How to Sell More with Your Social Media Strategy

You just can’t get people to buy your stuff

Despite the detailed information you’ve added into your social posts, people aren’t signing up for your offers, not engaging with your social posts and maybe just a few are actually clicking on your links.

It feels like you’re doing all the things the experts are telling you do. You’re posting frequently, you’re adding images to your messages and you’re adding links and not just posting text.

But … you just can’t get anyone to buy your stuff. And now you’re starting to wonder if you have to have a gazillion followers to make this stuff work.

Does this sound familiar?

Let’s cut right to the heart of this – it’s really not about the number of times you’re posting or what site you’re on. That’s not the real reason your social posts aren’t working.

I’m going to share with you one of the biggest marketing secrets to make more social media sales: When you focus on the features of your services or products, your marketing efforts won’t work.

It’s really just that simple.

The Lost Art of Listening

Maya Angelou once said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Think about that for a minute. Let it sit in your head for a full 60 seconds. Don’t think about what you have to do later today or someone you forgot to call. Just be quiet for a minute and think about the words you just read.

When I relate that quote to social media, it makes me think of this: People will forget what you’ve posted, they’ll forget what event you tweeted about but they will never forget the person who made them feel important because you heard what they had to say.

They’ll remember the ones who really listened to them.

The first step to learning how to sell more with your social media messages is to really listen to your customers when they talk about their challenges. Once you understand how your services/products can untangle their obstacles, you can show them how your stuff is the solution to their problems.

People don’t want to buy your product or services. They want to know how your products/services can provide them with a specific result like something to make their lives easier, help them do something faster or give them more confidence.

My First Real Grown-up Job

My junior year in college I got my first ‘I can’t believe they’re paying me this much to work here’ job at a local radio station. I worked in sales at the Top 40 station that all the college kids locked into the first place on their car radio.

I spent the first month learning all the secrets behind the music and voices on the air. I soaked in as much as my college brain could handle. For the next fifteen years, I found a home in radio.

With the exception of accounting, I’ve done just about every job you could imagine at a radio station. I even did a small part on the morning show at our local country station for about a year and half.

{ Some folks might think being on a radio station morning show sounds pretty cool but getting up at 3am every day for someone’s who is not a morning person probably wasn’t the best fit me! }

Then came that fateful day when the big box store corporations took over my world.

I moved to the online division of radio { my first step into the world of online marketing! } and eventually my frustrations with the way radio was changing caused me to leave.

I left radio to start my own business in 1999. That was truly the day the music died.

The real reason I stopped selling

I worked in radio sales for over ten years. By the time I worked at my last radio station, I stopped working in sales and moved my desk into the marketing department.

Want to know the real reason I stopped selling? I’m abso-freaking-lutely terrible at the hard sell. Quotas were getting harder for me to reach. Management was always on me to close more deals.

I tried, I really did but it just got to that uncomfortable, awkward icky place.

Truth was – I sucked at selling the product.

Ironically, over those ten years in sales, I did make money and hit my commission numbers. People bought from me because of my customer service skills.

They bought from me because I showed them how to get more folks through their doors, more people to show up to their events and more orders for their stuff.

At the time, I was just trying to find ways to help them. I didn’t realize that I was selling them solutions.

I gave them reasons why they should use my radio station – my listeners where loyal to the station’s advertisers, they were the right customers these businesses wanted and they had the money and the right problems to buy.

You’d think I would have been the top sales person and drive a big fancy car from all that solution selling.  But I didn’t.

Businesses wanted lower rates. They wanted to know they were getting a good deal or they’d buy from the radio rep that was waiting for his turn to get into the manager’s office.

It was a different time back then. Those were the days before social media and the idea of one-to-one engagement.

Sell the Solution, Not the Product

Most of the statistics I found said we see over 250 marketing messages per day. That number includes everything from TV commercials, outdoor billboards and social media marketing messages like Facebook ads.

There’s no way our brains can process that many messages. Chances are, you probably only recall seeing about a third of those marketing ads.

But the right message telling us how it can fix our problems? Now that will get our attention. A marketing message that shows us something we want will get noticed and remembered.

How do you show your customers you have the right answers to their challenges?

1. Establish value

I’m not talking about the “do you want to make that a value meal?” kind of thing. I mean to focus on the value your products can bring to your customers.

Does your service help them save time? Will using your product reduce the risk of something that concerns them?

Don’t just give me a post with a list all the selling points of your stuff. Use your marketing messages to tell them about how they’ll benefit from buying this thing from you.

Share a story about how your program helped you. Let me know about a client who had a problem and then your service helped them make more money, work only 5 hours a day … or whatever that one result is from buying your product/service.

2. Engage and then inform

When you pull your customers in with something that connects with them, they’ll be more open to hearing about your offers.

I always say that people do business with PEOPLE that they know and trust. Building that relationship with them is the key to selling solutions.

Show them you know what you’re talking about when you share a blog post that teaches them the basics. Establish your expertise with tips on YouTube videos or creating step-by-step images for Pinterest.

3. Marketing Yourself as the Problem Solver

To put your company in this place, you need to ask yourself this basic question: What problem does my product or service solve?

If you need some help answering that question, try breaking it down even further with these:

1. Does my product make my customer’s life easier?
2. Will my service help them do something quicker?
3. Does my stuff give them more value for less cost than the others?

You want your customers know that you’re not just some company they can switch out with the next one who comes along with a cheaper version of your stuff. You want them to know how your products and services can help them make their worlds flow easier.

Did you know that the top 5% sales people schedule time in their day to look up a company before they set an appointment? They read, analyze and monitor what’s going with their customers before they’ve even walked in the door.

These top sales people don’t have anything more to help them with their research than you already have in your laptop or smart phone.

There’s a ton of conversations happening in your social sites – like Facebook Groups, Twitter and even the posts with your Facebook friends – that can help you learn more about what your customers are talking about and what keeps them up at night.

When your customers see your social posts showing them that you understand what they’re looking for, there’s no longer a need for a sales pitch in your social posts.

Soon, you’ll realize that you’ll know your customer so well that you’ll start giving them what they want even before they ask for it.

 

PS There’s so much going on in your life. You’re trying to make your business happen, trying to make money happen … it doesn’t happen by chance. You have to deliberately show up when and how they expect you to, if you want grow your business online.

Download the Social Media Productivity Planner! Grab the one tool you need to take you from wishing you had time to grow your business to owning a profitable business.

{ This is me doing a hard sell 🙂 }