What do you use social media for? To garner engagement or build clout around your social media presence that you can later harness to maximize your revenue.
You want your social media efforts to yield tangible results.
Merely 22% of the businesses surveyed in a research were satisfied with their conversion rates. Why? Because many businesses use social media, an important lead conversion tool, just to drive brand awareness.
Your social media strategy leads to noticeable results once you stop using it as a top-of-the-funnel strategy and begin to leverage its potential to convert followers into customers.
So, to ensure that your social media marketing contributes to your business’s revenue, you must generate and convert social leads.
In this article, we are discussing 8 top strategies you can use to convert your social media followers into leads and customers.
Let’s dive in!
What is Lead Conversion?
The process of converting a lead into a customer is called lead conversion.
A lead is a person who has shown interest in your brand by providing you with some information. In some cases, the information they offer you may also be referred to as lead.
As a marketer, you have to use this information to nurture the lead and warm them up to the brand until they are ready to buy what you are selling.
For example, you are a SaaS company, and a social media follower has filled up one of your social media lead ad forms. Now, you have the information of this person or the lead, and it is your job to target the user with personalized messages and discounts until they are out with their wallets.
59% of marketers believe social media marketing is an excellent tool for improving lead quality. Do you know why that is? Because social media gives you a lot of opportunities to interact with your audience in a carefree, humanized way. It gives you tools to target your followers with personalized messages and data to craft these messages.
Let’s go ahead and see how you can use social media and all that it offers to convert leads into customers.
How to convert social leads
Converting social media leads is critical for you to prove that your social efforts were worth something in money.
But if you are struggling with social media customer acquisition, here are a few strategies that will help you convert your social leads:
Optimize social media content
Social media optimization requires you to do two critical things:
1- you have to optimize your content according to the platform you are using. You won’t upload a graphics-based content piece on LinkedIn instead of Instagram, would you?
Content is the key to conversion. If your content fails to deliver your message or does not align with the specific platforms, you will have trouble converting followers.
Each social media platform is unique, with users active on them for different reasons. A person is scrolling on Instagram to pass time, on Pinterest to gain inspiration, and on LinkedIn to look for career-related opportunities or information.
Therefore, make sure that the content you create resonates with the audience of the platform you use.
For example, 82% of marketers agree that Facebook is a great platform to generate leads. And if you happen to be among these marketers, then know that links are the most used type of content on Facebook, with 44.2% branded content based on links.
So, you may want to use links to your website on Facebook. But on Twitter, for example, you’ll have to post recurrent content because people use this platform to stay up-to-date with the latest news.
Do you see how brands are using Social media to drive leads on their website where they can convert them?
But, before you start posting links on your Social media, read the second important step:
2- You have to shape your content so that it attracts people and compels them to click.
Around 36% of people use social media to kill time. No one will willingly check out your website. You have to entice them with compelling captions, eye-catching graphics and lure them in to click on the link.
Never share a link without a caption. And never write a boring caption.
The first step to social media lead acquisition is to get your followers on your website, and for that, you have to pair a link to your website with an enticing caption to make the users click through.
Mix up your social feed
The last strategy is not your cue to start posting all your website links on your social handles and turn your feed into a commercial.
If you do that, people will simply ignore your presence.
And for lead conversion, you want your presence to be known.
So, keep your audience engaged so that they notice your social presence, interact with it and are more likely to convert.
Normally, people want their social media feed to be interesting. And if you want your user’s attention, you have to post engaging, valuable, and exciting content to keep your users hooked. Once that happens, your users will be more likely to click through when you post a link.
There are many ways you can keep your social users engaged.
Memes, for example, are the easiest and the surest way to deliver an exciting piece of content and garner engagement.
Check out the number of likes on that post!
Millennials look at 20-30 memes every day, and that’s understandable. Memes are so fun! That’s probably why they have ten times higher reach and 60% higher engagement.
You can create branded memes and share them on your social to have a good balance between promotional and engaging content.
If you are still unsure about meme marketing, check out this case study by Dash Hudson, where they analyzed Meme content and regular content of Chipotle, an American restaurant.
Check out how there feed is a nice mix of memes and other types of content:
Dash Hudson divided Chipotle’s Instagram content, which has a good mix of memes, into two groups comprising memes and regular content.
Then, they studied their engagement rates. And the results were astounding.
Memes had an average engagement of 3.47%, while regular content had that of 1.80%. This means memes had 48% higher engagement than regular content.
So, if your brand personality permits, incorporate memes in your social content to keep your audience engaged. With today’s social algorithm, engagement drives visibility which is the door to lead conversion.
Optimize your social profiles
Now that we have learned the strategies for lead acquisition let’s talk about lead conversion.
There are many minor and major details that need attention when it comes to increasing social media lead conversion.
One such detail is your social profile.
Your profile is the window to your website, where conversion happens. So you have to make sure it provides everything that a user needs for a smooth conversion from a follower into a lead and then to a customer.
Your profile should be up-to-date with all your contact information so that the users can find you easily. All your social profiles and website must be linked properly so people can jump from platform to platform.
Mail Chimp does this perfectly:
You should have a clear CTA that tells the people what to do once they have engaged with your post
Most importantly, all your social profiles should be consistent with the brand because consistently presenting a brand can increase revenue by 23%. And it is this revenue that we are after, no?
Your Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, Pinterest, and website should all be based on the same color palette because colors can play a critical role in website conversions.
