There are several well-known, powerful strategies to generate high-quality leads. However, there’s one that’s often overlooked – direct messaging.
Here’s how to use DMs to take people straight to your lead magnets – without the ick!
Benefits of direct messaging
- Speed: The clue is in the title, ‘direct’. You’re directly contacting someone, in the quickest way possible online. There’s no long sales funnel, finding the right page of your website, or emails back and forth. It’s just one quick message, straight to the right person, with one subject in mind – your lead magnet.
- Connection: It feels more personal, because it is – you’re only sending this message to this person. This strengthens the connection between you and each individual recipient.
- Authenticity: You’re a real human sending a one-to-one communication to another real human. You’re including something that you think will be helpful to them. There’s no fakery involved.
- Clarity: People you message will be very clear about what it is you do and how that helps them.
What a direct messaging lead generation strategy is NOT
Let’s address the elephant in the room – the huge, often discussed ‘ick factor’ of getting the wrong sort of DMs. This does lead to a generalised fear of accidentally sending icky DMs… and no one wants to be ‘that’ person.
Here’s the intrusiveness you want to avoid:
- A big chat: You’re not here to have a deep and meaningful conversation. Sometimes you might be, but not right now as part of your lead generation strategy.
- A sales pitch: We’ve all had the ‘sales pitch DM’, as soon as we’ve accepted a connection request. This is not it.
- Stranger danger: Most people are wary of a random stranger knocking on their front door. We feel similarly protective of our DM inboxes. We’re not cold-calling total strangers’ virtual doorsteps and offering them random things to buy.
- Too personal: Everyone knows that ‘Hello beautiful’ isn’t the way to start a message in a professional capacity, right? Right?! (Unbelievably, there are still some LinkedIn bros that seem to have missed this memo.)
Keep it appropriately professional – in the language, tone, and content of your messages. Compliment business stuff, not profile photos and nothing should get lost in translation.
- Generic: Templates you can personalise are a great idea, but the same cut-and-paste message for everyone is absolutely not.
The key differential here is that you’ve got a lead generation focus. You’re not doing a scattergun ‘I’m just going to DM all my followers’ approach. You have a specific purpose and you’re targeting your ideal clients.
Getting over the awkwardness…
If you’re totally new to using DMs as part of your lead generation strategy, try starting with something like this:
The Quick Catch-up DM: Examples
1.‘Hello, How are you? I just saw a post from [X company] and see you’ve moved onto [Y company]. How exciting! How are you settling in?’
2.’Hello there, I just scrolled past photos from that conference we were both at last month – I think you were the only person as excited as me by the popcorn stand! How’s it going?’
3.’Hi, Great to meet you at the networking event the other evening. Did you manage to get a gin sample? Delicious! How’s it going?’
This is a good way to start practising your DM game. These are all just openers, no mention of pain points or lead magnets, just a gateway to the habit of sending DMs for work.
You don’t need to spend hours sending them to everyone you’ve ever met. Start with an aim of 5 ‘Catch up’ messages a day, for 5 working days. See how it goes, reply as quickly as you can, and get the feel for sending DMs with your professional hat on.
Building a DM strategy around a lead magnet
This will be one strand of your overall lead generation strategy, created to promote one lead magnet. The keys to success are:
- Value: You’re here to be helpful. Your product or service is designed to help your clients solve a problem. It’s the highlighting value of that solution that puts you ahead of the competition. Get straight to the point.
- Personalisation: Every message you send is being read by one individual. You may be selling your lead magnet to thousands. But you’re talking to one person in each message.
You need to include how you know them, be it through a mutual connection, attending the same event, or commenting on the same post. However you know them, announce this at the start. So the ‘Who’s this?’ question is answered straightaway and they’re more likely to carry on reading.
- Wording: If writing isn’t at the top of your skillset, hire help. Your DMs need to be short, so the language needs to be succinct but still get over your value, connection and understanding to your recipients.
The less words you need to use, the more difficult it is to write because every word has to work. Wise business people hire experts to do the things they aren’t specialists in. When you consider the potential number of leads at stake, investing in a copywriter is a no-brainer.
- Follow up: Plan the follow up message for when you don’t get a reply. That way you get into the routine of sending one and it’s already written.
- Realistic: If you started with the ‘catch up chat’ programme, you’re already in the zone of sending 5 DMs every weekday. You need to set up a structure like this for your lead generation DMs.
It must be manageable in terms of the time you need to identify the right recipients, create personalised DMs, and respond to their replies. Goals that aren’t realistic from the start are doomed to fail.
- Monitor and review: Track those stats! Use a trial and error attitude with your DM lead generation strategy. Be prepared to try different things, see how they do and adapt to the data insights you get after a predetermined period of time.
Examples DMs for sending a lead magnet
1. ‘Hi, Do you remember seeing [name of speaker] at [name of conference]? We’re launching a free video course that’s focused on [something to do with the speech]. Let me know if you fancy it and I’ll send you the link.’
2.’Hello, it’s me from your LinkedIn comments! As I’ve already said, I was really interested in your post about [thing] because [detail about that thing]. I think our new [product or service] would really integrate well to your current [specific thing about their business]. If you’d like the link to the free webinar about it, let me know.’
3.’Hi, I love your honesty about [pain point] in your latest Instagram post. I think we can help with [specific understanding of the problem]. Happy to send you a link to our podcast, just give me a shout if you fancy it.’
In all of these examples, you identify your existing connection, show that you understand their perspective and offer them something valuable – which they can choose to opt into.
You don’t have to send hundreds of messages a day to see a result because your messages have a specific focus, that you’re pointing at ideal customers, that you already have a connection with.
If you send 5 lead generation DMs for 20 days in your first month, that’s 100 DMs in total. Imagine if that turned into 25 leads!
Top tips for lead generation DM success!
- Be human: Use your usual greeting, sound like yourself, show empathy for their situation, send a follow up message if you don’t hear back straightaway. (We all forget, or reply telepathically by mistake!)
- Follow the rules of the platform: Social media platforms have their own ways of facilitating private direct messages. For example, on X (Twitter) you can send a direct message to anyone that follows you. But on TikTok, you can only send a DM to someone if they follow you and you follow them back. (On all of the platforms, people can set their privacy settings to not allow DMs.) Find out the rules before you start, there may be other steps you need to take before you start DM-ing.
- Show respect: Give everyone the chance to opt in to receiving your lead magnet, rather than just sending links. Don’t get caught up in pushy sales talk. Your ultimate goal is to increase sales, of course it is. But right now, in the context of this DM, your aim is to strengthen connections with people.
ScoreApp is perfect for lead generation
Everything in business is downstream from lead generation. Direct messages are another weapon in your lead generation arsenal. They’re great for making fast connections, in a less formal way, that build trust with your carefully chosen recipients.
As part of your paid ScoreApp membership, you get access to ScoreApp’s comprehensive new Lead Generation Toolkit for free. This gives you all the time-saving, idea kickstarting tools you need to boost traffic to your lead magnets. Including more DM templates!
We add all our new ideas as we think of them – which is all the time! Get your Lead Generation Toolkit today.
