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So many fans, so few buyers! Argh! What gives?
Wondering where you’re going wrong with your online marketing?
Let me help you take a look under the digital hood and help you diagnose the problem.
I’ll give you 10 non-noobs tips for how to turn your followers into customers.
By non-noob I mean you’re not going to hear me say, ‘Make sure you have a business account for your Facebook/Pinterest/Instagram harharhar’ NO. š āāļø
You’re legions beyond all those basics and you’re looking for more advanced marketing tips.
I mean, you wouldn’t be getting all those followers if you were a noob, right?
So I’m guessing you’ve got the attraction and interest phase games on and now you’re eyeing that third part of the marketing funnel, conversions. Where the money at, yo!šø
So here we’re talking sales skills and persuasion skills. Or as I like to call it, a marketician’s digital witchcraft!š®
First, let’s get those noob-basics out of the way (just in case).
You’re NOT an online marketing noob if you:
- Already have business social media accounts, set to public (duh)
- Have good branding and good photography
- You’re all over email list building and know that it’s vital for running an online business. In fact, you know that you don’t have an online business if you’re not building an email list, and the #1 tip below will show you why it’s so important!
So let’s get into it, quick and dirty, just like I like my olive martini’s. šø
10 Ways How to Turn Your Followers in Customers (Repeatedly!)
1. Don’t sell on the front end – sell on the backend.
If you wanna piss off your followers, make them cringe (and almost inevitably call you a scammer at some point š) or both, keep trying to sell on the front-end of your marketing.
By front-end I mean directly on your organic social media posts, in your blog posts, and in your Facebook group.
This is the biggest mistake I see many businesses make online.
BUY MY SHIT!
BUY MY SHIT!
WHY ISN’T ANYONE BUYING MY SHIT?š”
Even if you’re creating fantastic content just to attract and maintain interest (the non-salesy stuff), people hate direct sales nearly 90% of the time. That 10% they do like sales is when there is a bargain or something just too good to pass up on, or when it’s exactly what they are looking for.
Since you’re not a noob you may have heard the metaphor that making a customer is like dating someone – you don’t propose marriage on the first date, right? So think of the frontend as a public place, like a bar, party, or Tinder, and the backend is like the first date.
So only sell directly on the front end when you’ve got a mouth-watering offer, or just as sparingly as possible.
Otherwise, you want to move your followers into your backend by getting them to subscribe to your email.
That leads us to point #2…
2. Give free stuff away on the front – webinars, optins, challenges, etc.
The best way to move people to the backend is by offering FREE stuff like webinars, challenges, and free optins.
These can be PDF downloads, free training series, templates, swipe files, and other fun stuff that is relevant to what you sell.
And if you’re thinking, ‘yea, yea, email doesn’t work‘ or ‘people hate email’ then you’re not doing it right.
People do like email when it gives them what they are looking for!
They do like email when it’s sending them good free stuff, good content, fun stuff, or even a fun vibe and lots of eye-candy.
If you make the free stuff the emails that follow worth signing up for, you’re followers are going to like it.
And that brings me to point #3…
3. Target the right people and remove the wrong people – they aren’t helping you sell.
Ok, ok, so maybe you’re well beyond knowing exactly who you are targeting since you’re no noob here.
You have a very specific person in mind when you market, and you’re talking in their language.
You target based more on psychographics (interests and attitudes) than on demographics (age, location, income level).
That’s basic stuff.
But if you have a big following and it’s not relevant to what you are selling or engaged with your content, it may be time to cull.
Deadweight followers will pull down your organic reach and skew your data, so don’t be afraid of a big fat cull.
Cull all the male followers off your Instagram if you only sell to women, for example.
Or cull all the Facebook page profiles out of your Facebook group if you are trying to create an engaged community.
Believe it or not, many social media managers report big spikes in engagement when they cull hundreds of fake and irrelevant followers off their social accounts.
This helps increase organic reach and relevancy, which will ultimately help you sell later.
Now let’s take a look at the best way how to turn followers into customers with your content…
4. Make your core content video or podcast-based.
I once visited a locally-based massage website where a lady was trying to sell massages with home visits.
There wasn’t a single photo of what she looked like on her site OR on her social platforms! š¬
I started thinking, ‘What if she looks like she would smell?’ ‘What if she looks like a serial killer?!’
(Not that I’m that cocksure I’d be able to tell a serial killer from a non-serial killer, but do you see how human imagination becomes space-invader foam-filler when we leave out the crucial details??!)
Seeing you and hearing your voice is like hitting turbo on the know-like-trust cycle.
Video or audio content massively closes the distance between your followers seeing you as a possible scammer to seeing you as a real, trustworthy human being.
Sales is all about closing up that distance as fast as possible.
Up there with direct selling, a void of human faces or human sounds in your online marketing is a huge block to selling.
Check that you are showing up in your marketing.
Rate yourself on visibility – low score for next-to-never, high score for every week, with bonus points for any video content.
5. Write your posts using classic copywriting persuasion formulas.
Now let’s take a look at THE most important skill you can develop as an online marketician, your verbal witchcraft.
Because witchcraft is an apt way to describe damn good copy that gets the clickety-clicks to your cart!
Copywriting is writing to persuade and to sell. Not to be confused with content writing. Or that trademark @ symbol for copyright.
Your ability to persuade people to buy your thing or, backing the truck up here a bit, to sign-up for your free thing first, is the true make-it-or-break-it element to online selling.
So invest some time in memorizing the most classic copywriting formulas.
