8 Mistakes That Destroy Your Social Media Lead Generation (And How To Fix Them)

Social media lead generation is extremely popular with marketers. Identifying, attracting and keeping the target audience interested is the key goal of every business person, so it is only natural to pursue the strategies that bring you the biggest percentage of an audience or customer database.

But, while social media is a great tool, it is definitely not a simple one to use.

The 2015 Software Marketing Industry Report from SIIA has reported that 96% of marketers who use social media for lead generation are constantly struggling with getting revenue in return for their efforts.

They also reported that only 46% of the 100 marketing executives being surveyed believe in the powers of social media-based campaigns.

When you join our digital marketing course, we’ll show you how to get your marketing executives to have more confidence in social media promotional campaigns and also drill you on how to achieve maximum returns on investment.

Have you joined the class? Not yet? Click here to join now.

Now that you’ve done that,

Let’s continue…

You see, the decisions you make and the steps you take will determine your strategy’s success.

To avoid mistakes from happening and improve your odds, we have curated here from our experience and expertise, the 10 most common social media lead generation mistakes that you’re making and how you can fix them.  

Mistake #1: Not Knowing Your Audience

You’d have to be the luckiest person in the world for your strategy to succeed right away without aiming it toward the audience. A marketer must know who to attract to know how to attract them.

If you don’t know what your target customers are interested in, you can hardly guess the best way to sell your products or services.

Fortunately for you, our digital marketing course is structured to expose you to the details and intricacies of lead and customer targeting that would effectively give you an understanding of your audience, their pain points (their needs) and how your offering can service those needs.

It’s why our students excel at social media marketing, reaching more qualified leads and engaging only those that matter.

Click here to join the class and learn these tips.

[bctt tweet=”Knowing your audience also means knowing where they hang out and when. Is your target audience getting information from Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook? Should you be aiming your strategy towards Instagram, too, or stick to Facebook only?” username=”dmsinstitute”]

Finding the answers to such questions will help you create the right content and use the right keywords, choose the right multimedia strategies, etc.

Mistake #2: Not Communicating With Them

Defining the audience and aiming your strategy towards the social media platforms they use won’t suffice. As soon as you have defined the audience, you need to start communicating with them.

Your audience will want to get in touch with you, and the sooner and better you answer, the higher are the odds that they will become customers.

How do you reach the audience? You don’t have to wait for them to start a conversation with you and chats and emails also aren’t the only ways to communicate with the target audience (if you have any).

Instead, you should post quality content on the social media channels you have targeted on a regular basis.

You can also answer queries, conduct Q&As, do surveys, conduct Twitter or Instagram challenges with giveaways, and many more.

As our digital marketing course training facilitators always say, this is, by far, one of the many awesome ways that you can interact with your leads. But then, it doesn’t end there.

There are still a lot of social media lead generation skills and tricks that you need to acquire when it comes to lead nurturing through communications and these are taught in details in our digital marketing course.

You can click here to start your learning journey.

[bctt tweet=”Great content will engage the audience and entice them to communicate with you. If your content does not result in engagement, you are probably doing something wrong.” username=”dmsinstitute”]

So, make some changes…

Add open-ended questions to the end of your posts and try to connect with the audience through your content.

Mistake #3: Not Targeting The Actual Buyers

Not everyone who likes your Facebook page or follows you on Instagram is a buyer.

Lead generation doesn’t always work in the same way – some people won’t buy from you even though they showed interest in your social media platforms – ever!

Don’t get your hopes up without evaluating everything first.

Just because a person commented or liked something you posted on social media doesn’t mean that they will make or want to make a purchase.

You should do your own internal analysis of your leads and customers to create your business’ expectation of the actions that would qualify a lead as being profitable to your business.

This is what it means to target the right leads. This involves researching possible leads that your offering would be most suited for and then segment them according to their interests and other demographic metrics.

This concept of customer targeting is covered in details in our digital marketing course, where we teach our students to create customer personas for their leads in relation to their buyer’s journey.

This would do a lot of tremendous value to your marketing efforts…

…because let’s face it, if you’re not targeting the right people for your social media marketing efforts, then the results would be dismal.

You can click here to join our digital marketing course, where these mistakes are resolved in details.

[bctt tweet=”‘’Your primary objective is probably to make sales or widen the audience, but you must understand that social media is not really a platform for selling. Once you start using it as a tool for lead generation instead of a selling platform, you can create a successful strategy.’’ – says Sandra Roberts, a marketing expert.” username=”dmsinstitute”]

Mistake #4: Not Using a Blog to Generate Leads

Currently, the leading way to bring generate leads is through content marketing, and this is solely the responsibility of your company’s blog.

Sadly, most marketers are not fully aware of the advantages of blogging as a lead generator. It’s either that or said blogs are not updated consistently with relevant content, do not have calls-to-action (CTA) or present the reader with ways of keeping in touch.

Aside from capturing new readers, blogs are also a perfect avenue for converting traffic into leads. Every written post is a fresh opportunity to bring in new leads on board.

Running the numbers with mid-tier company averages, you should be able to get about a hundred views a month with a 2% conversion rate.

Write consistently for a year, and that’s about 700+ loyal customers on board.

Blogs are an easy, cheap and convenient way to generate leads, but is sadly often overlooked.

All it really entails is consistent management and optimization, adding a CTA on every blog post or some sort of lead magnet (incentive) for the user to sign up for your newsletter.

For instance, your call-to-action could redirect the user to a landing page that offers exclusive content like checklists, webinars and free trials. Whatever you choose to blog about should be related to whatever you’re promoting.

