How to Turn Your Social Media Followers into Customers
Use these 5 tips, methods or strategies
You need first to understand and accept that not everyone who stumbles upon your offerings will sign up for it right off the bat. People only buy from people they already know and trust.
Therefore, your first set of potential customers is those who follow you on social media. It’s usually pretty tricky to get your social media followers to buy from you, but with these 5 tips, I bet you can make it happen.
Use An Opt-In
You give out an opt-in to people in exchange for their email addresses. I worked with an author a while ago, this was someone who had written a lot of bestsellers.
We came up with a plan to create a students’ version of one of his best-selling books and use it as an opt-in. Within 3 days, we had 1230 sign-ups. Opt-ins are magical and magnetic.
The key to getting this to work is to create one that is very valuable to your audience. And to do this, you must know the kind of people who follow you and what they would like to have.
For example, if your audience is mostly women between the ages of 25–35 who want to get their finances in order, what do you think they’d need? Any financial document, a financial tracker, a workbook or a pdf that explains financial terms will work well.
Once you’ve gotten them to give you their email addresses, you can start to build brand loyalty and trust by sending them quality emails and when they’ve seen first-hand that you’re delivering amazing content to them, you can rest assured that they’ll be converted.
Host a Webinar
Raise your hands if you’ve ever attended a webinar and you started getting emails from the host after it ended. Almost all of us.
The secret to offering a great webinar is to plan to give a lot of stuff out for free. You’ll be getting a lot of people to sign up with their email addresses and in order to convert them, you have to develop the trust factor.
Hosting a webinar will offer you a lot of opportunities to get people to sign up for your offerings when you offer exclusive buy-ins at the end of the webinar.
I attended a webinar that did just this the perfect way a few months ago. Now I’m in their database and they keep sending these amazing offers to me. So after the webinar has ended, you can still send out reminder emails to those who haven’t signed up, creating a sense of urgency. After the webinar, send out emails again to remind those who haven’t taken the offer, and you want to create a sense of urgency.
Share Really Helpful Content
Before you roll your eyes, please understand what I’m saying here. I know that it sounds like a cliche to ‘share really helpful content’ but the fact is that you cannot replace helpful content with anything else.
One trap that a lot of business owners, especially freelancers/solopreneurs fall into is the idea of posting content that’ll make them popular. You want to sound like an authority, so you post content that makes you sound like one instead of posting content that will help the people following you.
Your followers may like your popularity, but what they really want is something that’ll help them grow. They want to grow their business, they want to grow their finances, they want to have beautiful skin or eat healthily, and they need something or someone who can help them with that.
It’s your job to post content that will help them get from point A to point B and they’ll be eating out of your hands.
Run Ads
Running ads is a very good conversion strategy. With an effective Facebook ad, you’ll be able to get your followers to buy what you’re selling as easily as possible. The problem lies in running the ads effectively. Facebook ads are pretty complex, select the wrong objective and you’ll be throwing a lot of money away.
Many people attempt Facebook ads without knowing the right information. A lot of people have come to me with so many issues about their ad accounts, they tried to boost their posts on Facebook but ended up getting their ad accounts suspended because they didn’t do it the right way.
So my suggestion is that you give it to an expert to run your ads for you, if you are really keen on seeing results.
Develop a Sales Funnel
Sales funnels are instrumental to converting your followers to customers. I’m not going to complicate it at all. A funnel it’s simply the journey you take your customers through from when they first meet you to when they eventually make their first purchase.
With a sales funnel, you can track your leads as they move down the customer journey and move closer to become paying customers. You are going to be creating a landing page, an offer, a lot of nurturing and a lot of tweaking to make your sales funnel work.
Bonus Point: Dig into your competitor’s strategies and find out how they are converting their followers, just remember that you have to be as original as you can be.
