Tired of trying to sell on social media and getting mediocre results?
You’ve got something to sell, maybe your new product, service or event. So you plan out a series of social media posts to subtly promote it, taking care to tell stories and create eye-catching images.
Sadly, based on the last time you did this, you know you’ll have to post a lot to get just a trickle of sales and all the time you risk boring or turning-off your followers. Plus, you’re fighting an algorithm that only shows your posts to a fraction of them anyway.
Don’t worry, there is a better way. Instead selling on social media, use it to build relationships and get those people who want to know more onto your mailing list. Then do your promotion by email (making sure you also give a lot of value in your emails, of course).
The question is, how do you get people to make the leap from the social media platform to your mailing list?
Ahem, this is where I introduce a marketing funnel. Now, I don’t often mention the ‘f’ word (meaning funnel…!) because it feels a bit pushy to many people and we know marketing isn’t as simple as just moving people down a funnel.
That said, you do need some kind of process to get people onto your mailing list. Because the online world is so noisy that the chances of them finding their own way to it aren’t that high.
So here’s a really simple funnel-not-funnel to help you with that process.
A – awareness – help more people to become aware of you
B – build – build that relationship
C – convert – convert them into subscribers
Now, look at your current process/funnel and work out where the biggest bottleneck is. For example:
– If the same old 50 people are the only ones seeing your social media posts you need to work on (A) awareness. You could do this by increasing your reach on that platform or maybe by trying an entirely different awareness method.
– If you’re broadcasting content about what you do but with few replies, comments, shares, or most importantly, people joining your mailing list, then that could be a (B) relationship-building problem.
How could you do a better job of engaging with people and encouraging them to want more from you? Perhaps they haven’t tuned in to how you can help them, or you need to tempt them with a snippet of content rather than a long blog post?
– If you’re getting a respectable number of visitors to your landing page and only a trickle of people opting in to your list, that’s a conversion problem (C).
Do visitors understand the benefits of signing up? Can they see what’s on offer within seconds, without having to scroll down the landing page?
Or if they aren’t visiting your landing page at all, how can you make it easier for them to find? Do you just need to tell them about it more often?
Once you’ve fixed that bottleneck, look at the others. Then keep gradually improving all of them over time.
All of the above assumes you have data you need at your fingertips. Most email marketing platforms collect this for you automatically, so the data isn’t hard to find. But some of it may need to come from other places, like your website. So if you don’t have a way of collecting this data at the moment, make sure you set it up as soon as you can.
Let me know how you get on!
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