Stop Scrolling, Start Selling: Turning Social Media Followers into Paying Customers

Growing a social media following is increasingly seen as the holy grail of business and marketing. The more followers a brand picks up, the more likely it is to make its sales targets, or so the theory goes. The spirit of community and friendship that it was based on has been subverted. Social networks are cashing in as followers have become the competitive currency of our age. The exponential growth of social media has turned it into a two-way broadcast channel between brands and fans, full of opportunities. Or so they think. The reality is that they are ceasing to take them. But the impact of social media on sales is opaque. In one sense, there is no argument – there is a direct correlation between follower numbers and a brand’s imputed value. Therefore, as it grows, so does its market capitalization.

That data though is backed up anecdotally with struggles from brands to convert millions of fans into substantial sales. With internet users glancing at up to 300 content pieces each day and ditching a mere 45% of the average 219 seconds they spend on a web page, grabbing your share of that audience is a tough ask. Social media has both made brands of those who understand the zeitgeist and left behind those less nimble – 75% of those internet users are happy to engage with brands online if doing so is enjoyable or incentivizing, say Earnest. If it is not, they will be ignored. Marketing and advertising have never been under such pressure to come up with the concepts that will snap Joe Public’s eyes open and engage the brains that lie behind them.

Understanding Your Audience

Before you take another step on the path from followers to buyers, you need to get clear on who your followers are. This doesn’t mean a broad brush-stroke of who’s using what app, but a very specific picture of the human beings who are following and engaging with you. The more specific you can get, the easier it will be to build a sustainable business. You know how to make things. You know how to market. Those things are about you. When we talk about your customer, we’re talking about someone else entirely. This is the woman or man or non-binary person who is pathologically afraid of being in photos, but wants to get better at it because their kids’ childhoods are worth capturing. Or this is the family that’s just quit the rat race and moved to a cute little village and needs a new kitchen. Or these are the Nazi-punching knitters, or the beer-crafting vinyl hunters, or the self-made, unmade-up girl band. These people have very specific motivators. They have dreams and goals, they are in very specific phases of their lives. They are weighted down by specific concerns. When you understand them as individuals you can show them that your product or service uniquely can solve a need that they have.

Analyzing Demographics

Not every social media platform is worth your time or money, but some are more useful than others, and that mostly depends on knowing who your customers are. After you understand your specific target market’s age, gender, geography, and income level, compare those groups to the different demographics of social media users to decide which platforms are worth your time and ad dollars. For instance, if your core demographic is women ages 25 to 34, Pinterest and Instagram should be on your platform to log. Instagram and Facebook are the next best choices if your target market is women ages 35 to 54. When searching for native shopping options, Pinterest is a great choice since 81% of its users are women, and the platform easily links to e-commerce journals. Know your customer and know what social media platforms your specific customer uses, and then ensure that any chosen social media platform married the purchasing behavior of the customer you want.

Every small business owner should create an avatar of their ideal customer. What does your ideal customer look like? In other words, what is their demographic? Are they in broad target or a specific niche? What is the age or gender of your ideal customer? Are they college students, men, single moms, new mothers, retirees, or busy professionals? For example, if you have a store that sells pet supplies, the majority of the customers would be pet owners. What percentage of social media users own pets? Knowing this helps you decide which platforms are the best investment. 46% of Twitter users and 42% of Instagram users own a pet compared with 42% of the 77% of Facebook and 35% of Pinterest users. Knowing if your target customer is likely someone who already uses a social media platform will give you the best chance of reaching in existing buyer.

Identifying Interests and Needs

Identifying the needs, wants, and desires of your followers is crucial for attracting buyers. Instagram has made it easier than ever to communicate with your followers. The Stories questions feature has revolutionized the way you can communicate with your audience, and it can also reveal a ton. By performing regular question prompts such as “Ask me anything” or running polls asking a broad range of questions, you can really dig deep into the interests and pain points of your followers.

Although your Q&A responses will mainly be a mix of questions about products, brand, and life, you will probably get responses that reveal general themes and pain points. Many of these questions hold important data about what you should talk about more often. For example, if you receive questions about improving healthy habits, share what works for you. If a question is asked three times about the same subject, express how important the subject is. The important part is identifying the interests that you share with your followers and your unique experiences or content that can connect your interests seamlessly into your brand.

Building a Strong Online Presence

The primary reason that people use social media is also what makes it so addictive: the desire for validation. A like on Facebook or Instagram is a form of social currency that makes both the giver and the receiver feel positive. It’s a mutually beneficial exchange, and it’s what makes social media such a powerful tool. When you consider a purchase, you’ll often check out the seller’s social media profiles. If they have thousands of followers, and those followers consistently like and share their posts, that signals to you that they’re someone worth taking notice of. Just like having a brick-and-mortar store with a busy street outside, having an active social media presence reassures people that your business is a worthwhile one to stop and shop at. If you have no social media presence, or have profiles with only a few followers who never respond, then you come across as a business that’s to be avoided. Attention spans are fast, and customers want to spend their money with the in-crowd. When shopping it’s safety in numbers, and social media provides that security.

