Here’s the deal. Your business can have a huge presence on Facebook with thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of fans, but still struggle to get new clients. Why is this? Well, for the most part it is because you’re not doing a good enough job of turning those fans into actual paying customers.
You have done a great job with the first step in the process which is attracting people on Facebook and ultimately building a raving fan base. Now is the time, however, to take that next step of turning those fans into people that actually pay you money for what you have to offer.
Here are 5 strategies to consider that will help your fans turn into customers.
1. Be Consistent with Content
In the overall scheme of things, it is important that you keep your Facebook fans engaged and keep your brand in front of them at all times. To that end, it is very important that you as a business owner maintain a consistent approach to the content you are publishing for your followers. A good practice is to put something out there once a
day that is likely to be shared or liked a lot. Not only will this help your content go viral and get in front of more people, it will also establish you as an authority in your industry.
Examples of content that you can post on a daily basis are how to articles, tips related to your industry or even interesting photos that your fans may want to see. The key is to make this content as engaging as possible so that it keeps getting shared and it keeps your fans coming back for more.
Now, when one of your fans needs the service or product you offer who are they going to call? Exactly! They will call you because they know who you are and consider you an authority in your industry.
2. Reach More of Your Fan Base
In order to convert more fans into customers, first your fans actually have to SEE what you are posting and promoting so they have the opportunity to become a customer. One of the most dramatic changes Facebook has made recently is minimizing organic reach for brands. Basically, this means that only a tiny fraction of your fans will see your updates in their newsfeed. According to Edge Rank Checker as of march 2014 it was estimated that you reach about 6.5% of your fan base with every post you make on your fan page.
There’s a number of ways you can increase your posts visibility within your fans news feed, and one of the best ways is to promote your posts. A promoted post starts off just like any other post you’ve made on your fan page. You simply choose a post you want to promote, like a special sale, or a story you want to share about your business. Then you set a budget and the post is shared to a set number of Facebook members depending on your budget. Your post will be seen by your fans, and even friends of your fans depending on your budget. Promoting your posts is a very inexpensive way to ensure you get maximum visibility.
Another way to ensure your fans see your updates is to educate your fans that they can ‘Get Notifications’ from your Page.
Most of the time, users aren’t even aware that they aren’t getting seeing your updates. Simply by telling them how they can stay better informed with your businesses special promotions will boost the number of people that actually see your posts.
3. Create Offers with Urgency or Scarcity
If you want to turn more of your Facebook fans into paying customers then you are going to have to market to them – plain and simple.
Now, a common and effective practice to use is creating offers and posting them to Facebook that have an element of scarcity or urgency to them in order to get people to act right away. In other words, why not post a coupon limited to the first 10 people who claim it for a certain percentage off your service? Or what about a special offer on a service that expires in 24-hours? Make the offer something that your fans cannot pass up and you will see the phone begin to ring! That said, once you end driving your fans from Facebook through your doors it is your job to keep them coming back. Use these special offers as a way to get them there – it’s up to you to keep them there.
Another way to reach your audience with a special deal is through Facebook Offers. This is a form of paid advertising where you can create an ad and target specific people with a special offer that will fit their needs. Once the ad is created and displayed it will have a “get offer” button on it. When a user clicks this button, they will be directed to an area where they can claim the discount offered by your company. The thing that makes Facebook Offers unique and very powerful is that they will actually email the person that claimed the offer to remind them to use it. In other words, they will do some of the dirty work for you to ensure that the person actually becomes a paying customer!
4. Drive Fans to Your Email List
Having a robust fan base on Facebook is great and can be very profitable but there is an even better way to engage these people to turn them into customers. What is it you ask? Simple, it’s email. If you are able to drive your fans to your email list then you will be able to communicate with them on a whole other level. Email newsletters are still the best way to communicate directly to your audience.
Think about it for a moment. Not only are you engaging them within Facebook, but now you are also engaging them within their inbox. This is very powerful as the more “planes of engagement” there are between you and your potential customers the more you will see your bottom line increase.
The best part about building that email list from your Facebook fan base is that it’s easy! You simply need to drive your fans from Facebook to an email opt-in form on your website or to an opt-in form right within Facebook. There are many apps out there that make it really easy to create these lead capture forms right within Facebook so the fan never has to leave if you don’t want them to.
Please keep in mind that people will only opt-in to your email list if you give them a good reason. Don’t be afraid to offer a discount or some other valuable form of content to ensure they sign up right away!
5. Show Them Some Love Too
A final strategy to turn fans onto customers is to show them some love too! What this means is making sure you are active on Facebook and sharing content that your fans have produced. This will create a feeling of reciprocity between you and your fans. It will also show that you are just a normal person too – not a corporate machine.
