Actionable Tactics and Playbooks for Sales Teams to get Leads from Social Media [Without Paid Ads]

In the previous article (Content Marketing Playbook for Sales Teams to Get Followers, Lead, and Build Relationships on Social Media), we discussed the importance of focusing on your social media presence while conducting cold outreach.

As you already know, people with active social media presence will get far more replies to cold outreach messages than sales reps who don’t actively post on LinkedIn and Twitter (not to mention that active presence on social will also bring you a lot of inbound leads).

In the previous article, we learned:

• How to find your Content-Market-Fit (CMF), voice and build a narrative
• Different content categories and content types
• How to write LinkedIn & Twitter posts that get eyeballs and engagement
• How to Build relationships on social media (crucial for getting sales)

We need to combine all that knowledge to generate leads and close deals.

If you haven’t already, I strongly suggest reading the first article.

If you have read it, let’s see how to get sales through social media.

Two ways to sign deals through social

In reality, there are two ways (or strategies) you can implement to get new leads and sign deals on social media:

• Creating and distributing a lead magnet
• Account-based approach and building relationships with high-ticket leads

In this article, we’ll explore the first method, while the second will be discussed in the following article, Ugi’s ABM approach for closing high-ticket deals.

Creating and Distributing Lead Magnets

I know what you’re thinking right now—but I’m not a marketer. I’m a salesperson. I know nothing about creating lead magnets, and that’s not part of my job.

Well, let’s go back to the basics.

For the deal to happen, you need to have two things:

• A good offer – a good offer is one in which the product/service’s perceived value is bigger than what the customer is paying for.
• Customer’s trust – A potential customer must trust you or your product/service to pay for it.

So, why lead magnets?

Because lead magnets give you both of these things.

• Good offer – You’ll use lead magnets to solve a specific problem for your potential customer for free. By solving this problem, you’ll (with the help of your lead magnet) help the customer uncover the bigger and more critical problem (a problem that your main product/service solves).
  
  Getting a small problem solved without extra effort (or price) is a no-brainer for potential customers.
• Customer’s trust – By already solving one of their problems, potential customers will create affinity and trust towards you, making it easier for you to sell them high-ticket deals.

Now you know the reason why lead magnets are so essential & effective.

To answer your second objection now, should you be the one who creates the lead magnets?

This is up to you. But I strongly suggest either:

• Working closely with your marketing team on creating lead magnets that you need
• Or creating the lead magnets by yourself

At the end of the day, you know what Naval Ravikant says – The people who can both build and sell are unstoppable.

On the other hand (as you’re about to see in the minute), creating lead magnets doesn’t need to be too complicated.

How to Create Catching Lead Magnets

Now, I want you to forget everything you know about lead magnets or what you heard from your marketing friends.

Lead Magnets do not need to be all shiny and look good.

In reality, there are only two things a great lead magnet does:

• Solves a specific problem for a specific audience
• Solving a specific problem uncovers a more significant problem and upsells the main service or product.

So, the first (and most important) step is to find a small problem you can solve.

Once you know the problem, you must consider the delivery mechanism to solve it.

That delivery mechanism is your lead magnet, but you need to determine what type of lead magnet it will be.

There are many lead magnet types, but here are my favorites:

• Database of resources or information
• Free Strategy
• Free video breakdowns of certain activities
• Free trial
• Mini-course
• Research
• Ebook

The third step is actually to create your lead magnet.

Now remember, it doesn’t need to look fancy. It needs to be actionable and practical.

Some of the best lead magnets I’ve ever created are simple Loom videos or Google Sheets.

For example, if you’re writing an ebook, you don’t need to design every page. Heck, you don’t even need a cover.

A simple, shared Google Doc will do just fine.

A good hack for getting dozens of lead magnet ideas is to simply examine what other competitors are doing and do better.

Here are a few lead magnet examples to get inspiration from:

You’re only taking your secret knowledge and turning it into content. Nothing too complicated. 

