Tips for Selling on Social Media | More Leads Online!
Ready for some tips for selling on social media? Well, you’re lucky because if there’s one thing people just aren’t talking about enough: Getting sales on social media. There’s a whole load of chat about providing value and community building and engagement…but very little about actual sales. And it’s affecting your bottom line.
So, in this video we’re going to share our six-word social media sales strategy that never fails AND give you a three-step process for implementing your brand new sales plan.
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Ready for some tips for selling on social media? There’s one thing people just aren’t talking about enough: Getting sales on social media.
There’s a whole load of chat about providing value and community building and engagement — and of course that stuff is all really important. But there’s very little information on how to actually make sales on social media, even though that’s what ultimately let’s you pay your bills.
So, keep reading for our six-word social media sales strategy AND our three-step process for implementing your brand new sales plan.
The only six words you need for social media sales
Every time you sit down to do your social media, we want you to remember these six words:
Build an audience, convert the audience
That’s it.
And here’s why it’s so effective: a lot of small business owners just do the first part. They’re great at building an audience of potential customers, but then they shy away from the second part because they’re scared of selling. So these potential customers never actually become paying customers.
So how should you approach your social media?
We’ve talked before about the ‘double it rule’: however long you spend on marketing your business, you should spend twice as long on sales.
That means that you should be spending twice as long on converting the audience you already have, rather than focusing on building that audience.
And that applies whether you have an audience of 1000…or an audience of 10. Really!
For two reasons…
Firstly, 10 people is still 10 people, or 10 sales, and you have to think about what each sale is worth to you. Secondly — and this is really important but frequently overlooked — when you proactively sell to your audience you learn way more about them and about your business and your product offerings than any marketing book will ever be able to tell you.
Think about it: when you actually proactively try and sell to someone, when you have that sales conversation, you’ll learn more about their actual problem, what they need from you, what they think they need from you, where they are in the buying journey, and you get to understand their deeper objections to buying.
Yes, some of that you can learn through your marketing and your content — but the information you glean from trying to actually sell your thing during a sales conversation? That’s the most honest and accurate feedback you’ll ever get!
The 3-step process to convert your social media audience
So, how does it work in practice? How do you convert the audience you already have?
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Figure out your sales trigger
Take a minute to step back from social media and think about your sales process in more general terms.
Think about the first step in your sales process: what do you actually want people to do?
Do you want them to book a meeting or an initial discovery call? Do you want them to set up an account on your site or book a free demo? Do you want them to pick up the phone and give you a call? Do you want them to read more about your products, download a brochure, price guide, or lead magnet?
We call that first step the sales trigger, and if you’re not sure what it is for your business, you need to figure it out pronto! Because step two is all about creating content that pushes your audience towards that first step.
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Create hand-raiser content
We have more info here about hand-raiser content but here’s the nutshell version: you want to create content that both lets your audience self-serve information about your products or services AND lets you see who in your audience wants that information — so you know who’s interested in buying and who you should be following up with.
For example, you could create Instagram stories that show what you do for your customers and then encourage people to DM you or click a poll to find out more or ask questions. You can then follow up with these people.
Or you could create a post about free trials or ways to sample your products and services. An in-depth lead magnet like a brochure or a price guide is a great way to gauge interest and webinars can help you find out who in your audience actually has the problem that your product or service solves.
You could also put a pixel on your content or your videos so that you can build a custom audience and re-market to the people that have requested access to that content.
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Follow up
Of course the key to making this hand-raiser content work for you is to actually follow up with these people in some way after they’ve accessed your content — and that’s step three.
We often expect that the people who show a real interest in our products or services will just buy immediately, but that’s rarely the case. Which is why a follow-up, whether it’s by email, re-marketing ads, a phone call, or a DM, is so important.
Our favourite follow-up method is email. For us, email marketing and social media marketing go hand in hand. Because once you have people on your email list, it’s really easy to follow up with the ones who have taken certain actions, like clicked on certain links or opened certain emails. And you can make it even easier by automating some of these processes too.
Let’s look at an example of this in action.
Say you’re a website designer and on social media you’re trying to build an audience by talking about ways to get more sales through your website. And you have a free guide that tells people everything they need to know before getting a new site built.
You talk about this guide on social media, you promote it, and you tell people to download it — and you know that everyone that does so is a potential customer because why would you bother to download that lead magnet unless you were unhappy with your current site?
Now you have the email addresses of all of these potential customers. So what are you going to do about it?
You’re going to push them towards that first step in your sales process, that sales trigger you figured out in step one. Let’s say that your sales trigger is taking a free assessment of their website or a website review and a follow-up call to go over the findings. All of a sudden, you’ve got these people interested, you’re having a meeting with them, and you can talk to them about potentially building them a new website.
We just love how effective this process is when it all comes together. Essentially, if you want to make more sales on social media, you need to remember the six word strategy:
Build an audience, convert the audience.
And then follow the three-step processes that’ll help you do exactly that. Figure out your sales trigger, create content that pushes people towards that trigger, and then follow up with those people. Oh, and always spend double the amount of time converting the audience than building the audience.
Do that, and watch those social media sales soar!