People love being engaged with in social media. If you take a few minutes each day to engage with some of your fans, you will see that investment on time come back to you tenfold. Even if you post though automation and use a platform such as MySoPro, it’s a great idea to always check in daily and take a look at new likes, comments, shares and overall engagement. All of a sudden, a normal fan will become a raving fan just because you reached out to engage them. Who do you think that person will do business with when they need what you have to offer?
All in all, getting your Facebook fans to turn into paying customers is easy if you know what you are doing. Just follow the strategies that are outlined above and watch your business take off like you never thought possible!
If you want to ensure you’re getting the best results from your Facebook ads, you need to know they’re reaching the right audience. The good news is, thanks to the social media giant’s huge range of targeting options, this couldn’t be easier.
By only reaching the people who actually matter, your ads have a lot more value and in turn deliver a much higher conversion rate. So how exactly can you ensure you’re reaching the right audience?
Location and demographic targeting
Two of the most powerful targeting options available when you create a Facebook ad are location and demographic. You can choose exactly where you want your customers to be based. This is especially useful for local businesses focused solely on drawing in local customers to their stores.
Narrowing down the location is only the first step. The next is to target specific demographics. You need to think about the type of consumer that’s going to be most interested in your product.
For example, will Millennials be more interested in what you have to offer, or would your services best suit those over the age of 40? You can specify certain age groups when targeting your ad to ensure you’re reaching the most appropriate audience. That’s not all, you can also target things such as:
Gender
Relationship status
Employment
The more you narrow down your audience, the better the results you’ll have. However, one thing you should be careful of is behavioral targeting. While it may seem clever, 68% of consumers state they are not ok with targeted ads that follow them around based upon their behavior.
The benefits of running multiple ads
Of course, targeted ads largely only help if you know WHO you are targeting in the first place. However, it is possible to develop a deeper understanding of your target audience by running multiple ads.
It can be extremely beneficial to run several targeted ads at the same time, each targeting a different demographic or location. That way, you can see exactly which groups are most interested in your product.
You may just be surprised to discover that a different group of people to those you initially planned to target are more interested in what you have to offer.
It’s pretty simple to set up a targeted Facebook ad. The options are automatically presented to you once you’ve chosen your ad objective. However, it is a good idea to do your research first. That way, you’ll know exactly who you should be targeting and which options have the best chance of success.
Raise your hand if you’re cautious about spending money on marketing? Same here.
That’s why it blows my mind when one of my clients drops up to 10K on an animation and does nothing with it. I’m not kidding.
I’ve followed up with clients months after we finish an animation and ask where they’ve been using it. Their response?
“Well, we have it on the website somewhere.”
Then I play my favorite game of “Where in the world is the video we created for my client?”
I love my clients. All of them. But they are leaving money on the table because explaining a confusing product or service takes time. And what does time equate to?
Money.
That’s why I created a checklist of best practices for marketing your video(s) to get the most mileage. Below are a few ideas from my checklist which you can download for free.
FRONT PAGE OF YOUR WEBSITE
You might be thinking, “No s%#t Mike”, but this is the #1 place the majority of my clients do NOT use it. Completely kills me. One of our clients had it on the front page of their site but it was hidden by an image that looked like a film strip with a 12pt type that said: “Watch our video”.
I took a screenshot of their website, sent this image and told them to have their web designer use it as a template to get the video front and center.
Below was his reply after they followed my advice.
—-
You were right!
The new placement of the video has yielded 110 views in the past month, compared to 127 views in the 4 months prior to the move.
Thanks for your help on that!
Steve
—-
Take a look at your analytics and see how many people are visiting your website daily. Even if it’s just 3, what does it mean to you if just one of them becomes a client? Is there a residual value to that?
Also, don’t forget that your website works during the weekend even when you’re not.
ADD IT TO YOUR EMAIL SIGNATURE
This is something you can do right now. Just think of how many emails you send out a month. According to my email account, I’ve sent 711 in the last 30 days. That’s A LOT of eyes and potential clients.
Here’s what you can do:
Grab the youtube link or the landing page where your video resides
Open your email settings and write something witty in your email signature with a link to the video. Here’s a sample:
Make sure you don’t put the link as the text because people will click less on that
Drink a beer.
Add a weekly or monthly reminder to check your Bitly clicks so you can see if you need to change the signature to get more clicks. If you have employees, suggest they do the same thing in their signature.
UPLOAD IT TO YOUR LINKEDIN PROFILE
Think what you want about Linkedin, but people use it. Know what they use it for? To check your credibility and learn more about your skilllzzzz.