But building up a following doesn’t come instantly. It has to be earned, and the way to do that is by sharing content that you, and others, enjoy and find useful. Social media helps you earn that critical word-of-mouth advertising most small businesses rely on. The more people who see things that offer value, and that they can relate to and engage with, the more followers you’re likely to attract. It’s a win-win situation. Social media platforms look favorably on users with lots of followers, because they boost the platform’s value and ultimately profits through advertising. In return, the platforms provide more visibility to people with large followings. The trick is finding a way to accelerate that kind of organic growth. Advertisements can be a useful way to grow your following, but there are also ways to make increases without spending as much. Ultimately, though, a small properly engaged group of followers is more valuable than a larger one that never interacts.

Optimizing Profiles and Pages

The first step in transforming social media into a sales tool is to optimize social profiles and pages such that they lead back to the primary online sales platform. Just like storefronts were before the rise of online retailing, social media profiles and pages are now the outward face of a business, available from any gadget. These social pages need to accomplish many of the same tasks that websites do. They need to inform potential customers about the business and the products, entice customers with imagery, and provide all the necessary information for customers to make a purchase.

There is also a discussion of shopping functionality which can be embedded directly into Instagram and a list in the form of 12 dos and don’ts unique to Instagram. The chapter even includes the results of a recent survey. Since profiles and pages both have a set of base qualities that businesses on any social media platform should first address, this chapter is set up to cover profiles and pages on any platform providing a list of must-have items with descriptions and images and showing how to accomplish these must-haves on as many of the more popular social media platforms as possible.

Creating Engaging Content

Social media can be a powerful tool for driving sales, and the most important aspect of marketing is going to be the content that you share with your followers. So it’s important first that you start by getting to know your followers. All of the tenants of good content creation still apply. You want to make sure to motivate your followers, be eye-catching, funny, or informative. Once you understand that, you want to make sure to showcase your product in your content. Beautiful photos and videos go a long way for showing your product in action with a relevant caption that educates, informs, or captures the viewer’s attention. The relationship that you’ve established with your followers is very personal, so be honest about what you’re selling. You don’t have to be perfect to be successful.

It goes a long way to connect with your audience by being personal, showing the behind-the-scenes of your business, and motivating them. It takes nine times for your message to stick with a potential customer before they decide to make a purchase. Influencer marketing can have a high return on its investment, especially with micro-influencers who have a more personalized relationship with their followers. Make sure that if you do use influencers to promote your brand, you let them show off their personal style and values.

Implementing Sales Strategies

In order to implement the proposed sales strategies and turn the followers on social media into clients, it is very important to step up the business’ online presence with exciting sales texts. At the same time, in order to avoid a break in customer communication, continue to produce non-advertising content. The sale posts should be seen as mini-sales letters, which meet the requirements of the patterns of a successful sales letter. Besides, sales need verification and testing in order to prevent future loss of clients. This can, to a certain extent, be accomplished by means of special, internet-contemporary calls. Such calls are available as both the first and the second level calls and are not to be mixed with the work of the usual call centre due to the creative approach that they impose upon the sellers. After a customer becomes a client, the implementation of the provided service transforms into the ongoing support of customer communications in order for that same client to be kept over the longest period of time.

Finally, a solid step towards achieving their audience’s loyalty via the incentive-based model can also be the loyalty programme. In conclusion, we can optimize the strategies that ensure audience attention to these services by placing special offers and exclusive information about the discounts or the products only in exchange for the contact information. Everything that happens on social media is the result of precisely defined communication models that follow common rules – founded on appropriate communication language and manners that have transformed the advertising, thereby turning them into the framework of expecting the society of contemporary societies. Social media are not an exclusive interactive medium but, combined with the connection that it has with the old means for communication, can encourage consumer trust and loyalty which, in turn, will lead to business growth.

Utilizing Influencer Marketing

In fact, the success of influencer marketing is indicative of a wider trend within the social media community. As audience tastes become harder to predict and as algorithms used by social channels to display content on users’ feeds become more complicated and competitive, both influencers and brands are looking to trade direct engagement for hard cash. And for many of today’s web-savvy entrepreneurs, the biggest achievement of all is to leverage a large following into a viable business.

