Most businesses today have a social media presence. But not all of these businesses find success from their social media marketing. Being on social media is a totally different thing to getting sales from it. If your social media could benefit from a little boost, then here are my top 5 tips for how to make social media convert.
1. Know Why
I hear a lot of people say that they need to market their business. But marketing isn’t a general thing that a business should do. Marketing should always have a reason behind it. Are you on social media to market or are you on social media because you want to reach a £1M turnover by 2025?
Being more focused on an actual objective and having more purpose in what you do will vastly increase your chances of getting results. Doing stuff for the sake of doing stuff will rarely lead to anything good. After all, if you don’t know why you’re doing it, how do you expect people to know why they’re interacting with it?
2. Be Sociable
It can be all too easy to treat social media like a tick box exercise. Pop on to Buffer or Hootsuite, add in your social media messages for the week or two ahead, and you’re done. But what you post is only half the story.
The fastest way to convert anyone is to have a conversation. Business is all about relationships, so you need to show up and be sociable in order to build them. Track who is liking and commenting on your posts. Comment back and like what they post. Keep a tab on your favourite prospects and start to engage with them more frequently. Encourage them to find out more about you by dropping in that blog you just wrote that totally answers the question they just asked. Listen to their pain points and casually suggest that you have a lead magnet that could help. Or build a lead magnet that answers those pain points perfectly.
The more you connect with them, the more they’ll engage in return. Interact in the same way you would if these were people standing in a room with you. The more sociable you are, the more you’ll get out of it.
3. Joined Up Approach
Doing social media in isolation from the rest of your marketing plan is a very bad idea. People will never just look at your social media in isolation. If they’re interested in buying from you, they’ll also look at your website, they might read your brochure, they might chat to you at a networking meeting, come and visit you in store, and so on. If your clients go on a journey before they buy from you, then you need to make sure you have that journey all knitted up well. The more consistent you are in your messaging and how all parts of the customer journey correlate, the better perception your prospective clients will have, and the faster they’ll understand and trust you.
Treating your social media as a separate part of marketing, and having a standalone ‘social media strategy’, could actually detract from what you’re trying to achieve instead of aiding it.
4. What’s Next?
As part of thinking about your customer journey, make sure you’ve considered just what you want your audience to do next. They’ve seen a lot of your social media posts, but so what? If you want them to work with your or interact with you in some way, you kind of need to tell them that. We’re very strange as people. We act far more when we’re given instructions than when we’re left to our own devices.
That means don’t just post and share stories and hope for the best. Have lots of call to actions. Create purpose built landing pages. Plot every step of the way. What do you want your clients to do and how can they find out more about you? Make it super easy and super compelling. Don’t leave it up to chance.
5. Measure
The last thing to do is measure everything. Just because you have seventy likes on your last post, it doesn’t mean what you’re doing is helping you to reach your sales target. If no one is going to your website or moving forward in any way to find out more about you, something isn’t working properly.
At the same time, don’t forget that social media isn’t (or shouldn’t be) working for you in isolation. If you track where all your leads come from, and none appear to come directly from social media, that doesn’t mean that social media isn’t playing its part. Your clients will do their research before they buy from you, and visiting your social media channels may be part of that research. So measure and keep a track, but always try to remember the bigger picture and keep that customer journey in mind.
Growing Your Business?
If you’re looking for serious growth over the next year or so, then please do have a chat with us at Lindsay Woodward Marketing. We love to work with businesses who have massive growth targets, helping them to find innovative and interesting ways to smash their targets while being cautious about their budget. If you want to grow, at least have a chat with us. I bet we can come up with an idea you’ve never considered before.
