When it comes to marketing strategies for online entrepreneurs, social media, that is fast and vast, is simply very tough to ignore. According to eMarketer, because of the proliferation of inexpensive mobile devices and affordable fast broadband access, the Internet will hit an estimated 3 Billion users by 2015, and nearly half of the world’s population will have access to the World Wide Web by 2018. Presently, over 80% of web users are driving the traffic for popular sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest, Twitter and LinkedIn (for more professional interactions). Roughly about half of this demographic search, research online and study comments of other netizens before actually paying for something or giving out their credit card numbers. Because of the non-personal nature of social networks, about 30% of these buyers prefer to chat on social media instead of the phone. In the case of individual freelancers and entrepreneurs, over 90% of them use social media as an advertising medium because it does not require a humongous corporate budget and it’s essentially more direct to their target market. Definitely, the world has grown a lot smaller, allowing people from across continents to share information and exchange goods.
As a start-up eCommerce entrepreneur on ONESUPERSHOP, we understand that you still do not have the financial powerhouse and the manpower of a giant corporation, yet. Social media is your top choice for marketing your products simply because it’s free and it’s easy to reach people you want to sell to. However, because of the web’s massive, erratic and highly democratic nature, it also comes with the danger of bruising your own online reputation, getting bad mouthed by competitors, getting your friends and contacts irked because of your annoying persistence and consistent spamming. News travels fast these days, and one mistake has turned lives 360 degrees. That is why it is very important to understand the different aspects of social media marketing so that you will be able to market successfully without falling into the pitfalls of being blocked or erased from someone’s contact list.
Be Clear on Your Objectives and Define your Niche
What is your objective? Boost sales? Create awareness? Build a database and gain new subscribers? Your strategy will be molded based on your business objectives. Having clear, written and concise objectives will allow you to put this side by side with your outcomes, and see if your methods were effective when you test your campaign. Being clear on your objectives will save you time and money. You have to define you niche, which simply means you can't sell everything to everyone. Focus on the products that you know best so that you can reach the customers who will buy your products at the least cost and time possible.
Be Prepared
You can’t go to battle without the right weapons. You have to be equipped well or you would be dead within seconds. If you are selling beauty or health products, be ready with before-and-after photos, the active ingredients, FDA documents and testimonial videos. If you are into multilevel marketing or insurance, be ready especially with return on investment scenarios and product features. If you are selling real estate, make sure you have the online map, loan options and the mortgage computations ready. These have to be in digital format with visual content – website, explainer videos, or PDFs – which you can easily send through Facebook chat or email. Have a working demo that you have tested beforehand if you are selling software-based products.
You have to know what you are talking about. Sometimes you get only one chance in getting your prospect’s attention. Once he or she asks a question, you should be ready with links to materials or answers off the top of your head. You have to sound knowledgeable about your product. Be ready with (1) your value proposition (2) your uniqueness (3) and your advantage over other competitors.
It’s all about extreme personalization and customization. Do your research about your prospect. Profile your prospect. They want to feel that you did your homework about their business or what they need. Knowledge equals Trustworthiness – and being trustworthy is the first step in building up the rapport to finally sealing the deal. Make sure you have links ready for cut and paste, especially the link to the product page where he can immediately purchase it online.
Know the Appropriate Timing
When you see a friend who recently just lost his job, would you go and borrow money? Of course not. You timing would have been off. Knowing the current mood of the prospect through his posts will allow you to time your approach. Knowing the mood of a prospect allows you to get a more positive feedback. How do you know the timing? There’s a lot to be deduced from the way posts are written. Facebook has a little convenient tool, which allows you to post your mood such as “Feeling Happy”, “Feeling Sad”, or “Feeling Angry”. You wouldn’t want to engage when that person is feeling something negative, unless it’s a personal message of comfort. If that person is feeling positive, LIKE or COMMENT to initiate an engagement. A comment such as “Feeling the same way! I’ve got a lot of things going. I’m happy for you” will start a conversation. Once, you see a reply, and then you can respond quickly and build up the theme of your engagement to lead to a sale. Whatever the post may be - be it a celebration of moving to a new house, getting married, raving about a new movie – you can always time your approach. The ultimate goal is to lead the person into a private chat or a chat group you have set up.