So far:

• We know what a good lead magnet looks like.
• We found a specific problem that we can solve with a lead magnet
• We created a good lead magnet that solves that specific problem

Now it’s time for distribution and getting leads.

There are two main ways to distribute lead magnets on social media:

• Passive distribution (Inbound leads)
• Proactive distribution (Outbound leads)

Let’s explore them.

Passive Lead Magnet Distribution

With passive lead magnet distribution, we get inbound leads.

In other words, we distribute our lead magnets through social media posts, ask people to request our lead magnet (by commenting on the post), and then send them the URL where they can download the lead magnet in exchange for their email.

For this to work, we need to have:

• A lead magnet
• A gated landing page for the lead magnet
• A simple process to automatically send the lead magnet to all prospects (that I’ll show you in a minute).

The landing page doesn’t need to be complicated, it’s enough to follow a simple Headline-Subheadline-CTA format. Like this:

If you want, you can also include a quick 1-minute video and a social proof or a VSL so that it can look like this:

Channels for passive lead magnet distribution

There are three main channels you can leverage to distribute your lead magnets:

• LinkedIn (your, your employees, and your company’s LinkedIn profile – if you can, leverage all of them for the most impressions and results).
• Twitter (same as above).
• Communities

Communities might be especially useful since they already have a lot of your audience, and with a good post, you can get hundreds of leads.

For example, I leveraged the community to get the first client for my podcast booking agency back in the day:

As you can see, I got 120+ leads. Why did this work?

• A catchy post that follows the best psychological and copywriting practices drove a lot of attention (we’ll see how to write your distribution posts in a minute).
• The lead magnet itself had a massive value, so many people contacted me to ask for a done-for-you service.

And that’s how I got the first two clients for my new agency in less than a week:

So, in addition to your social media channels, check if there are any communities you could leverage. The best ones are Facebook and LinkedIn groups, but Slack communities might work, too (just check the rules, and don’t be too spammy!).

Also, Reddit communities might work as well, but keep in mind that:

• Distributing there is hard (The Reddit audience is pretty demanding)
• Large communities might drive a lot of low-quality leads, while the smaller communities might be dead, so try to look for some communities in the middle.

Writing your distribution post

Once everything is ready (you have a lead magnet, a landing page, and distribution channels), it’s time to write our distribution post.

If you pay close attention to all the distribution posts I shared above, you’ll see that they follow a similar pattern.

For example, let’s take a look at this post that got us over 500 leads:

The template I used in this example goes like this:

• Hook – If you’re starting out with your lead gen agency…
• What – We made a list of 8 money-printing niches…
• Unbelievable fact – They print money like crazy…
• Value they get
• CTA – Like + comment “send” to get
• Scarcity/FOMO – must follow, 24hr only
• Catchy screenshot or gif to get attention

The hook and what needs to stop people from scrolling.

We use the hook to grab their attention. You can do this in two main ways:

• Start with something mind-blowing or an unpopular opinion
• Call out your audience (like I did in the example above).

Then, we present them with our lead magnet. Again, think about the headline of your lead magnet also as another hook. If your lead magnet doesn’t intrigue them, then it doesn’t matter that you grabbed their attention with the hook at the beginning.

So, the first two things work hand-in-hand together.

We use the unbelievable fact after the what section to increase the prospect’s interest even more.

I like unbelievable facts to be short, crisp, and cheesy.

Then, we talk about the value our lead gets with our lead magnet. 

But remember, don’t talk about the features of your lead magnet. Instead, discuss the benefits (as I did in the example above).

As the CTA, we encourage people to comment on our posts, which gamifies the engagement. 

The more engagement we have, the better organic reach we can expect.

As for the scarcity or FOMO, it’s there to improve our conversions.

In the end, use your media space wisely. I always use a catchy GIF or screenshot. It serves as another hook and attention grabber.

