HOW A SMALL BUSINESS CAN SUCCESSFULLY SELL ON SOCIAL MEDIA
The amount of times I see people ONLY SELLING on social media, a bit of social selling is fine, but remember social media is for socialising. People will soon get bored if you are constantly selling.
Follow the 20/ 80 rule, 20 % subtle selling and 80 % socialising.
People love a story, they love humour, they love visuals. They like useful information that is helpful to them. People like to WIN things/competitions. So, get your thinking caps on and think about how you can showcase your products or services in a way that doesn’t bore or annoy your audience.
If you are at a networking event, you wouldn’t go up to someone and start the conversation talking all about yourself or your product and why they should buy it.
First, you would:
- Engage in conversation
- Ask questions
- Listen to them and most importantly…
- Take an interest and respond to them
Listen to your audience
If you don’t know what your audience wants, then ask them, do a FREE POLL on Facebook. Join groups where your customers are hanging out and start to make a note of their pain points. What are they struggling with? What would they find useful?
If someone likes your post, always try to thank them and reciprocate. You will get some negative feedback on the odd occasion, but that’s ok you can use that information and learn from it. However, don’t take to heart if you do get the occasional comment, there will always be a few haters out there, the best thing to do is remove them from your list.
Work out where your audience are hanging out.
You might think you need to be on every social media platform, but you don’t. You just need to work out which one works for you. I say to my clients, it’s better to stick with two channels and understand them fully and gain a steady following than be on all social media networks.
Also, different platforms perform better depending on your business. For B2B I personally like LinkedIn, it’s great for networking and building up contacts but if you are selling a product, I have worked with many businesses that have more success on Instagram, Facebook.
Build a Profile
If you are unclear who your target audience is, then start by creating a few personas. Start with age, what they like, what they do for a job, what they struggle with, give them a name if it helps too. This will provide you with a clear idea of who you are targeting. I have been on many courses where they say only do one profile, but I disagree. You can be targeting different people depending on your product and services. So I say do as many as you think are right for you, but make sure you are writing your sales content with only one persona in mind rather than all of them.
Create a group
If your audience is very niche, explore Facebook for groups. If there isn’t one, this is an ideal opportunity to create a Facebook group around your subject or product.
This is great for interaction and gives you a chance to understand your audience and also an opportunity to showcase your services or products directly to them. A fast way to build up a group is to target them through Facebook Adverts.
Use Facebook Adverts
There is no better way to attract your customers than Facebook Ads. Facebook collects so much data about you. It is quite scary how much they know, but it is a dream for businesses. Especially small businesses that don’t have the big budgets the large companies have. Facebook from my experience is the most cost-effective way to advertise and attract customers.
There are successful because there are soo targeted. You can target based on interests, demographics, age, location. You can even see what pages they like. (For example, if I wanted to focus on new parents. Facebook allows you to target new parents of babies 0-1 year and every age,) You can then add all the interests to narrow the search even more.
Or if I was a selling vintage wedding dresses, I could target females that are engaged on Facebook and then narrow their interests down to vintage wedding dresses, vintage clothing and all interests related to weddings and vintage. Next step is to select a location if I am a wedding shop I can target within a mile from the shop, so you are only targeting local people, (however, I would target around 5-10 mile as people will travel that distance to find their perfect wedding dress.)
Facebook Ads certainly is an effective way to advertise to your clients. But and there is a BUT, you need to understand what you are doing. Facebook adverts if you don’t understand them properly, you can quickly dwindle your money away without realising it.
The best way to start is to test a few different audiences and different visuals for an advert on a lower budget until you find the winning one. Ideally, if you can run four adverts or even six, then you can cancel the ones that are not performing.
What most people do is run only one advert, waste all their money on that one campaign and wonder why it didn’t work. Most agencies like ourselves will do split testing with different creatives, audiences until they find one that winning advert.
Blogs and Vlogs
Video’s and Blogs are a great way to engage on social media as most video’s, and blogs are offering advice and guidance. Here we are selling, but it is subtle and most often helping a particular group with a problem.
Blogs are excellent for your website too, as every blog you add and share on social media it is bringing traffic back to your site and adding more keywords enabling people to find you on Google. This helps Google know you exist, especially if you are in a saturated market and currently sitting on page 15.
Blogs give your audience a chance to explore your site and what other things you have on offer. You can use blogs to direct your reader to pages you want them to see by adding hyperlinks in the text.
Give away a FREE gift or a useful tool
People rarely buy on first sight on social media; they need to KNOW, LIKE and TRUST you. By offering something free in exchange for their email or a business page like you can build an audience. If you are marketing a product, you might offer a discount voucher in exchange for their contact details. Facebook has excellent sign-up forms, so you don’t even need a website to do this.
Capturing their email allows you to send them targeted content based on what they like and if you are selling events, you can send them future events that they may be of interest to them.
If you are feeling stuck on ideas on how to promote your services or products on social media, then contact us, and we can book a two-hour session to explore creative ways to promote your business.
