Social media marketing is an indispensable tool for all businesses. The success comes from building strong and lasting relationships with customers and professional contacts over many months and years by giving them the type of content and expertise that they will want to share with their friends, family and colleagues.
It provides you with new opportunities to build relationships, engage with customers and increase sales like never before.
However, you may have only had limited or no success and were wondering why your social media followers aren’t buying from you. If that is the case, this article will help you to change that.
Have You Defined Your Goals?
If you have not defined your goals and what you want to achieve on social media it is going to be hard to measure your results. Whether or not your social media campaign is a success or not all depends on what you want to achieve from it.
Are Your Social Media Followers Relevant?
There are a number of factors to take into consideration regarding whether or not your social media followers are relevant to your business and your products in order to convert them into buyers.
The first thing to take into consideration is how you got your followers. For instance, if your follower base is built on friends and family, this could be a major factor why your social media conversions are so low. The reason being that they are probably not that interested in your product or service. They are interested and loyal to you, and that is the reason why they liked and follow your page.
Another mistake that a lot of businesses make is when they run social media competitions in order to try and get more ‘likes’ and followers. Although the competition might initially attract many more followers, the quality of the new followers might not be actually very good.
The quality of these followers could be improved if you only gave away one of your products or services as a prize as opposed to a cash prize or generic shopping voucher which will attract anybody and everybody, whether they would be interested in your product or not. Giving away a gift relating to your business would ensure that the majority of your new followers would be interested in your company or products and will want to engage with you in the future.
That is your aim. You want your fans to have a genuine interest so that when the competition is over, they will continue to take an interest in your business and may purchase from you in the future.
The whole point of marketing on social media is to have fans and followers to be genuinely interested in your company and products and for that to be the main reason why they liked your page in the first place.
Do You Post Enough?
Social media is something that you have to do consistently in order to make an impact. There are so many other people competing for the attention of your followers on social media that you need to make your voice be heard above the noise.
If you are only posting a few times a week it is not enough. You will need to post more often in order for your message to be heard.
Review Your Posts…Are They Relevant to Your Followers?
Depending on the kind of business you have, you will probably be promoting certain products on your social media pages in order to send traffic to your website.
However, if the visitors are not converting into sales, it might be a good idea to review your posts and see if they are the right kind of products that your followers want to buy? You may need to experiment with various products in your range to see which ones work best and convert the most buyers on your social media pages.
Your content needs to engage with your followers and to be appropriate to what you are selling. If you are not posting solid content that your followers and fans enjoy reading you are going to lose them and you will have to work extra hard to try and win them back.
Do You Post Too Many Sales Messages?
Most people tend to go on social media sites for light relief and entertainment, not to be given sales pitches.
If you come across as too pushy and are constantly trying to push your products and services in your social posts a lot of people will be turned off and not want to buy from your company.
To convert your social media followers into customers your posts need to be friendly and interactive.
Do You Forget to Repost Your Offers?
Don’t automatically think that just because you have posted your offer and it didn’t get as good a response that you had hoped, that your followers weren’t interested.
There will be occasions where your audience will see your product post and may very well be interested in it. However, they may not be in a position to buy it right at that moment. For example, they may have children to look after, or be especially busy or may even be in the process of cooking dinner when you make your post.
In order to convert them into buyers, it is a good idea to promote the product again a day or so later. The chances are, many of these interested followers may be in a better position to buy from you this time.
It is quite common to have to promote an offer three or four times in order to push your audience down the converting tunnel.
With that said, you do have to be careful not to irritate your audience by constantly making the same promotion time and time again. You need to be more subtle with each promotion in order to get the balance right.
There are no hard and fast rules. It all depends on your particular audience and also how often you promote others things alongside your products and services.
Are You Posting At the Wrong Time?
Your aim is for your posts to be read by as many people as possible. There are lots of studies out there that measure the best times to post and Facebook even gives you the data in your Insights tab on your fan page which will help show you when the majority of your fans are online. Keep your own records and monitor the response that you posts receive at various times.
Are Your Expectations Too High?
Don’t expect to become a millionaire overnight. To get any kind of success from social media marketing requires a lot of time and dedication. Remember too, that it is only one aspect of your Internet marketing campaign. It should be combined with SEO, email marketing and other essential marketing methods to complement it.
Are You Focussing on the Wrong Networks?
Most people are familiar with Facebook but there are other platforms out there and some of them may be more suited to your target audience. For example if your product or service is highly visual then Pinterest would be your best option. If you have are aiming at a younger target audience you may want to consider using Instagram instead. Think about your audience and which platform they are most likely to use. If you don’t know, then ask them.
Are You a Broken Record?
If you are posting the exact same messages on every platform there’s no reason anyone would follow you on more than one and it could be losing you a lot of sales. Optimize your content and the way you present it for each network. Your LinkedIn followers and your Instagram followers likely match different customers personas and they will expect different things from your social media posts so you need to adapt your messages to suit them.
So as you can you can see, there are many reasons why your social media followers are not buying from you. If you can identify with any of the points you have just read, it is highly probable that you will start to see much better results once you have corrected the problem.
Despite the fact that social media marketing is so popular, there are many businesses owners who find it daunting and too time consuming.
There are HUGE Benefits…and We Can Help
There are so many reasons why social media marketing is so important for your business. Here are just a few reasons why you need a social media marketing campaign:
- Enhance your trustworthiness – You will see an increase in your website conversion rates. People are re-assured by the presence of a regularly updated Twitter feed on a website (hours, not days). It shows professionalism, authority and clearly displays that your site is “open for business”.
- Brand recognition and repeat exposure – It is said of traditional advertising that a potential customer has to see your advert seven times before taking any action. This is your opportunity to get your brand under your potential clients noses without being pushy.
Getting ahead of your competitors – Do your competitors use social media? Most of your competitors will probably not be doing a good job of embracing social media, so this is your chance to race ahead. If they are engaging well in the social networks then you must get involved or you risk being left behind and losing your audience to your competition.
- Grow your marketing power – As your followers increase your marketing power increases. The more following you have – the more people want to join in and get involved. It’s the “crowd effect” people always want to see what the crowd is interested in, and they join the crowd!
Improve your authority – When people see you have a busy social network with hints and trivia relating to your chosen business field they will automatically associate authority with it. Your business will be seen as having increased credibility and specialist knowledge, which, in turn, will also increase your sales conversion rates.
- Return on investment – You’ll never see a better return on investment than a well-run social media campaign. Google is now returning social media results in amongst its search results and Twitter and Facebook have literally hundreds of millions of users. You can get access to this market for a tiny monthly investment when compared to other marketing channels.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – Google has placed more and more prominence in what are commonly referred to as “social signals”. We can use these to good effect to boost your rankings.
- Website traffic – This goes hand in hand with SEO – because Google will be giving you more traffic – but as your social media campaign grows and matures you will also see more and more direct traffic from the social networks.
Let us take care of it
We have a number of ways that we can help you with your social media marketing. Please contact us to find out how we can help your business to achieve social media success and increase your profits as well as promoting your brand online.
