Converting Conversations Into Sales

Like you I have a lot of reasons I am in business, to help others to be successful through  giving them the benefit of my experience and knowledge, to spend my time doing what I am passionate about, to raise my credibility and profile and to make money. If I wasn’t in it to make money I wouldn’t charge for what I do, lol.

I waffle on a lot about being social on social media, however once you get ‘it’ you need to then be able to create sales for your business and that is the next and vital step to your social media marketing.

The first and more important priority is to do nothing until you have created a plan for your social media. I talk about this in every workshop!

Know what you are doing, why you are doing it and where you want to end up and that includes creating outcomes and goals for each of your actions. DO THIS FIRST!!

I have written about RASMs & RAMs (Random Acts of Marketing & Random Acts of Social Media) before and they don’t work for anyone. Some ideas for conversion outcomes and goals could be:

• Getting them to sign up to your email list
• Getting them to subscribe to your blog
• Encouraging them to share your fan page with their friends
• Giving them a bonus download as thanks
• Telling them more about yourself, and what you do
• More sales for your products and/or services

Now that you have your plans and clearly defined outcomes and goals you are ready to start thinking about tactics and strategy for your digital and social media pages and profiles. All of these outcomes lead to the final goal of more sales for your business.

Brand Follower Personalities

There are loads of reasons why people follow brands and knowing a little bit about the types of personalities you will find on your social media brand pages can help you make the most of your conversations and your conversions:

The Self Promoter – this user loves to follow brands so that they can promote their own business, and most if not all of their comments will be directed back to their own page, website or skillset. They love to brag about how great they are, or their business is and will often try to slyly put your products, services or offerings down.

The Pure Spammer – is not the same as the Self Promoter, the Pure Spammer is the person who has no interest in connecting or conversing with you at all just in finding ways to broadcast their own advertising messages across as many mediums as possible without being social. Their entire focus is in creating as wide a footprint as they can without doing any work to establish their own base of followers.

The Freeloader – this person is always looking for freebies, and follows brands in the hopes of scoring big. You will hardly notice them until you go to give something away.

The Social Guru – these people know it all (even when they don’t), they have an opinion on everything and loudly proclaim it at every opportunity.

The Loves to be Seen Fan – This person loves what you do and loves to communicate with you and your followers on your page, and love to be seen in the scene with lots of LOVE & xx’s. However their loyalty however is very much predicated on you allowing them to boost their own ego by associating with you so they will be very upset if you try to sell to them, ignore them or ask them to do something for you.

The Bystander – This person, as the name suggests sits back and watches it all happen, they take no action, do nothing, don’t contribute and often you only know they have been on your page/profile because your stats tell you so. If they are in business as well, these people will often take your content twist it to suit their needs or alter it just enough to avoid copyright issues and repurpose it for themselves – keep a wary eye on them.

The Troll – is to be ignored and avoided at all costs, these people for reasons of their own (seeking attention) and at times as a marketing ploy (controversial marketing) love to create controversy by brand and people bashing. They will post a negative and arbitrarily aggressive comment to see whether they get a rise out of you or your followers and when they do – watch out!

The True Advocate – these people love you and love your business, they may or may not be purchasers but they are wonderful to have around as they help spread the word about your business to everyone on their own friend and follower lists.

The Buyer – these are the people who are looking for what you have and are ready to be convinced and given the opportunity to purchase what you have. This is the person you connect with, acknowledge, show gratitude to and gift the most often. Buyers fit into 4 distinct personality types as well however that information will be in the next post on this subject.

The two most important goals for your social sales need to be leads and sales, and sales come either directly from your social marketing or from your leads, so sales is the ultimate goal of your marketing on all channels off and online.

There are of course loads of different outcomes for your marketing and there are a few in the above list, add to that are word of mount recommendations which of course hopefully end up as more sales.