Beyond Traditional Media: The Added Advantage of Social Media for Sustainable Lead Generation and Sales

Over the last 20 years, we have experimented with various media options to identify the optimal marketing mix for sustainable lead generation. Traditional direct marketing methods, programmatic display, and search continue to play a vital role in our strategy, consistently driving high-volume business over the years.

Social media is also an integral part of the high-volume mix, offering the added advantage of consumer feedback and engagement, which provides deeper insights into how your campaign is perceived and valued by your target audience. It can be leveraged to drive brand awareness, leads, and sales, all within the same budget. By applying best practices and smart strategies, you can maximise the impact of your social media investment.

Strong fundamentals can help you exceed your business goals. Success begins with proper tracking and campaign setup, followed by creative content that resonates with your audience, and finally, a well-designed user journey beyond the click that encourages the desired action and minimises drop-off.

By utilising social media as both a platform for brand awareness and sales, you can increase your overall digital share of voice. This, in turn, leads to a higher frequency of your ads and results in increased search volumes for your key terms.

Social media enables you to drive your business objectives immediately while also nurturing those in your audience who may not yet have a direct need for your product or service. By utilising A/B testing with different creative options and ad formats, combined with proper tracking, you can measure the effectiveness of your marketing messages and identify the most successful ones.

This approach ensures that you deliver ads that stand out in the feed, capturing attention (achieving the brand awareness goal), and even identifying which creative elements drive leads or sales. Understanding your audience's varying levels of engagement provides valuable insights into what works and what needs improvement.

When your creative content is attention-grabbing, you've already achieved brand awareness, making an impact. You can then take it further when that content also converts into leads or sales. However, not every piece of creative needs to fulfil all roles, but you can ensure with AB testing that all creative you run at least fulfil a role, if not you can remove it from your creative mix, but you never have to waste money with social.

Lastly, the ability to keep social media users on the platform they are already using when you try to sell to them can make social media a much more cost-effective option compared to other platforms. When users show interest in your brand, they don’t always want to leave the platform, wait for a web page to load, and then engage. Sometimes, they prefer to engage instantly and move on.

We need to take advantage of the options that social platforms offer. For instance, Meta provides lead forms and Click-to-WhatsApp ads (even though technically clicking out, you're still within the Meta ecosystem). When you A/B test 'stay-in-platform' options versus 'click-out' options, you’ll often find that click-out options deliver lower results.

Digital media is effective for both lead generation and sales. Most digital platforms can deliver strong results if you implement the fundamentals correctly and continuously test and learn to understand what works best. Social media is an obvious choice for driving both awareness and engagement, and by applying best practices, you can maximise your media budget, showing value over both.