, and nurture them to be your customers.
Many target customers visit social media to find content and get insights and information from other users as they search for brands to help solve their pains.
A great strategy for attracting and engaging target customers can help you generate more leads, nurture them, and convert them to customers. Try these marketing strategies and get potential customers to your brand.
Post content on niche communities
Most of the target customers you want to attract are in communities within the different social media channels. They join communities where they can get insights and information that they need to solve their pain points.
To build relationships and drive those target prospects to engage with you, share helpful content on niche communities. Also, answer the questions the target audience share in the communities and forums.
When target customers see your expertise and market knowledge about their pain points, they will be more willing to know more about your brand and see the value you will offer them to solve their challenges.
Run targeted ads
Ads are a great plan to get prospects and drive them to your business. Since you understand your target customers well and know the challenges they face, create ads that are captivating, and engaging and address those pain points.
Give them an actionable step that they can take to draw them close and start nurturing them as you show the value of your product/services. Running conversion ads on social media is a game changer for brands to generate leads as PartnerStack says:
At PartnerStack, we generated hundreds of leads on LinkedIn via conversation ads, which are InMails at scale. Because LinkedIn limits how many conversation ads a member can receive in a month, buyers aren’t inundated by them as they are email, which means the open and engagement rates are much higher. If your buyer is on LinkedIn and you have an elevator pitch that can convert, conversation ads are worth a shot to generate leads on LinkedIn for your SaaS sales team. (Director of Demand Generation at PartnerStack)
You can also run referral campaigns and offer incentives to your social media followers who refer target customers to use your products or services. Give your target audience a clear call-to-action with your ads when they engage your ads. Don’t forget to set your ad objectives and track them. Here is an example of such CTA.
Source: LinkedIn
Also, run retargeting ads to get the target audience to finish the actions they didn’t complete when they engaged with your brand. For example, a prospect can watch your video on social media about your brand but fail to sign up to get more information or know more about the product. You can retarget them with ads to get them to complete the action, and help you start nurturing them.
Use hashtags & social listening tools
Some prospects search for the content they want to engage with using hashtags. Study your target customer engagement and the kind of content they love most then create social media posts and add hashtags the prospects love.
With the help of social listening tools, you can know what your readers are saying about your brand, how they are engaging with your competitors, and the best content they love. With that data, you can maximize the best-performing content and include hashtags relevant to readers to help them find your content. You can also use social media chatbots to engage potential customers and show the value your business delivers to their challenges.
Host webinars and live streams
Use webinars and other live streams on social sites like Facebook or Linkedin to engage more leads and show them the value you will deliver for them.
Do your customer engagement search to know the valuable information your readers want to know and engage more with. Then look for experts on those topics and invite them to share their expertise with your target audience and show them how to solve their challenges.
Leverage influencer marketing
People trust others who influence the market. You can partner with influencers in your market niche to promote your brand and engage more leads to your business. When the target audience sees your brand mentions from influencers they trust, they will want to know more about it and the products or services it delivers so they can use them to solve their pains.
Target customers trust a brand’s products or services that an influencer in their market niche endorses.
For example, when a potential customer sees your brand advocated by this influencer they will most likely trust it and engage with it. As you can see, he has over a million followers most of whom can become your leads.
Source: Linkedin
Here is what John says about using influencers to generate leads.
The key to ensuring influencer collaborations work like magic is finding the perfect match between the influencer’s niche and my brand’s target audience. It’s about handpicking influencers whose content resonates with the same demographics I’m trying to reach.
Instead of a blatant ad, these influencers are crafting engaging stories that feature my offerings as integral parts of their experiences. It makes the content far more engaging and turns it into something inherently shareable. When followers start sharing this content within their networks, its ripple effect extends the reach beyond the influencer’s immediate circle. That, in turn, brings in a fresh wave of potential leads who’ve been introduced to my brand through these personal connections.
The influencer’s credibility, reach, and knack for authentic storytelling create a trifecta that resonates with potential customers on a whole new level. By aligning influencer partnerships with targeted audience demographics and crafting compelling narratives, I’ve found a goldmine of potential leads who trust and engage with what I offer. (John Pennypacker, VP of Sales and Marketing at DeepCognition.ai)
Run a/b tests
Not everything works out on social media for brands when they want to generate leads. Some content types work better and deliver more desirable results than others. To generate leads on social media, run different a/b tests on the content you publish and engage the audience, but avoid making these mistakes with a/b tests.
