How to Generate Leads Using Search and Social Media

As the population of netizens is on a constant rise, Internet is fast becoming one of the prime advertising and marketing mediums. Social networking has accelerated the personalization of the web and created new opportunities for businesses who are looking to generate new customer leads.

In this post are some tips on generating leads using search and social media for business owners, who are trying out online marketing for the first time.

In today's competitive business arena, one must take help from multiple marketing and advertising channels to generate leads. What Internet marketing and advertising can do for you is, assure visibility for your brand or product.

Ultimately, the quality of your product or service is going to decide its fate in the global market, but it's important that it gains visibility initially. That is where marketing comes in. The Internet is truly representative of the 'Global Village' ideal and your product can get global exposure through this medium, at little or no cost.

What constitutes web search and social media? It spreads over a much diverse Internet landscape, which primarily consists of social networking sites, e-magazines, blogs, and other promotional web sites, along with search engines like Google. Here are some suggestions on using the Internet as a marketing channel.

The first and foremost thing to do, is the creation of your own product website. Invest time and money in designing the website and present detailed information regarding your product.

You can present contact information, product features, accessories, or information about services provided by your company. Submit your site to the Google search engine.

Consult a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consultant, to ensure visibility in the web search domain. With the website, you have created a little island for yourself on the web, from where you can send out connections and generate leads via social media.

The next step in generating leads is to advertise via the Google Adwords program. You can bid for the keywords relevant to your product or services.

Google's advertising program will place your text advertisement on web pages that have relevant subject matter in them. When any user clicks on one of those advertisement links, they are directed towards your company website. You pay Google according to how many leads it generates in this fashion.

Another online advertising option is provided by Facebook, which lets you put up graphic ads on profile pages of users. One of the many advantages of advertising on Facebook is ad placement in the news feed of people, who may be the target audience for your product.

You can also create a page on Facebook to promote your business. What will spread the word around about your product is the 'Like' feature provided on the site.

Your company's official website serves to present official product information and customer care features. You can back it up with a dedicated blog for your product, where information about latest developments can be posted.

This is also a good place to conduct surveys and gain customer feedback for your product. The blog can generate leads for you. You can also put up videos related to your product on YouTube and other video sites that may generate interest in your product.

Other than that, use every opportunity for creating a web presence, provided by networking sites like LinkedIn, broadcast sites like Twitter, Yahoo answers, and other promotional websites.

Wider exposure, automatically ensures better visibility and outreach for your product. Widening your web presence will ensure that you gain more customer leads.

It is important that you take advantage of social media marketing channels. The best thing about it is that, it costs almost nothing compared to real world advertising. Try it out and see your sales soar higher.