Effective Lead Generation Techniques – #SocialMediaMarketing

Even though the internet has been around since a decade or two, the concept of digital marketing has picked up its pace only in the last 5 to 6 years. But such has been its impact that for most businesses, it is the most important medium of advertising and picking up new customers today. From social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram to personalised blogs which earn through Google AdSense, the new age marketers, better known as the digital marketers have not left a single platform out of their grasp for the purpose of marketing. The dimensions associated with marketing have changed in every possible way with digitisation and the businesses have adopted to it quite nicely, realising how important a medium of marketing the internet has gone on to become.

What is a lead?

The exact task or purpose of digital marketing is generating leads through different platforms and websites. A lead can be defined as an individual person or an organisation which is interested in your product. The way that these organisations or individuals show their interest is through sharing their personal details, mostly their phone number or email address so that they can be contacted by the particular brand. The more the number of leads generated translates to a larger number of customers for a brand. With digital marketing, the speed of gaining leads has increased exponentially, but so has the complexities and skills required in the art of marketing. A business now requires a full-fledged website which has absolutely every details about its product. And for the purpose of marketing, the website must also have a landing page, which is a special page on a website having all the important details about the business and its products, plus a box in which a person can fill his/her personal details and get transformed into an actual lead.

Various Platforms and Techniques for Lead Generation

There are a lot of platforms on the internet with which leads can be generated. From video streaming platforms to conventional social media sites to image sharing websites, each and every platform requires different techniques in terms of lead generation. Let us analyze some of the biggest platforms and the lead generation techniques for each one of them-

Facebook- It is by far the biggest social media platforms that there is. Facebook currently has more than 2.4 billion active users from all around the world, and it is designed in such a way that it accommodates even the most intricate and smallest of interests. For digital marketers, it is a heaven. The businesses use the Facebook ads feature for marketing their businesses. Before the whole privacy issue, Facebook provided a feature wherein you can upload your email list and use the third party features to easily find people of similar interests which can easily be targeted. Bur now it is not possible. But even after this, Facebook is the biggest market for businesses to digitally market themselves as it has the biggest audience. A digital marketer only needs to spend more time to refine their search to find more people of similar interests. Facebook marketing is quite similar to Instagram's, which is down to the fact that the owner of Instagram is Facebook.

LinkedIn- A strict B2B (business to business) platform, this is where all the professionals related to different fields socialize while building their professional connections. When a person signs up on LinkedIn, he or she has to enter a lot of details to complete their profile. These details mostly concern things of professional importance such as job titles, qualification and other details related to businesses. While Facebook relied on third parties for these details, LinkedIn is different in this regard. It already asks these things when you make a profile and while using LinkedIn ads, all one needs to do is choose the interests. That will display your ad to the people who are interested in that particular thing. It has almost 500 million active users, and almost all of them are business professionals which again gives a big opportunity for making some good leads.

Quora- It is probably one of the least used platforms to build leads with. Quora is a platform where people ask questions and a person whose interests match with the questions answers it or/and reads the answers. The questions can be from any topic, from sports to philosophy to ghost hunting. Basically anything, however big or small, or however unimportant, it is listed as a topic in Quora which if you are interested in, can follow and see questions and answers to them. As can be deduced from the above explanation, Quora is a platform based on topics and interests, a digital marketer can use its ads to easily showcase their product or service to the target audience and generate leads. An intelligent digital marketer can even use the answers to market their product by using the link of their product anytime and every time they answer a question related to the topic concerned with their business.

Conclusion- To conclude, it is important that before marketing on any single platform, a person knows what kind of an audience the business needs to market to. A lot depends on this. For example, if you are the owner of a newly opened restaurant, the best platforms where you can market your business is Instagram and Facebook, because a restaurant needs more and more people to know about it, and these two platforms offer quite a large number of audience. If you provide a product or a service which can be useful to professional businesses, then platforms like LinkedIn are the ones which will suit you to get you leads. As said before, LinkedIn is a B2B platform, so it'll be a better choice for you to market your product on LinkedIn if it's meant for professional businessmen. Platforms such as YouTube and Quora can be easily manipulated to display your brand's ads to only those people who have a particular interest in those fields which concern your product and field. As a digital marketer, one must also know how to refine the audiences so that the ads are displayed to only those people who can be converted into leads.