By Maguire Haigh 
Over the years, I have worked with a number of new social media marketers that get fixated on the wrong metrics. Many of them are preoccupied with pointless vanity metrics, such as likes or shares. More experienced marketers appreciate that traffic to their websites is more important, but even that metric is not the ultimate determining factor of success.
The real priority of every social media marketer should be lead generation. You can drive a ton of traffic to your website through various social media platforms without having anything to show for it. One colleague that I spoke with back in 2013 had a website with an Alexa rank of around 1000, but he was generating less than $100 a month by monetizing it. This is a rather extreme example, but it still illustrates the importance of focusing on attracting high-quality leads instead of large amounts of traffic.
The art of lead generation is a lot more complex than scaling traffic to a website. You can’t just build a website, throw together a contact page and hope that your visitors will reach out to you. You need a sophisticated funnel that attracts the right visitors and entices them to convert.
The right tools can go a long way towards creating a profitable lead generation strategy. Here are some of the best tools to build and monetize leads.
Leadformly
The importance of lead capture forms cannot be overstated. Econsultancy shared a couple of case studies on the importance of optimizing these forms. One of these studies showed that a company was able to increase its conversion rate by 59% by making a couple small tweaks to the lead form. Another organization claims it has increased conversion rates on client landing pages by up to 200% through form optimization.
Leadformly is a great tool for optimizing lead generation forms. This tool has a number of excellent CRO features, including lead segmentation with conditional logic and showing a progress bar indicator to encourage visitors to finish the remaining steps on the form. The tool also has an auto-fill feature, which makes it easier for visitors to complete the form without having to do a lot of data entry. Finally, Leadformly also comes with a very nuanced analytics interface to track conversions and conduct split tests.
Spokeo
Social media lead generation is a form of inbound marketing. However, inbound marketing strategies often hinge on outbound marketing practices.
One major example is with influencer outreach. The best inbound marketing strategies rely heavily on influencers these days. One in five marketers are spending between $100,00 and $500,000 a year on influencer marketing. However, reaching out to influencers is easier said than done.
This is where a tool like Spokeo comes in. It is one of the best tools for finding information about people. You could use Spokeo reverse number lookup to learn more about influencers and reach out to them to see if they are interested in collaborating on your lead generation campaigns.
OptinMonster
OptinMonster is one of the most popular lead generation tools available. It is trusted by some very trusted brands. SnackNation is one of their major clients, which has increased its leads by 1,200 a week after using this tool.
This tool has a number of excellent features. The biggest advantage is that enables marketers to create different lead funnels for every webpage. OptinMonster also allows marketers to create special offers to people leaving the site, as well as retargeting offers for returning visitors.
Lead Forensics
One of the biggest frustrations of lead marketing is discovering that a number of visitors start to fill out the lead form, but don’t follow through. This figure can be reduced by using tools like Leadformly to offer to autofill the form for them. However, some of those visitors are still going to fall between the cracks.
Lead Forensics is a tool that solves this challenge. This tool enables marketers to identify companies based on their IP addresses. They can follow up with those companies by email or social media after discovering they failed to fully complete the lead form.
Use the Right Tools to Optimize Your Lead Generation Strategy
Traffic is vital to every marketing campaign. However, traffic needs to be properly monetized to capture quality leads. There are a number of excellent lead generation tools that you can use to get the most value from your visitors.
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Sitetrail Research Team