How to generate leads with social media

There are certainly plenty of people to talk to on social media about your business but the real question is how to generate leads with social media that are targeted leads. In this post I break down not only how to generate leads with social media but also generate targeted leads.

Generating targeted leads starts with knowing your target market

Unfortunately most people think that how to generate leads with social media starts with blasting their opportunity links every chance they get. They have the mindset that targeted leads will just come to them if they get enough traffic to their site.

In reality this couldn’t be further from the truth. Ouch right? Well to get targeted leads you can’t be marketing to everyone you meet and hope that they sign up and buy from you.

The best way how to generate leads with social media starts by defining your target market. Marketing to everyone is really marketing to no one.

Trying to pitch your business to everything with a pulse might sound great, but you’ll end up wasting most of your time on people who really don’t have much interest in your offer. In fact, doing so will also push a majority of the people who timing isn’t right for away from you.

Understand that your ideal target market is going to be people who have a problem, need, want, or goal that your business or product can provide a solution to. Knowing that as the foundation can help you generate targeted leads for your business who are actually interested in what you have.

How to generate leads with social media? Speak to your target market

Again trying to convince those who aren’t interested or open to what you do and offer is just a waste of time for everyone. Would you rather have a targeted lead that is ready to buy and asking you for more information, or desperately try and convince someone they need your product or business?

Obviously you’d rather have fish jumping into the boat, than trying to hunt people down. Attracting people to you is a whole lot more fun, and the leads you generate will be a much higher quality.

Speaking to your target market starts with knowing your target markets needs, wants, pain, and goals. For example let’s say you market weight loss.

You probably know that someone struggling to lose weight has tried plan after plan with little results. Or maybe they have tried going to the gym, but their busy life just doesn’t allow them time to spend hours working out everyday.

In this scenario you could get a very targeted lead by speaking to that problem, and create content based around a simple weight loss plan without spending hours in the gym.

Want more targeted leads? Know where your target market hangs out

As the old saying goes, “Stop fishing in the wrong pond.” Another mistake that most people make with generating leads with social media, is that they are putting their content and offers in a place their target market doesn’t hang out at.

If you are trying to reach business owners, where do business owners hang out? Maybe pages on personal development, leadership, marketing, other business leaders, etc.

When you know where your target market hangs out, and you place your valuable content there that solves their problems, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll start generating targeted leads for your business.

An example of how to get more leads with an effective lead magnet

One of the best ways to generate leads through social media is with an effective lead magnet.  For example, maybe you’re trying to generate real estate leads.

In this case, think of your target market and what are their primary struggles. From there build a lead magnet around it.  If you’re not familiar with a lead magnet, basically it’s something of value you give away for free in exchange for a name email and phone number.

In this real estate leads example, you might create a video course on the top 5 things you need to know before you buy your first home. As a real estate agent trying to sell more homes, having a list of people interested in buying their first home is great place to start.

Another example might be if you were in insurance sales.  You could create an ebook on 5 things to get maximum coverage at the lowest price.  A list of people looking to save on insurance is a very targeted lead.

When you understand your target market’s pain points, needs, and wants, it makes it simple to create lead magnets. Using this marketing strategy you’ll be able to generate leads through social media.

One of the things I specialize in is teaching people how to grow their business through Instagram.  So in conjunction with that, a lead magnet I created is teaching people how I generate leads through Instagram.  This shares how I built a following over 22,000 people and how to get leads with Instagram.

If you’d like to get that Instagram marketing training for free click here.

3 Foundations for generating leads with social media

There are 3 key foundations for how to generate leads with social media and they are to build your following, engage your following, and then sell to your following. If no one is seeing your valuable content you’re not going to get many targeted leads.

There are many platforms and ways to build your following, some great started points are Facebook friends, a Facebook group, Twitter followers, Instagram followers, an email list etc.

Social media followers are definitely a great place to start because in most cases it’s free to start building and if you are “fishing in the right ponds” they can be very targeted leads.