Be warned – once you learn them you’ll start to see them everywhere around you! You’ll start making it a game to deconstruct the writing on every billboard, magazine ad, and tv commercial you see (I did!).
When I started using the basic formulas like FAB, ACCA, PAPA, and the much-belove AIDA (acronyms for formulas) a few things happened:
- Engagement, clicks, and shares increased
- I saved HEAPS of time trying to come up with captions and descriptions!
- Conversions to sign-up for free things and to paid things increased (woo-hoo!)
You can use the formulas for all the conversion points of your marketing: social posts to optin page to the first email and on and on to the next important sales conversion point…
Of course, copywriting gets far more sophisticated than the classic formulas, but memorizing half a dozen or so is a great place to start verbally lubing up your marketing for sales.
The point of your copy should ALWAYS be to move the reader along to the next point of your sales funnel.
An excellent and famously classic primer for learning persuasion copywriting techniques that I highly recommend reading is The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini
And that brings us to point #6…
6. Write a killer sales page or product description
If what separates the noob marketers from marketicians is their copywriting, nowhere is it more important than on their sales page or product description page.
The place where you directly sell and bring out the big guns of emotional and logical persuasion in a systematically captivating way.
Noobs write boring, shoot-from-the-hip muck while Marketicians have studied copywriting or hired one to write their sales pages and product descriptions.
They have invested time into getting inside the heads of their readers to know what keeps them up at night, what they dream and aspire toward, and what they fear.
This requires research and skill.
Sales pages are designed to convert.
So if you want to learn how to turn your followers into customers, learn sales page copywriting.
Study how to write compelling product descriptions.
You’ll not only learn how to sell, you’ll also learn how to connect your brand to your followers in a meaningful way that may lead to repeat sales and brand loyalty to boot.
Let’s look deeper at some of the mechanisms of good sales copy now…
7. Use urgency
Another huge mistake noob marketers make online is making their offer available all the time, anytime.
When you have a forever sale, people tell themselves, ‘I’ll get to that later’.
But people are distracted. They won’t get to it if you leave it up to them.
You’ve got to harness the twitchy fingers right then and there.
And one of the most potent digital lassos in sales is urgency.
I see this a lot with my clients who run regular free challenges. People sign up, forget to make time to do the challenge in their schedule, then miss out.
‘Can I have a replay link?’ Nope. It’s all down now. Too late.
‘Will there be another challenge?’ Maybe. (there always will be but never give vague assurances or they’ll just get lazy again – precise dates or nothing.)
But if you apply urgency to your marketing, you shorten the sales cycle and build anticipation for your offers by creating a sense of FOMO ahead of time.
‘Act now or miss out on [bonus/early bird price/VIP access/etc.]’ is a powerful sales tactic.
If you want to learn how to turn your followers into customers, research ways you can apply urgency to your marketing.
And that brings me to the sidekick of urgency…
8. Use scarcity
Not only do you have to let your followers know they need to get your thing NOW, they also need to know that your thing is limited.
‘Only 10 spots left!’
‘Only 5 available!’
Make your thing limited to further apply pressure on those twitchy fingers right then and there.
And actually limit your thing – no need to don’t lie about it! Your followers don’t know if they are the only one interested or not. But what’s important here is that they perceive the offer is limited so that they are compelled to grab it in the moment it’s offered.
Research ways you can create a perception of limitation on your offer, then stand by it.
Remind people what they will miss out on if they don’t buy right away. Make it painful!
Now for the biggest finger-clicking-lasso of all…
9. Use testimonials and case studies to ‘get results like this!’
Nothing convinces people your thing is worth buying more than hearing from other people convinced that it was worth it.
Like the social proof of having a decent social media following, having a strong set of both testimonials and case studies gives people the proof they want to see that if it worked for others, it might work for them, too.
Case studies backed by data or before-and-after themes tend to be stronger than testimonials. A lot of people think testimonials are bullshit, but a case study using data as proof is harder to write off.
If you do use testimonials, use actual screenshots of where the testimonial came in (on Facebook, for example) and post a little bragging-blurb on how you got those results for your customers.
Or, attach a photo and live link to your customer (with their permission) to prove that the person is real.
Tell people, ‘if you want results like this’ they can get them from you, and ‘Here’s how!’ with the data and proof to back up your claims.
Savvy marketers have a sophisticated understanding of how to turn customers into buyers because they have identified the different types of buyers.
They know that while pretty product pictures may be enough to captivate the impulsive buyer, the skeptical buyer needs her every question answered: Is it a scam? What are the reviews? Who IS this person on this testimonial?
And you can bet they are fiendishly Googling ALL of it (I know because I AM a skeptical buyer – I need to see a thousand, government stamped, certified, and signed-in blood pieces of evidence to believe anything) š
10. Get outside eyes – get a marketing audit.
Finally, once you’ve checked off all of these things, get a pair of outside eyes to look at how you are selling.
There may be red flags your followers are seeing that you’re oblivious to, if only because you are too close to your own work to see them.
What I find most often wrong is how the offer has been presented. It’s missing key parts mentioned above, or it talks about features first rather than benefits, for example.
But knowing what makes a good offer requires experience, so don’t just ask your BFF to do your audit.
Hire a copywriter, marketing agency, or business coach with strong marketing skills to help you out.
Or, if you’ve got the guts, join a Facebook group focused on marketing and share your sales page or copy sample, and let the hounds out!
You won’t always get the best advice, but you may get a lot of insightful tips and ideas. Sometimes just having someone give you an outside insight is all you need to know in order to point you in the right direction to understand what may need changing up!
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