How to Generate More Leads from Social Media
Watching your Facebook and Twitter posts explode with comments and shares is a beautiful sight to behold. However, you can’t judge your social media marketing success by the number of likes and shares you get. The majority of social media interactions won’t translate to leads and sales unless you employ a strategy specifically designed to capture leads and generate sales.
Tired of getting engagement that doesn’t result in leads or sales? Stop posting content that triggers casual conversations and start posting links to content on your website. By posting links to content on your website with minimal commentary, people will have a reason to visit your website.
Once a user visits your website, that’s where you’ll generate leads and conversions. However, first you need to get people to click on your links. What’s the secret to getting people to click on your links? Specific, targeted titles.
Titles Tell People “This article is written for me”
Regardless of where you post links to your content, marketing is about getting people to see that your product or service is designed for them. With content marketing, you accomplish this through your titles.
When your goal is to get social media users to click on your links, you need to capture their interest. That’s not as easy as it seems. Shocking titles generate clicks, but the content doesn’t always deliver and people bounce fast.
To generate legitimately interested potential customers, your titles must speak directly to your target market. This will be a given if your content is written by a professional copywriter or content writer. Although, if you’re writing your own content, it’s crucial to spend time perfecting your titles.
Titles Should Be Targeted
Certain industries tend to publish content with repetitive, boring titles. For example, insurance companies frequently publish articles with generic titles offering generic advice for choosing the right policy. When users see general titles they’ve seen many times before, they’re less likely to click.
When article titles are aimed at a niche segment of your target market, you’ll get more clicks. For instance, this article titled “Life Insurance With Diabetes Type 2, What is the Best Coverage?” speaks directly to people with a specific health condition. This is important because people with diabetes are considered high risk and often struggle to find a life insurance policy. People with diabetes will likely ignore generic articles because general advice doesn’t apply to them.
What micro-niches can you identify within your market? What are their specific struggles? Identify as many micro-niches as you possibly can and start writing articles specifically for those people. If you’re running PPC ads, set up a separate campaign for each niche and apply the same strategy to your titles.
Article Titles Shape A Reader’s Experience
Crafting effective sales copy doesn’t begin with the first paragraph of your content – it begins with your title. Your titles set the tone for how your readers will experience your article, what information will stand out the most, and how they’ll remember those details.
The New Yorker published an article explaining an eye-opening experiment that proves the powerful influence titles have on readers. The article explains how Ullrich Ecker, psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist from the University of Western Australia, demonstrated that slightly misleading headlines affect the way readers interpret what they read.
In the experiment, factual articles with misleading titles “hurt a reader’s ability to recall the article’s details.” Readers mostly remembered the details that were in line with the headline. Details that weren’t part of the headline were harder to remember.
On the other hand, opinionated articles with misleading headlines “impaired a reader’s ability to make accurate inferences.” When asked to predict future potentials based on the article, readers made inferences unwarranted by the evidence in the article due to the misleading headline.
What Does This Mean For Marketing On Social Media?
Although some platforms do support direct sales (like Instagram and Facebook), social media marketing isn’t really marketing – it’s a form of lead generation. Your main objective should be to get people off social media and onto your website.
You might think daily posts are only good for interacting with fans while PPC ads are better for generating leads and sales. However, you can use your daily posts to drive visitors to your website by posting links to your content.
The key is to create interesting, useful content and craft specific titles that your market finds irresistible. Since your titles are the first thing people see when links are posted to social media, powerful titles can generate just as much traffic as your PPC ads.
