Today, the old ideology of the hard-sell is a sure way to lose potential customers.
And while many of us can remember the old ads that told us “but wait, there’s more!”, today’s audiences are more savvy to the marketing techniques and tools used to sell them products.
Marketing tools like social media mean that the hard-sell very quickly results in lost followers or a disengaged following – and that isn’t going to help your bottom line at all.
But it’s a business page. You have to promote your products, don’t you? Yes. But here are a few things you can do to bring in more sales minus the constant hard-sell technique.
Remember the phrase is “social”
It’s about connecting with your audience. Share posts and content that will build and establish their trust in your business by connecting with them. Sharing your story, showing your work behind the scenes, acknowledging and honouring your customers and user-generated content (reposts of people using your products) are a great way to do this.
Bring value to your posts
Tell your audience why they should be following you. What purpose does your business serve them? What problem does your business solve and how will it make their lives easier? How have others found your products work for them?
Listen to your audience
What questions are they asking you? Think about how you can use this to create posts and content without blatantly selling products to them.
Set up pillars
Consider the different types of posts (content pillars) you can run and what objective you want to achieve by each type. This along with a regular posting plan will help you easily ensure a good ratio of valuable posts to sales posts and determine what posts are attracting your audience’s attention.
Build your audience off social media
You don’t own your follower database. The social media platform does. And if they go offline tomorrow, you lose your database. Give your audience a reason to sign up to your mail-outs highlighting an offer or value by doing so. This means you can own your audience of engaged customers and communicate with them direct to their inbox.
Consistently selling directly to your customers might have worked in the past, but a deeper connection is going to give you a far better return in the long run.