In this way, the process of transformation from lone gun blogger to serious retailer is far from straightforward. Many content creators with the vision and the audience quickly run into difficulty when faced with the challenge of inventory management and ecommerce, order fulfillment and shipping – not to mention after-sales customer care and community management. Without the right business infrastructure in place, the day-to-day nitty-gritty of running an online store can actually get in the way of growing a brand and building a loyal audience.

Running Promotions and Campaigns

What makes promotions and campaigns such a good idea? Firstly, it’s a great way to reward your followers! Next, if you want to clear some stuff from your inventory, this is the best time to do so, and running a promotion or a campaign could also help to create some buzz. Lastly, a well-thought campaign or promotion could be a great way to persuade your followers to buy your product. For example, you could try out the idea of having promotional codes that could only be used when buying from your website or in your brick-and-mortar store. These promo codes could get your followers a discount on the product that they’d like to buy. You could also use promo codes to motivate your followers – inform your followers that special promo codes that could be applied only once will be handed out to your fastest followers. Or you could also arrange games on your Instagram, and winners of the games could be rewarded with the promo codes.

You could also organize flash sales – tell your followers exactly what they need to do and when they need to do it to join the flash sales, and also what kind of rebate they would get if they participate in the flash sales. Social media platforms could also be a place where you actually handle charity auctions. Tell your followers about your plan and the charity organization, and also the products that you would be auctioning. Take things a step further and auction off exclusive products, or customized/autographed limited edition products. And, you could also organize lucky draws! But remember to present all of these activities in a visually appealing way and make your followers engage and interact with you!

Measuring Success

In the end, every businessperson must ask themselves: What’s my goal? Is my goal to get millions of followers and likes? Or is my goal to be rich and happy? From the days of Marco Polo and his travels on the Silk Road, the goal of a merchant was to generate riches – which usually were defined by how many coins one had. With increasing numbers of followers on social media, the question then becomes, “Great! How am I going to monetize the people that follow me?” The majority of businesses have a bottom line, and that number usually is arrived at by a simple subtraction problem of the money the business brings in versus how much it costs to bring the business in. If you want money, you’ve got to be able to turn the tides in your favor and either be better at selling (i.e., increasing your conversion rate, which is the percentage of people visiting your store who end up buying something) or go out and get more visitors.

In the last chapter, we discussed how we can measure the success of websites with metrics such as bounce rates, clickthrough rates, and whether or not people think you’re worth the money. The same concept applies here. After acquiring all your social media followers, you subsequently want to figure out what they’re actually doing. If you ask businesses how their Facebook or Twitter presence is performing, they might use the raw number or the growth rate of their follower count as their top KPI. And although your follower count is a good KPI, it can be easily gamed. As social media’s reach grows, you’re going to get a big net of people from all around the world. They’re going to be just about as valuable as dropping $100 bills on a school of young 7-year-olds who are wheat and gluten intolerant. Great, you’re attracting followers, but is this the right group of followers?

Key Performance Indicators

One of the basic mistakes that keep so many business owners stuck in content creation mode, churning out posts day after day without anything to show for it, is thinking that engagement is the ultimate goal of social media marketing. Their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – if they’re thinking that far – look something like “978 likes” or “212 comments” or “6 shares.” But those KPIs don’t put dollars in the bank! Growing a following and gathering engagement are not ends unto themselves. The most successful digital marketers use the boost in their followers as a means to an end: getting these people to provide them with money in exchange for some sort of value that they’ve delivered – whether it’s a product, a service, a cause to support (such as a fundraiser), even a voting bloc for a competition with a prize at the end.

That’s how the pros think about these things – and you need to adopt this same mindset if you’re going to start making sales through social media. You should have at least one KPI that measures whether you’re reaching your ultimate goal: conversion. That is, moving a follower from engagement to making a purchase. These posts could be one-time flashes in the pan, or part of a larger campaign. But no matter what you’re selling, there are key pieces of content that need to be present for your sale to happen. This chapter breaks these content pieces down into a series of three slideshows, since Instagram and Facebook are excellent for moving people through three phases of the buying process while scrolling. Each slideshow focuses on a different way people can show their interest in your product or service.

Analyzing Data and Insights

Hack a media kit tool: This will help you see a more comprehensive overview of your Instagram profile, including the quality of your audience rather than just quantity. It will show a lot of things you can’t already see, such as the average likes and the average comments every day, and the engagement rate, which is important to know when you’re reaching out to brands.

Another app I recommend, which is free and easy to use, is called Iconosquare. When you’re looking to understand who your followers are, how they interact with you, what your customer profile looks like, and gain a deeper understanding of your most popular posts, think about using the Instagram analytics service and data source for influencer marketing. It also reveals information such as genders, locations, and age ranges, best times to post, and what type of posts generate the most engagement, as well as video views. You can track up to 5 profiles, track your growth, and connect with other influencers around you also using Iconosquare.