Check out how GoPro has mastered consistent branding:
Optimize your landing page
Social media landing page optimization is the key strategy for enhancing lead conversions because the the landing page is the first thing your social followers come across when they click on your link.
And you have worked super hard to get your followers to click. You don’t want to disappoint them now, do you?
Make sure that the landing page is everything that the user expects. For example, if the traffic source features a product, the landing page should feature all the information that a user might need about that product.
Check out how Xbox has perfectly aligned their social posts to their website content:
Given that 99% of social media users are online with their mobiles, you have to make sure that your landing page is mobile-optimized so that the user doesn’t bounce and converts.
Do you know that 80% of a mobile visitors’ attention is focused on the top of the page? That means you have to come up with a catchy headline that delivers your USP.
Since the attention span is dropping, people don’t have time to understand confusing things. Make sure your landing page is not confusing by filtering out the noise and featuring only one offer per landing page. This might prove profitable for your lead conversion strategy since putting multiple offers on your landing page can reduce conversions by 266%.
Talking about dropping conversion rates, a bulk of offers are not the only factors that can chip away at your conversions. Your conversion rate drops by 4.42% for every second that your landing page takes to load.
Use accelerated mobile pages (AMPs) to optimize your page load time and ensure you don’t lose leads on the threshold.
Nature Air, a Costa Rican airline, performed landing page optimization by adjusting the position of their CTA to make it more prominent.
As a result, their conversion rate jumped up by a whopping 591%
Perform A/B testing to find out which position of the CTA converts better and continue optimizing from there.
Leverage video content
Have you ever watched videos on Facebook Watch? Have you noticed how addictive they are? Of course, you have.
Social videos are more engaging than other types of media. According to Statista, almost half of Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat users spend time on these platforms watching videos. And since videos impart information more effectively, they make for excellent media for driving lead conversions.
There are many ways you can incorporate videos into your social content strategy. You can create explainer videos or product videos and satisfy your customers since 72% of customers prefer learning about products or services from videos.
You can take your users behind the scenes with fun office videos. The ideas are countless.
Social media video ads can be promising in driving lead conversions because, one, they are targeted at the right audience, and two, they are short and compelling. They can stop the users from swiping next or scrolling down.
KitKat Australia leveraged Facebook video ads to drive brand awareness and sales under the campaign “Fill Your Break with Wonder” during Christmas.
The video add featured eye-catching colors, that complemented their Christmas-y theme and was short, sweet, and compelling. Exactly how a social video should be.
That is why this campaign contributed to a third of KitKat’s yearly sales the year it ran and led to a 3x increase in KitKat’s online sales.
Build upon user-generated content (UGC)
The conversion rate of prospects who come across UGC is 161% higher than those who don’t come across UGC. Moreover, customers are 2.4% more likely to view UGC as more authentic than brand-created content.
The reason why UGC is so profitable is that it provides social proof. Moreover, it leverages human’s inherent herd mentality and compels them to act like everyone else.
But most importantly, UGC builds trust.
And the best thing is, including UGC in your content strategy can help you create more social content with less effort, as your followers will supply the content, and all you will have to do is use it.
Post user reviews on your social media to build trust. Ask your users to share the pictures of your products in use or your services in action under a branded hashtag.
Doing all of this requires minimal effort but packs a powerful punch in terms of lead conversions.
You must remember the famous “Share a Coke” campaign, right? Coke created bottles and cans with names printed on them and asked the users to share the picture of their Coke bottle with a branded hashtag #ShareaCoke.
I could never find my name written on any of the Coke bottles, but coke did generate exceptional results from this social campaign when it led to a 2% increase in US sales, which is significant when their revenue was dropping.
Learn from customer behavior and personalize your content
91% of customers are more likely to shop from a brand that offers a personalized experience. That means closely following what your users would like to see and then incorporating that in your content can help with lead conversion.
Perform thorough audience analysis to find out about your audience’s interests. You can even conduct short surveys and ask the audience directly about the type of content they would like to see.
In a world where social media is extremely overcrowded, personalized content helps filter out the noise and prevents your users from information overload.
Track your audience’ behavior and implement automated follow up.
For example, if you notice that a person has checked out the “Denim” section of your clothing website, be sure to target them with ads offering discounts on Denims.
Cadbury won the personalized social media marketing game when they created highly personalized videos for the people who signed up for the campaign and shared their data with them.
These personalized videos received high engagement rates, had a 65% CTR and a 33% conversion, where almost a third of people who watched the video filled out a promotional form.
Track your social media performance
We have discussed all the strategies for increasing lead conversions. But you have to perform routine social media analysis to find out whether they are working or not.
Determine KPIs according to your social goals, which in this case is conversion so you might want to track CTR on link, bounce rates, MQL to SQL ratio etc.
87% marketers struggle with tracking their social media ROI. You can be from among the remaining 13% if you use the right social tools, paired with the correct measurement metrics.
Use UTM parameters to have a better view over which social media campaign is working and which one needs optimization.
Finally, track the performance of each of your social content, to see which type of content resonates the most with your audience.
Conclusion
Your social media efforts will turn profitable the day you start converting social leads into customers.
The good thing is, social media is an excellent tool for lead conversion. You just have to learn to harness its potential and use it to drive conversions.
Start by linking your website with your social handles and pair it up with enticing content that compels people to click.
Create personalized social content that resonates with your audience.
Once you have people on your website, optimize the landing page with conversions in mind.
Finally, don’t forget to track your social media efforts using the right analytics tools.
Implementing all these strategies, and optimizing them regularly will have you on your way towards increased conversions in no time!