Once you show up on someone’s profile page there’s an option to “See More”. You can add video to this section. What a great place to put your video so people know what your company does?!
Have employees? Suggest they add it to their profiles as well.
PIN IT TO THE TOP OF YOUR FACEBOOK BUSINESS PAGE
If you have a Facebook Business page then people are using this as a way to find out a little about your business. Visitors will briefly skim your page and then bounce. They’ll check out reviews and some posts to see how people are engaging with you. This is why pinning your video to the top of your page is useful. Especially if you want them to quickly know about something you are currently promoting.
Check out Eleven Lights Media’s Facebook page. The very first post is a pinned video because Sarah Moore wants everyone to know about her CREATE campaign.
First, upload your video as a post. Once it’s up, click the drop-down arrow in the top right corner and choose “Pin to top of page”.
Voila!
MAKE CLIPS OF YOUR VIDEO INTO GIFS
Giphy.com is amazing. You can upload your youtube link, add text, and create 10-second clips that are looping gifs.
Create 3-5 clips and spread them out through the week with a CTA telling people to click on a link to watch the full video.
Want more ideas? Just click to download the checklist I mentioned at the beginning of the post.
And if you are looking to explain what your business does in less than a minute, check out my company www.drive80.com.
<3 Mike
* Mike Doyle is the owner of Drive 80 Studios, a Raleigh NC Based animation studio. We think he rocks and we love all of his videos.
If you want to boost a post on your Facebook Business Page, it’s pretty simple. We have been doing these types of posts for years and it is one of the fastest ways to generate interest, find new followers and generate leads for your small business.
Here is a short video from Facebook describing the simple process in detail:
Once you boost a post, you can view it on Facebook and click on the link that shows all the people who reacted to the post. This will be those people who clicked Like, Love, Wow, etc.
When you view these people, if they don’t already like your Facebook page, there will be an Invite button on the right-hand side next to each person. You can manually go through these people and invite them to like your page, one-by-one. Watch your audience grow!
If you would like to learn more about posting to Facebook for your business, what to post about or what to boost, please contact us today. We will provide you with a no obligation, free information session to help you along the way!
We all have the same 24 hours in a day. It’s what we do with that time that determines our level of success. The harsh reality is that once time is gone, we can never get it back. I know, it sucks. But it’s the truth. However, the good news is that MySoPro is going to save you time. And lots of it! Saving time is very important for all business owners, so we get it. You no longer have to worry. MySoPro is here to save the day! It serves as your own personal social media assistant and this free tool is here to eliminate all the stress and frustration you dealt with in the past when handling your social media campaigns.
Saving You Time
Saving time is important because it allows you to focus on the things that matter most to all business owners, making money! You can finally spend more time actually running your business and set aside time for all the other important things that matter to you such as family, friends, and relaxation. MySoPro allows you to schedule posts on your social media platforms days, weeks and even months in advance. Unlimited posts for as many social media accounts you have.
Being able to save time while posting in advance increases your engagement. You can grow your social media platforms by gaining more likes and increasing shares. This will allow you to achieve overall success and growth in revenue through online marketing.
Why Social Media
Social Media is the ideal platform needed to promote upcoming sale events, share information about your products, educate people about the services you offer and share reasons why they should come to you and not your competition. MySoPro allows you to easily find and post relevant content and videos that you may not have thought of initially. There’s a cool feature called ‘Content Research’ which allows you to search through powerful platforms such as YouTube, Google News and even Facebook for various relevant content to repost and/or share with your audience. This is a great tool to utilize when you’re in need of some fresh ideas.
Getting Things Done
Schedule days or weeks of content in just minutes! Even if you don’t have time to schedule posts out months in advance, you can still get a significant amount of posts scheduled out in just 5 minutes. The beauty of it all is that you can manage all of your social media profiles in one. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest all in one location. You don’t have to open multiple tabs on your computer to access them all. Simply reach all of them through MySoPro.
Even though this is a free tool, there is a pro version that comes with more unlimited features for only $32.83/month when you sign up annually.
Owning a small business can be the most exciting thing that any person can possibly do. The challenges of reaching out to customers, successfully identifying and entering markets, and keeping a competitive edge over the competition can easily take over every waking moment. In order to help you keep this edge, we decided to give you some of the best social media tools we have found.
However, the stress can easily become too much over the long haul. That is due to the never-ending need to engage with clients while also handling the administrative tasks for your business. Who has the time to handle everything?
Thankfully, we live in a time where technology has advanced enough to provide us the tools to automate most communication tasks, while simultaneously allowing your company to reach new clients without adding any additional cost.