For instance, you can find out that carousals deliver better results than just posting updates about your brand. You can use such information and give your readers the best-performing content for them as you get them to engage more with your brand. Use social listening tools to find what your target customers love about your brand and the kind of content they focus then create more of it.
Share reviews and testimonials from customers
Trust– one word every customer is looking for. They want to be sure when they engage and later use your products or services, they will get the results they want. One best way to prove this and build that trust is to give your target audience testimonials or reviews of your brand. For example, if a potential customer is looking for a social media automation tool and sees this testimony from a customer, they will likely engage the brand.
Source: Bulkly
When they view proof from other customers with similar needs and solve them with your business products or services, they would like to get the same results. That will drive them to get to know your brand well and even convert into customers. You can feature the reviews or testimonials in the social media posts you create and keep building relationships with potential customers.
Share valuable content
Engage readers by commending content, shares, and mentions. Hear their feedback and act on it. Don’t just share content, ensure it delivers actionable tips and shows the value you can deliver to solve their pain points.
Have buyer personas for your target audience on social media. It will guide you to get clear insights on your customer’s pain points so you know the best content to engage the leads with and drive them to your brand.
Create different content across the buyer journey as your target audience is not on the same level in the sales funnel. Then optimize the content with the keywords the target audience uses in their search to make it easy to discover your content and engage it.
Remember your target audience is always on the search to find solutions to their pain points. When they see the content and the results it delivers, they will engage the company more in a bid to know the products or services they offer to solve challenges.
It is also important to publish content on social media platforms when your target readers are active to increase engagement chances. Use visuals and video content to connect and engage more. In addition, ensure you have a highly optimized social media profile for your brand on the different social media channels. Here is an example of Hubspot
Source: Linkedin
If for instance a lead was looking for a CRM tool to scale their business and happens to come across this profile page, they will be intrigued and want to know about the business.
Integrate CRM with social media platforms
You want to collect information about your leads and focus on the attributes that are performing and know what to focus on to get leads to engage and start nurturing them.
Here are the results of Ollie of Air Atomic with integration CRM for leads sourcing:
We integrate our CRM with various social platforms. This integration feeds key attributes back, enabling us to determine the actual cost per customer for each social campaign. Consequently, our focus shifts to identifying which social channels deliver the most cost-effective customers, rather than just the leads. Adopting this dual strategy has resulted in a 46% reduction in our cost per customer across all social media activities.
With the data from the CRM, you can position your brand to be the answer to your target customer’s pain points.
Use Lead Magnets
You can get your target customer details and start nurturing them as you prepare to convert them into customers. Lead magnets are an effective way to get target readers to engage with your brand and get their contact details.
Give your target audience content like case studies, eBooks, or white papers that give them value and show them how to solve their challenges. Once you get the details you can start the nurturing process using email marketing. See the results Abhishek got and the leads they generated with lead magnets.
We offer valuable resources such as eBooks, whitepapers, and webinars. Our landing pages are optimized for conversion, resulting in a 15% increase in lead capture from social media traffic.
In terms of quantifiable data, here are some specific numbers that highlight the effectiveness of our social media strategies over the last 12 months:
LinkedIn: Inbound leads increased by 40%, with a 25% rise in conversions.
Twitter: Follower count grew by 25%, contributing to a 30% increase in leads.
Instagram: Lead generation saw a 20% boost through engaging visual content.
These numbers underscore our commitment to using social media as a powerful lead-generation tool. We firmly believe in the value of sharing concrete results, and we are dedicated to providing you with a thorough and accurate representation of our experiences. ( Abhishek, https://testlify.com/ )
Wrapping up
It’s crucial to recognize that not all social media platforms apply to every business. Maximize on the social platforms where your target audience mostly hangs out and engages them.
Use the different ways and strategies to drive leads, engage them, and nurture them through the buyer stages. Craft your business profiles on the selected platforms, and maintain uniform branding elements such as profile images, cover visuals, and descriptions. Use customer feedback and deliver experiences that match their needs and show them the value your brand will deliver to solve their challenges.