Does having 100,000 fans matter?
Too often I hear about increasing Likes and increasing followers, but what about increasing sales?
The most effective way to start your online strategy is to identify what result you want. Align social media marketing with your business goals for the most effectiveness.
If you want more sales, these might be goals that you have.
- Increase website traffic
- Increase repeat sales
- Obtain more press
- Grow exposure or reach
- Obtain a higher sales average
Social Media Marketing can accomplish all of those goals. You just need to align your strategy to do so.
Is Social Worth the Investment?
Remember when your mom used to ask, “If your friends did something silly would you do that too?”
Things probably changed since then and you notice that it can be harder to convince people to get on board with you when it comes to social media’s investment of time and money.
These are 5 reasons why social marketing done well is worth you company’s time and money.
Trust: People don’t necessarily trust advertisements and they resent advertisers for interrupting their day. Having conversations and building relationships achieves the opposite effect. People are open to it and engage when they have time.
Visibility: With your target market spending an average of 23 minutes four times a day on social media sites you have an opportunity for more exposure. This exposure is from potential customers and from media looking for stories.
Word of Mouth: Word of mouth is the most preferred marketing tool for small businesses. It takes just a second for someone to share content about your brand with their friends, family and other like-minded people.
Voice: As the publisher of your content, you get more say in what people hear about you and your brand.
Cost: Cost starts at zero. Although you can pay for graphics, photography and video production most content will be very low cost.
Promote Profitable Items
It’s right back to the basics, but before you start any promotion you need to know what to promote and how it’s going to impact your bottom line. With the over abundance of the deal-of- the-day sites that give away the farm and fall short when it comes to repeat business, you’ll want to be confident in the margins of any item or special offer that is promoted.
Start by taking the Product Engineering concept to find your products or services that are a star, dog, challenge or workhorse. The calculation takes into consideration product cost percentages, contribution margins and accounts for popularity.
Star: Both profitable and popular.
Dog: Unprofitable and unpopular.
Challenges: Profitable but relatively unpopular.
Workhorses: Relatively unprofitable but popular.
This is how you’ll evaluate which items are best in promotions; you will know what you want to sell.
Once those items are determined plan to promote those items more heavily than the others.
Remember, promotion doesn’t always mean discount so you can take a picture of the item coming out of a newly shipped box, being packaged, being displayed, demonstrated, worn or paired with another matching item! There’s so much you can do with one single item to highlight it without offering a discount.
Goof Proof Plan to Get Past Customers to Come Back More Often
Radian 6/Salesforce estimates it cost 5-10 times more to bring in a new customer than it does to retain a past customer. That startling number is the exact reason why this step is crucial to your success.
Take an inventory of the systems and databases you are already using. This includes things like your shopping cart, email platforms and your point of sale system.
When customers come to your brick and mortar, your staff needs to be trained to ask for the customers’ email address and ask for permission to send them promotional offers and relevant information. Some retail brands are doing great with this by offering to email the receipt to the customer. From there it’s as simple as checking a box, exporting the file and importing it into your email system.
Most brands send emails once or twice a month and have average open rates of 20%. They also see an increase in unsubscribes when emails are sent more than 1 time per week. Customers are raising their hand, saying they are fans and they want to build relationships with you and your brand. The easy solution is to continue sending your promotional emails but provide value on your social sites too.
Success Stories:
Within a month of working with us, Make My Notebook started seeing consistent sales daily and the average order price on those sales increased.
The Machine Shed Restaurant ran a recipe book promotion by emailing their current list the link to download a free copy of the book and used fan gating on Facebook to grow Facebook Fans from zero to 5,000 in one quarter.
Strings Restaurant compiled five recipes into “Secrets of a Strings Chef” and sent the email to their current list. The result was that they doubled their Facebook Fans overnight and increased their daily engagements by 50%.
Once those databases are merged you now have a platform to invite customers to come back more often and a platform to invite customers to join you on your social sites too.
What you can do right now is circle one day of each month to export the email addresses from your shopping cart software and import them into your email system.
LinkedIn for Sales
Many brands are reporting surges in sales, fueled by revived corporate spending.
Wholesale accounts are appealing to many brands and there are many off line ways to increase sales but the most effective online strategy to bring in wholesale leads and sales is to leverage LinkedIn.
When most people think of LinkedIn they think of job searching, recruiters and posting a resume. In spite of that, “LinkedIn generates more leads for B2B companies than Facebook, Twitter or blogs.” -Social Media B2B
These are the exact steps to bring in wholesale leads on LinkedIn.
- Make sure that your profile is complete and top notch. Include a great headshot of you smiling, headline that stands out and makes clear what you do, many connections and endorsements to build trust and credibility.
- Identify your target market’s title, keywords, location and organizations.
- Join the groups that your target market is a member of. For example, if your target market is a boutique owner, go to Search Groups and type “boutique.” When the results come up join groups that are active and have large followings.
- On the Group page, select “Members” and a list of all members will populate. Refine the search by specifying geographic location or specific job title within the members section and a targeted list will populate.
- Send a magnetic message by hovering over their profile. When it turns blue and send message button will appear. Click that and write a subject
line and paste your Magnetic Message. Your Magnetic Message will be 5 sentences with these specific components.
- Sentence 1 and 2 will be about them, their vision, a mutual connect or something you have in common.
- Sentence 3 and 4 will be about what you’ve done for other people like them.
- Sentence 5 is the call to action.
Go ahead and work off this sample.
Subject Line: Products
Hello Kathleen,
I noticed you own an adorable boutique in Denver and noticed that you are focused on offer unique hand-made products by local artisans.
Our products have been getting praise by Sunset Magazine and lifestyle bloggers for being just that: unique and handmade with love.
Kathleen, I’d love to see our products in your store. I’m happy to discuss this week, but in the meantime take a look at our wholesale kit here (link).
All the best,
Katrina
In your message make sure it is clear what they need to do next. The best next step is have them click a link that takes them to an email opt in form. This way, you’ll be able to track how many people clicked the link and you’ll be capturing their email address for upcoming wholesale email campaigns.
Once your team receives their email you can directly contact them with a warm call.
Take Action:
Social media offers opportunities for you to increase your sales. Start by aligning your social marketing strategy with your business strategy for the best results.
Biography:
Katrina Padron founded Padron Social Marketing, a boutique social media marketing agency that delivers not just fans but sales. Being extremely passionate about positively influencing people to build a business and life they love while implementing online marketing, online pr and sales strategies make the impact.
Hire her here: https://northstarhq.com/