Here’s another example where we got 500+ leads that follows a similar template:

Sending your lead magnet

Manually sending your lead magnet to a few hundred people will take time.

Fortunately, there’s a 5-minute workflow you can follow to send it to anyone who requests it.

To do that, follow these simple steps:

1. Copy the URL of your LinkedIn post
2. Open your Expandi account
3. Go to My Campaigns on the left menu
4. Create a New Campaign in the top right corner

5. From the Templates section, select the Message Your Network template:

6. Now, let’s add people to your campaign. Click on the People icon:

7. Select New URL search:

8. Select the Post Engagement search type on the left side:

9. Now, just paste the URL of your LinkedIn post and Click Save in the upper right corner:

10. We’ve added all the people who engaged with our post to our Expandi campaign. Now, it’s time to create our messaging and launch our campaign. Click on the Steps in the upper campaign menu:

11. Click on the step you want to edit, and edit the message:

12. Repeat this process for every message inside your campaign. Don’t forget to click the little Save icon in the upper right corner of your campaign graph.

13. Activate the campaign, and you’re ready to go!

As for the message to use when sending your lead magnet, I like going with a simple:

Hey {FirstName}, thanks for requesting {NameLeadMagnet}. Here’s the URL: {URL}

Additionally, you can also follow up with every prospect a few days after sending them your lead magnet and say something like:

Hey {FirstName}, did you have time to check {NameLeadMagnet}? What are your thoughts about it?

Remember, your goal right now is to solve a tiny problem they have, build relationships, and then uncover a bigger problem they have. 

Once they see the bigger problem, you upsell them your main product or service.

Active Lead Magnet Distribution

So far, all of this has been passive (or inbound) lead magnet distribution on social media.

We create a lead magnet, write a post about it, ask people who want it to comment on the post, and send them the lead magnet.

Now, let’s talk about the active (or outbound) lead magnet distribution.

The process is similar – the only difference is that we’re not waiting for the people to request the lead magnet, but we’re reaching out to them.

Think of it as a simple LinkedIn outreach campaign.

However, this is not a cold outreach campaign but a semi-warm outreach campaign.

We’ll not just find emails or LinkedIn profiles of our potential clients and send them the lead magnet out of the blue.

No. We need to have a context.

Our lead magnet needs to be 100% relevant to them.

So what do we do?

We borrow the audience from other influencers and people in our niche.

To be exact, we find posts that distributed a similar lead magnet and reach out to people who requested it.

Everything is the same (including the process of sending the lead magnet).

My recommendation is to do both active and passive lead magnet distribution.

How to do active lead magnet distribution

Many of the steps are the same as above. The only real difference is that you need to find distribution posts for other lead magnets from other people.

Here’s how to do that.

How to find people who requested similar lead magnets before?

There are two types of posts you need to look for:

• Posts that distribute the same lead magnets as yours
• And posts that distribute complementary lead magnets as yours

Let’s put this in an actionable example.

Let’s say that our lead magnet is a list of 500+ SaaS podcasts.

We will look for both posts that distribute:

• Other podcast databases
• And posts that distribute guides on how to find relevant podcasts, how to speak on podcasts, etc.

To do this, go to your LinkedIn search and type a query you’re looking for:

Find the one that piques your interest and has enough engaged people.

In our example, here’s one post that makes sense to target:

Repeat the same process for the complementary lead magnets. Just tweak your search query to match what you’re looking for.

To send the lead magnet to all the people who engaged with these posts, follow the same process I explained above by using Expandi.

The Bottom Line

With this, we’re wrapping up our guides on how salespeople can leverage social media (Twitter and LinkedIn primarily) to build their thought leadership brands and attract leads.

But all of this is worth nothing if you don’t know how to convert those leads into clients.

And to do that, you need to know how to create and nurture relationships with your leads (especially if you sell high-ticket) deals.

That’s the topic of our next article – Ugi’s ABM process for buidling relationships and closing high-ticket deals.