Delivering your messages on social media also require strategic timing. You have to determine what time of the day is your target market actively participating online. Is it during office hours or off hours? Weekends or weekdays? Is it during lunch break or during coffee break? Daytime or evenings? What time do they check their emails? What tools or social media sites are being used during these times? This data can be gathered by doing a survey or observing date and time of posts on your wall. Timing is everything.
“Hi, I’m Here! Talk to Me!”
There are three levels of engagement on social media. First level is to let the prospect know that you are around. Be careful not be invasive. Just a like, follow or small comment will do. See how the prospect will react to this. Second Level is to do small engagements such as making a longer comment or sending an introductory message. Always introduce yourself. Do this second level of engagement if your First Level garnered some sort of response. At this level, you may send links to different webinars you have set up or an explainer video. During this stage, if your prospect is interested, he will send you a response. Third Level now engages you with the prospect with the hopes of closing the sale. This engagement involves more detailed chat sessions, demos, and email exchanges of documents and sending of draft contracts. Prospect may also add people to the chat who he feels may benefit from your product. Getting from the first level to the third level and how quickly you escalate requires sensing the response from your prospect. Do not overstep boundaries or engage in obvious private conversations.
Post Relevant, Meaningful and Original Content
Did you ever wonder why your wall posts are only getting one or two “likes” and a few comments from friends? Only a very small fraction (I suspect even less than 1%) of your contacts will be able to actually see your post, because of algorithm changes of the system in displaying wall posts. You can’t possibly expect Facebook to show millions of posts on your wall. One way of improving your visibility is to improve your content, making it more “likeable”, “shareable” and “commentable”. The more engagement a certain post have, the more visible it will become.
One of the main purposes of posting some content on your wall is you are expecting it to produce “likes” and “comments”. Another way of putting it is we want to induce meaningful engagement. When I scan through all the wall posts on Facebook, I notice that the ones getting higher number of likes and comments are meaningful posts such as a new baby, a wedding proposal, or about a new job. The post must mean something to people, and this will lead to engagement, the more chances of it getting more visible on other people’s walls.
Interesting photos and videos get more engagement than just plain text because they take up a lot of space on the wall, especially on a mobile phone. A post that requests for action, such as an interesting puzzle to guess or a trivia, get a lot of engagement points as well. Usually, viral content contain humor such as Memes or spoof videos, so you have to get good writers to come up with a funny post. Be entertaining. Be excited. Posting a message that shows your excitement about a product or what you have been doing can attract people to comment or like, which will lead to an opportunity in closing the sale. If you have the budget, offer a prize, and lead them straight to your page or site. Vague and unclear posts usually don’t get any engagements. You can also post testimonials from other people to give you additional credibility. You also have to take into consideration that most emails/posts are read on mobile phones – so it’s best to be concise so that it can be understood even on small screens. Most importantly, make sure your content is original and unique. The top three for us are original written content in post or blog format, original video or photo, and originally curated content (content from a third party source, but you provide original insights).
Respond and React Quickly
If your content is good enough, people are going to like or comment on it. They might even
send you a private message. Don’t forget to engage and respond quickly so you can capture them at the point when it’s still fresh on their minds. Send a private chat because people appreciate personal messages. Seize the moment. Respond Quickly. Personal messages make people think that you have thought about them, or what they need. Don’t forget to thank them for giving you the opportunity to share your product. If the feedback is negative, you have to react quickly as well through reassurances, product adjustments and good customer service. Give feedback to your customers as soon as possible.