Here are seven social media tools that are taking the small business world by storm in 2017.
You already know that social media is a very effective way for you and your business to generate new leads.
Using the right tools makes reaching your social media goals possible and we’ve provided you with one of the best for free! It also happens to be free for unlimited social accounts. This may change in the future, but this is one of the reasons we have ranked it the best!
I’m sure it will become an invaluable part of your business. It finds relevant and engaging content including videos & news, all of which can be posted with the click of a button. It also creates incredible image posts without any photo editing experience.
You will save loads of time by having all your social media in one place with the ability to schedule posts across multiple platforms. You can also measure your social media performance, which helps you get more traffic and generate new leads.
It’s amazing and it’s free so signup here and give it a try. Sign up free at social.mysopro.com
Disclaimer: We own MySoPro, so we may be a bit partial. (When you click on it, it will take you to social.mysopro.com).
Not going to lie. We cannot live without this tool. 90% of all of the Facebook/Instagram ad campaigns we run are built with this amazing piece of software. They were recently acquired by Hootsuite and this will only allow them to grow and get much better.
AdEspresso saves us so much time. Not only do we love the beautiful and easy interface for creating ads and subsequently analyzing campaign performance, they have a built-in automatic optimization feature. What is this? Let’s say your ad is being clicked on by mostly 35-44-year-old women and not nearly as much by 35-44-year-old men. AdEspresso will automatically optimize and show it more often to the group of women and less to that group of men.
There are so many features such as synchronization of data with CRM, Hootsuite integration and more than we can list. Their team is also very responsive and the founder is always innovating and improving.
SproutSocial is designed to make managing your social media presence easier by congregating all of your messages into one seamless interface. The goal of this service is to reduce the amount of time you have to use collecting feedback from users, thus allowing you to maximize the time spent helping improve your company’s products and reputation.
SproutSocial breaks down messages on a demographical basis, enabling you to see with a single glance which particular group is responding more. For instance, when deciding on a new gender-specific product, it is a good idea to know who is more enthused by your company.
Information is power, and by understanding who is saying what, you can get ahead of any trends and profit accordingly. What separates this from Hootsuite is that it is designed for companies with just a few employees. One person can manage everything with this service.
Argyle Social is one of the larger, and more successful, companies in the social media tool industry. It is designed to automate publication of material put together by you or your marketing team.
The company prides itself on being at the forefront of data collection, identifying new and powerful ways to give its clients the information needed to reach out to consumers without having to worry about wasting time and precious company resources.
It is one of the more expensive social media tools on this list, starting at around $300 per month, but the experience and dedication found in this company is guaranteed to make the investment worth it at the end of the fiscal year.
Post Planner is a Facebook management tool that helps automate the sharing of content to your Facebook page. Like others, Post Planner will handle everything in the queue and automatically post out based on pre-configured times.
In addition to having all the normal page management features, such as scheduling, insights, it also comes with a secret weapon. What separates Post Planner from other management and posting tools is their content discovery engine. This feature finds you the most popular, most shared content in your industry and then you can add that content to your queue to post later on.
By finding the best content to share, you will increase your engagement level, shares and social mentions with your audience and save time doing it.
Buffer is really cool, but a bit on the pricey side if you have several accounts. Our favorite feature is the app and browser extension, allowing you to click on something(article, image, video), and have it add it to your queue to automatically be posted.
It works with all major social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram. You can selectively choose which ones you want to have your content posted to if you don’t want it to go to all of them.
Onlypult is the only site we know of that will schedule and actually post to Instagram. We have been using it for close to 2 years and have determined we cannot live without it.
Not only can you schedule and post, but you can add hashtags, perform hashtag research, use emojis, make the first comment for more hashtags and manage multiple accounts
Pricing starts at $12/month to manage 3 Instagram accounts.
NOTE: We have been told that while Instagram states this as a violation of TOS, Onlypult seemingly has a legitimate way to continue their service and they have not had a problem with Instagram about this service to our knowledge.
Recap
Social Media does not need to be a chore for the small business owner. By taking advantage of the social media tools available, it is possible to leverage the Internet and create a new stream of customers for your company.
Take the time to look over and look over our reputation, and imagine the possibilities. Reach out to these teams, and learn what can be done to improve your company’s image on the web, and see what new profits and opportunities can be had for those willing to take the plunge.
You do not even need to be fully digitized to benefit, numerous companies utilize social media instead of traditional websites due to costs and convenience issues. Seize the day!
What are your favorite social media tools to use? Feel free to share them in the comments section below.