Focus on building your email list of targeted leads

For the long term, one of the best leads to generate on social media are those that join your email list. A major reason for this is that you own it.

Social media platforms are great, but they can be here today and gone tomorrow. Remember My Space? Depending on how old you are, you might not.

How valuable would a hundreds of My Space followers be today? Probably not worth much if anything. Hundreds or thousands of email leads though are of incredible value.

Certainly email open rates aren’t what they used to be, but regardless of that imagine sending out one email message that goes to 10,000 people. If only 100 people opened that email, and 10 bought, well that’s still 10 sales from writing a single email.

It’s important to build your list with something you own. When you own it, that gives you the ability to continue to market to that list.

If you’d like to set up your own email autoresponder to start building your own email list, check out Aweber. I’ve been using it for years and it is a very low cost email autoresponder you can use if you are just getting started. You can actually get your first 30 days of Aweber for free through this link! 

After you have started building your list you want to start engaging them

The next step in the process of generating highly targeted leads through social media is to engage your audience.  You can do this in a variety of ways. As a start, I highly recommend implementing some form of video marketing.

Video marketing is one of the best ways to build trust, rapport, and credibility with your audience.  They get to see you as a real person, hear your voice, and see your mannerisms, and get a taste of your personality.

People want to do business with people not just faceless companies.  Always keep that in mind as you’re creating content and building your audience.  For this reason, engaging your audience is a very important step building your online business.

Since you’re building your email list you want to send out your value-based content to them. Do this on a regular basis to keep engagement up.

Not everyone that joins your list will be ready to buy it immediately. However, as you engage them on a continual basis some will be ready to buy eventually. When you send them content on a regular basis they will come to you vs someone else. 

Another powerful reason of having an email list, is that you can remark it to people on an ongoing basis.  This can help you develop a relationship with them, which can lead to more sales and sign ups for your business. They will join your team, hire you as a coach, or whatever it is you market when timing is right.

Finally focus on selling to your audience as a way how to get targeted leads on social media

The final step is actually selling to your audience. Unfortunately most people focus on selling alone, and that is why they continue to struggle.

Most people neglect the 80-20 rule while building their business on social media.  If you are wondering how to get targeted leads for your business, you need to lead with 80% value and only 20% selling.

People love to buy, but they hate being sold.  This is why you need to focus on value first to get the best results.  Social media is exactly like it sounds, social.

People don’t come to social media to be sold to buy a product.  It’s more about building relationships. Just because you’re marketing online, doesn’t mean you can’t develop relationships with your audience.

This is why selling needs to be a footnote on the process of how to get leads through social media. Do this instead of making it the main focus. Again when you focus on sales last, you actually make more sales than you would being in pitch mode.

Some other tools you want to get targeted leads on social media

You definitely want an email autoresponder to start generating leads for your business on social media. However, you’ll also want a couple more tools as well.

If you’re just starting out and haven’t implemented using sales funnels in your business, you should. It’s a powerful tool to not only get leads through social media, but also increase sales.

Having sales funnels in place can help you automate lead generation, as well as some of the sales process. Most people tend to struggle with how to get leads on social media, because they spend too much time with the wrong people.

Trying to convince people that aren’t interested, and that aren’t in your target market will only cause frustration and lack of sales.  Having a proper sales funnel system can eliminate that headache in your business.

You’ll also want step by step system place to generate leads that works in conjunction with your sales funnels.  If you’d like to learn more about setting up a lead generation system like that, be sure to check out my free lead generation boot camp here.

Also if you’re new to sales funnels, you may want to check out Clickfunnels as a way to set up some sales funnels for you. You can actually get a free 14-day trial of Clickfunnels here.

How to generate leads with social media can be simple. Focus on your target market and leading with value. Implement the strategies listed above and you will start generated targeted leads for your business in no time.

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Mike MacDonald

Facebook: facebook.com/coachmikemacdonald

Email: [email protected]

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P.S. If you aren’t generating leads for your business it’s because you don’t have a system in place to do it. CLICK HERE to set up the exact system I use to Rake In Quality Targeted Leads Daily

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