Social media is a great platform for aligning your sales and marketing teams and keeping everyone happy. Marketing develop personality, promote your brand and new content. And sales get to connect with new leads on a one-to-one basis.

That said, only 6% of businesses are currently using social media to generate leads. Sometimes that’s through choice and other times it’s not knowing how.

Let’s look at the steps you can take to increase your sales funnel using social media:

1 Gate your content

The most obvious way to generate leads through your social channels is to promote high value, gated content. That said, it is worth bearing in mind that gating content can go wrong and can put you in danger of turning leads away.

Through trial and error, we’ve discovered that requesting email address maximises the opportunity. At this point, it’s all you need, rather than an unnecessarily long form to complete, which can be off putting.

Gating your content also suggests value of your content. By protecting it, you can also filter out what we call, the ‘tire kickers’. If people really want to read your content, they will have no problem in providing their email address to do so.

Once you have their email address your sales guys can start nurturing them for sales.

2 Run competitions & surveys

There’s no better way to connect with thousands of followers than running competitions. Include clear call to actions such as retweet to be in with a chance of winning X.

There are two key things to remember with these types of promotions. Ensure what you are offering is A. of value and B. of relevance to your audience. Remember, the end goal is to produce qualified leads, not thousands of irrelevant people who want to win an iPad.

Offer the chance to share your competition as it boosts your reach on social, giving you a wider audience.

Asking for feedback via surveys is also a great way to promote engagement and a chance to improve. Remember to keep your questions open for best results.

3 Paid social Ads

While you can target your organic social posts to some extent, paid for social ads takes it to the next level. Pushing your brand and products to the forefront of your potential buyer’s social activity is a great way to get noticed. And that leaves you with a constant stream of qualified leads generated for your sales team. Its easily becoming the biggest social media trend and everyone seems to be at it so it’s important to get it right. Define your goal, select your content; audience and platform, and be flexible to mix it up on a regular basis.

4 Engage and interact

I’m sure it goes without saying that to succeed in lead gen via social media you must engage and interact with your followers. As we know, the technology world changes tact on a day to day basis and it’s important to be ready to act quickly.

Ensure you have resource dedicated to being active on your platforms to pick up comments, retweets and links within minutes. Like-wise if something isn’t working or doesn’t quite look right you need to jump on it straight away and change. Also, this will help you identify what content and landing pages are performing better than others.