Paid or organic reach?
This simply means whether you’re going to use paid advertising or hope that your audience will find you on their own. This will naturally have an effect on the amount of leads you generate from your channels. Paid search will allow you to increase your reach, but if you’re not clear on what you want from your customers when they find you, you could be throwing money down the drain.
Organic reach is free, but you need to know how to play the game. You know what they say; if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. Often, social media platforms will have algorithms in place that will promote your posts to people’s feeds, but you need to know how to get yourself in the best possible position. This is often through engagement on other accounts. Organic reach requires you to put in the work to get the results you want.
With millions of active business pages on Facebook, it’s easy to see why companies choose to advertise their services on there. The platform has one of the lowest CPC (cost-per-click) rates, making it one of the cheaper platforms to implement your paid strategy.
In addition to paid promotion (you’ll need to get on Facebook Ads Manager to access this), the most common methods of attracting leads on your Facebook account are on-page and off-page promotion. You’ll have likely come across the on-page promotion the most – where businesses set up their own business page and post relevant content on there; your leads will likely be anyone who likes your page or engages with your content. With the introduction of Facebook shopping, it’s never been easier to direct people where you need them to go.
Off-page is a little more behind the scenes; engaging with groups, communities and other pages.
When it comes to generating B2B leads, LinkedIn’s the hot spot. With a large proportion of users accessing the platform on a daily basis, it’s the place to be seen whether paid or organic.
Particularly on LinkedIn, you can use segmentation to target leads very specifically – by profession, function, industry etc. In terms of your organic reach, this is where you need to be strategic. If you’re seen to be engaging with others, your profile will more likely be boosted to their feeds when you post; you get out what you put in.
Twitter has been one of the most popular lead generation tools in social media marketing. According to research by the CMI, it’s the preferred tool of 95% of UK marketers. It’s easy to use a combination of paid and organic search on Twitter; the infamous hashtag makes it easy to make yourself discoverable without spending a penny.
Instagram and Pinterest
Particularly if you’re a very visual business, Instagram and Pinterest are the obvious choices to try and up your lead numbers.
You should always be including a solid call to action in your content, no matter the platform. However, with Instagram you can add clickable buttons to help you. Once you have a certain number of followers, you can add the swipe up function to your stories; a clever tool that can drive people to your website on an impulse. This can often be more effective than a link in your bio.
Before diving into any of these platforms, a solid strategy identifying where your customers are isn’t a bad shout. If you know they don’t tend to congregate on Instagram but spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, then it’s only sensible to focus your effort (and budget) where it will be most effective.
This is where Bobble Digital can help you. If you have the products and services, but no idea where to start, we can design a strategy to help you get the results you want. For more information, please contact us today.