Whenever we work with a new business to develop a marketing plan, the first goal is always to boost brand awareness, gain followers, and build an audience for the company to pitch their products to.
But what about when you finally start to gain some traction online? How do you leverage your audience and turn your followers into actual sales?
There’s a lot more to marketing than just brand awareness. In fact, brand awareness is a very small part of marketing.
At Zynk30, our thorough and creative marketing plans are designed to help you through each step of the marketing process. We want to help you go from zero to industry hero through battle-tested digital strategies like social media, email marketing, and web design.
Once you have built a decent following, these are just a few of the strategies that you can use to turn your followers into fans, and your fans into sales.
1. Do Serious Content Analysis and CTA Optimization
Most businesses post content on social media, but once they’re done posting, they close their laptop or smartphone and never think about their content again.
I mean, they just don’t have time to think deeply about their social media content. How many business owners actually have time to develop social media content, study the perfect hashtags for their brand, and then create an optimized call-to-action (CTA) that will help their brand actually connect with customers?
The number probably isn’t zero, but it’s pretty darn close.
Our team is focused on creating social media content that will simultaneously help you broaden your reach and pique your customers’ further interests.
We do this by connecting social media with email marketing. This is a secret that a lot of people don’t know: it’s really hard to sell products directly through social media. I mean, how often do you randomly buy things that you see in social media ads?
Probably not too often. However, would you sign up for a newsletter that offers you content and updates on your favorite brand? It’s just an email address. It’s free to join.
I’m not saying you should never use social media to sell products directly, but by combining consistent social media production and quality email marketing to create a sales funnel, our clients are able to get the best of all worlds.
2. Using the Right Platforms
Here’s an interesting fact: most people on LinkedIn are not on LinkedIn to buy Oreos.
You will more than likely never see an advertisement for Oreos on LinkedIn. You might see one on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, but LinkedIn is a business-focused site. This means you’ll probably see a lot of ads for B2B (business to business) services.
Having the awareness of your business to focus on the right platform can save you a lot of time when it comes to trying to build your audience, but it can also help you make more money than you might expect.
While there are people on every single social media platform, your people are likely going to be on one or two specific platforms.
Our goal is to help you find those platforms and triple down on them. Instead of “kind of” being everywhere, we’re going to make sure your business has a strong platform on only the right platforms.
3. Don’t Be a Robot
When customers are shopping around online, they don’t want to connect with businesses that seem like they’re being run by computers and robots.
Maybe people are still scarred from the first time they saw Terminator, but the point is that people aren’t ready to buy products from robots.
Though your customers probably don’t want to be your best friend, they do want to connect with you. They’re coming to you because they have a problem, and they want someone who they can trust to fix it.
This doesn’t mean that you should confide your deepest, darkest secrets in the person you’re selling marketing services or computer software to, but you definitely should let your personality show in your business’s marketing strategy. Whatever content you put out into the world, you need to attach the story of your business to it.
Digital storytelling is the foundation of a strong digital media strategy.
We can help you tell your story across whatever the best platform is for you and your business, and we’ll be able to help you put that personal touch into all of the content that you share.
The results of this simple mindset switch will surprise you.
4. Make Them Feel Special
One of the oldest marketing tactics in the book has been forgotten in the social media age. All of a sudden, people seem to think that because social media is free to use, it should also be free to build a following.
People want to feel special. They want to feel seen and heard, but when they visit most business pages, it’s the business that is trying to make themselves seem special.
See, selling products isn’t about you, and it’s not even really about your product. Selling products is about your customer, their needs, and how they feel when they interact with you. It’s estimated that 80% of the decisions that people make are emotional decisions. If you can understand this and can create a space where your customers feel comfortable voicing concerns and working through them, you can easily create more sales.
To be an entrepreneur, you don’t have to be a therapist or a psychology major— although, the ladder might help more than you think :) — the point is that selling is more about the customer than it is about you, and sometimes, marketing is more about emotion and connection than logic and reasoning.
Closing Thoughts
Selling products is hard work, and so is marketing them. Our team is focused on helping you create marketing plans that not only will help you build a following, but will actually help you generate sales, leads, and loyal fans who will support your business for years.
Marketing without sales isn’t marketing, it’s just awareness. That’s why we’re focused on creating strategies for our customers that are both grounded in reality but focused on your future.
We want to help you both establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry while you make a living selling your products. To learn more about how we can help you turn your followers into sales, check out some of our work here, or get in touch with us here.