Mistake #5: Not Using The Right Social Media Lead Generation Tools

So, you’ve managed to do everything right so far, and people are coming to your website. But do you know who they are or what specifically brought them to your site? Are you aware of the actions they took when they visited your site and when they left?

If you cannot answer these questions, you will have a hard time understanding your base and may be unable to retain them in the long run. You need to know what makes them tick and if what you’re doing interests them or not.

These aren’t questions you’re going to be able to answer by yourself, unless you have a lot of time to spare and a lot of skill in the right departments.

Alternatively, instead of reinventing the wheel, there are a lot of excellent tools made specifically to help you learn more about your visitors and converting them into sales.

The trick here is to find the right combination of lead generation tools that give you an adequate amount of insights into generating enough traffic through your social media posts, qualifying the traffic as leads, warming the leads up into potential conversions and closing the loop with sales.

There are lots of social media lead generation software companies with lead generation tools that provide basic services such as customizable checklists or content calendar templates.

Amazingly, we have an updated social media marketing toolbox from where we provide smart tools that help students of our digital marketing course training achieve their business goals.

Mrs. Sanya, for instance, was able to add highly optimized CTAs on all her business’ social media shares, thereby, increasing her lead generation and conversion rate by a huge margin by using one of the mind-blowing tools that we shared with her and our other students in the class.

She and many more are getting this much profitability by attending our digital marketing course training.

You should too. Click here to reserve one of our limited seats.

Mistake #6: Not Generating Leads Organically

Once again, lead generation won’t occur magically overnight. Some marketers, after working hard, or not, and not seeing any meaningful results, turn to buying their leads, rather than acquiring them organically.

This could either be by buying social media accounts, followers, likes and even shares so they have something to feed off at least. It may seem like a worthwhile investment in the short-term, but over a long period, it will do more harm than good for you.

Buying leads isn’t a good idea for several reasons, and our digital marketing course students have realized this and are even doing it the right way with detailed and easy step-by-step guides that we teach them. 

Here’s how they learned it.

What you may not know is that bought leads do not allow you the opportunity to get quality leads, because your best deal would be getting fake accounts following you and no quality engagement that could lead to conversions.

[bctt tweet=”The right way to acquire customers through social media is the good old-fashioned “follow me” method. This means anyone you send promotions to is expecting them because they gave you their contact information willingly, likely in return for valuable goodies like content offers or a webinar.” username=”dmsinstitute”]

Growing an organic followers list will take time, but it’s totally worth it eventually.

Mistake #7: Not Having a Well Planned Social Media Strategy

You may get lucky when one of your posts go viral, but remember that online content often goes viral for the wrong reasons.

Another popular mistake you’re making is not having a well planned social media lead generation strategy that will help define the marketing efforts.

Every company that is serious about generating leads from its social media channels should have an editorial calendar that will help them maintain consistency. 

The calendar will not only guide the marketers on when to post, what to post and which social media channel to use, rather, it will also make sure that the published content gets maximum exposure and engagement. 

Luckily for our students, we have prepared a bunch of actionable and high performing content calendars that we share with them and also teach them strategies on creating performance-based content calendars during our digital marketing training course.

Many of them come back to say that the calendars are kickass for ensuring their content is consistently in sync with their social media strategy. (Click here to join them and have access to these templates)

You cannot post any and every content whenever you feel like. Each social media post, image, and content should be tailor-fit for the channel, professionally designed and backed up by facts. 

You also need to dedicate a specific day and time to post the social media content to avoid it from becoming unpredictable and unreliable.

When it comes to generating leads with social media channels, it is important to reach out to your targeted audience to generate potential leads that can successfully be converted into sales.

Mistake #8: Not Using Social Media for Lead Generation

Although social media is most effective for top-of-the-funnel marketing metrics like traffic and brand awareness, it can still be helpful as a platform for lead generation, and a low-cost one, at that.

If you’re finding that social media isn’t generating very many leads for you, there’s a chance you’re not doing it strategically enough.

One way to generate more leads from social media is to sprinkle blog posts and offers that have historically generated higher-than-average leads numbers for you in with the new posts and offers your team is creating.

[bctt tweet=”We’ve found that linking directly to an offer’s landing page can be more effective -as long as your post copy sets the expectation that you are, in fact, sending people to a landing page.” username=”dmsinstitute”]

Also, you should make sure you’re using some of the features on each social network that are specifically designed to help you generate leads.

On Twitter, your lead generation tweets should contain a value proposition, a short URL linking to the landing page with a form, and an image to ensure the post stands out.

On Facebook, there are a number of great ways to generate leads from Facebook. For example, one way to easily generate leads is by simply using the call-to-action feature available for Pages.

This way, you can put a simple CTA button at the top of your Facebook Page, and it can help drive more traffic from your Facebook Page to lead generation forms like landing pages and contact sheets.

Take Away

Truth is, there are a ton of more social media lead generation mistakes we could add to this list, but these are some of the most common ones that we suspect you as a marketer are probably doing.

We hope that the corrective follow-ups presented in this piece will help you prioritize where to focus your time and resources.

Still, identifying these mistakes and knowing a few of what to do to correct them is one step to liberating you from the social media lead generation jinx.

The next step, of course, would be to join hundreds of our students who have realized lots of less obvious mistakes that you might not know, as well as strategies to correct them from our digital marketing course.

You’d be glad you did. (Click here to join them now and make fewer mistakes)

See you in class.