Establish Credibility
Your profile page or website alone should establish your credibility. Do not post anything that will discredit you or will drop your trustworthiness. For sure, the first thing that your prospect will do is check out your profile and do the same profiling you have doing to them. Prepare your credentials, documents, past work, CV and website if you have any to add to your credibility. Have a way for your clients to contact you by email, mobile phone or landline. Another effective way of establishing your credibility on social media is to post photos or videos of you with credible people (and no, not stolen selfies). You may also ask your reliable contacts (those with reputation or a contented buyer) to post testimonials or reviews on a prominent portion of your page so that people may notice them. A website with your own domain name adds also authority, especially with visible security features such as SSL (Secured Sockets Layer). And nothing ruins a legitimate website than poorly written content that did not go through spellcheck or grammar check. Proofread everything that you post, or better yet, have someone else proofread it for you.
Follow up/Professional Persistence
There’s nothing wrong with being persistent with your prospect, but you have to do it in a professional way. Give some time between follow ups, and do not use intimidating words such as “Have you thought about it?”, “Can I follow up my proposal?”, “Are you ready to invest?”. You have to make sure it’s all about listening to your prospect. Be direct but ask the prospect if he needs to know anything else. By the way, know when to stop and move on. If a prospect clearly does not want to hear from you, don’t waste time and shift to the next prospect.
Sense of Urgency
Creating a sense of urgency allows you close the sale faster. A lot of online promos have limited time offers that ends after a certain time or date. In order to create a sense of urgency, buying earlier must have a specific advantage than buying at a later date.
Test, Implement and Focus
Unfortunately, most people don’t know how to come up with their social media campaign’s return on investment. To determine how successful your campaign was is challenging. Before you can measure the effectiveness of your post, as mentioned earlier, you must first be clear on your objectives. Is it to gain more free subscribers and sales leads? It is to have more conversions from click to purchase? Ultimately, we all want sales and conversions. After you have determined this, then you can already accurately and mathematically compute and compare numbers. Initially, you have to test multiple strategies and messages. Release one paid or unpaid post/sponsored ad then see the response. Release the second one, and see the response. It is a tedious exercise at the start, but it saves you a lot of time and effort when you execute your actual marketing campaign.
After doing the math, then you can determine which message or posts was the most effective, and retargets your efforts to that message, or create similar ones. Check your sales as compared to the number of likes or comments on the particular post. This is your conversion ratio. Further breakdown your message and focus on that. Determine your best customers and find more of them.
Social Media marketing, to be effective, requires discipline and a lot of effort in building the most precise and effective message. Once you determine the most effective message for your product or service, you can now confidently commit more time, effort and money to it, making your social media marketing campaign a more fruitful one.
Use a Data Capture Strategy
With all the chats, comments and messages that you will have with your prospect, it is very difficult to keep track of your leads. Utilize a single data capture page or website that allows them to register their information into the system for your future reference. Give them motivation to sign up by giving them free access to content or if you have the budget, a raffle prize to be given away. At the end of the day, even if you don’t close the sale, the database is very valuable for future references. Integrate a business intelligence tool if there are any, so you may know your demographics very well. There are a lot of data capture pages available for free on the Internet with you can set up with your own personal link which you can share to your prospects when you engage with them. You should also have explainer videos and content about your product or service on the capture page itself before they sign up. Give your prospects incentives when they share your capture page to their friends. This will widen your network with fewer efforts on your part.
Leverage
At the end of the day, it’s really the bottom line that counts. Your goal is to be able to build your business network online, increase sales and build loyalty. Leveraging means being able to accomplish something by replicating a process with less personal time and effort. You only have a limited number of personal contacts on social media, but if you multiply that amount with the friends of friends of friends of your friends, that is a number that cannot be ignored. You can leverage on this by cascading down the online tools and ready to use documents/links to these people, so that it’s very easy and convenient for all these people to share your information, write reviews and compliments, give suggestions, and paste links on their chat messages. You should make it easy for them to add or grab your products to their own social pages, blogs or their websites, so that you become more visible on the web with half the effort. Giving them rewards or referral fees for successful sales is a very effective way of replicating your effort. Leveraging creates sales momentum.
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