3 Important Elements of a Facebook & Twitter Lead Gen Campaign

Facebook and Twitter have become invaluable resources, particularly for the sales profession.

Never before have businesses had such unfettered access to potential customers and leads. The question is, how do you find them? How do you use the incredible power of platforms like Facebook and Twitter to run a successful lead gen campaign?

We sat down with Mike Beck, head of Growth & Marketing at Earthclassmail.com, and talked about the three most important elements of a successful Facebook or Twitter lead gen campaign.

1) Understand Your Audience

This one should seem obvious. You can't generate leads if you don't know who your audience is.

Facebook & Twitter both target interests, and that's a good thing for you. Want to target individuals who use MailChimp? Their list of Twitter followers would be a simple place to start.

The catch is this: how do you move past simply finding an audience that is interested in what you're about, and find those who are ready to convert?

You're going to have to spend some money to figure it out. You'll have to use trial and error.

Collect enough data to make a good decision for your business, and look past the click-through rate and cost-per-click. Dive deeper. Facebook & Twitter are extremely helpful in generating leads for your product (if you have your audience nailed down.)

2) Nail your Messaging

Here's the thing about messaging: It's completely unique to each business and their audience. There is no "one-size-fits-all" approach.

People have made a lot of money writing books, articles, and blogs on "best practices." There's nothing wrong with best practices, but they're not the end-all, be-all. Start with best practices, but make sure you're not married to them.

Time and time again, best practices end up losing out to variations and new ways of doing things. (Click to tweet)

Start with CPC & PPC and use those as your baseline. Build your foundation on them, but don't make them the things that you bank your entire campaign on.

Remember this about social media ads: they grow stale much faster than traditional CPC & PPC advertising. They're image-driven and display-focused, so it's critical that you rotate images. Otherwise they hang around, and people end up losing interest.

3) The Landing Page

You understand your audience, and you've nailed your message. Now when you get the lead, you've got to make sure that your site delivers the message you want.

If you're using creative imagery in your ads (optimizing Facebook & Twitter), make sure your site reflects that. So many companies are running elaborate ad campaigns on Twitter and Facebook. They're immersive, visually impressive, and they lead to a bland, unresponsive, boring landing page. This leads to lost leads and clients that don't get the experience they came for.

Finally, if you want volume, you need to make the path to get there as short as possible. It's important to remove as many barriers as possible. If you're using form fields, instead of collecting first name, last name, address, email, phone number, etc, try and do with just an email address. Make it easy.

Conclusion

There's plenty of business to be done on Facebook and Twitter. With hundreds of millions of users, it should be obvious why a lead gen campaign can be beneficial. The customers are there, you just have to know where to get them, and how to keep them.

This post is based on an interview with Mike Beck from Earth Class Mail. You can find this interview, and many more, by subscribing to the B2B Growth Show on iTunes.