How Does Social Media Generate Sales?
How many of you awesome readers started your business Facebook page just for the sake of having one? If you’ve done this, you’ve probably done it with the expectation that social media will be this great floodgate and sales will start pouring in. In reality, that hardly happens. But does social media really generate sales? It does if you keep at it and that’s exactly what we’re going to talk about today- how social media marketing increases your sales.
Before we get too far into this, let’s look at some ways that businesses can directly attract customers. There are the obvious things like posting about sales, making discounts available, or highlighting new products/services to entice people to take notice. With the right considerations, this works. What’s great is that it is really easy to track effectiveness. In addition to these general tactics, there are deeper ways that social media marketing can translate into sales. It may not be quantifiable on the surface but there are things going on behind the scenes to help you.
Exposure
First up, we have exposure. With any element of advertising, by getting your name out there, people are going to see it and you hope that they turn into a customer. Social media is no different, but allows you to change up your message very quickly. If you’re managing your page by yourself, you’re not paying anything to post, which is a plus. However, instead of reaching super broad audiences like you would in magazine, radio, billboard, or any other advertising, you’re able to reach people who are just like you. They share the same interests, hobbies, and other demographics. And just like with traditional advertising, the repetition of people seeing your content will make them think of you first when they are ready to buy.
Organic Content
As consumers, we’ve trained ourselves to recognize an advertisement and ignore it. This means that posting coupons or offers won’t make a person become a customer. If only it were that easy! The question we need to ask ourselves as marketers then is how do we reach these people without coming across as pushy or sale-sy? By creating content that doesn’t directly encourage followers to purchase. What?! That doesn’t mean don’t ever post sales-type posts. We have a rule-of-thumb: 1 out of every 10 posts are the traditional sales-type post. That means you can post about all sorts of things- product demos, customer reviews, behind-the-scenes looks at your business just to name a few. This kind of content gets people interested in your stuff. Then, when they’re ready to buy, they already have an idea of what they want and once again, you are at the top of mind when it’s time.
People Already Are Interested
Here’s the best part- the people who follow or like your page are already interested in what you have to say! If they weren’t, they wouldn’t have followed you! Your followers want to hear from you. Don’t let them down by failing to ever post.
Engagement = Reach = Followers = Sales
Still a little unsure? Let’s put it all together. Check out the chart below:
It’s all a cycle! As your followers engage with your content, that tells the algorithm to push it to more people. As more people see it, they become followers. Rinse and repeat! Then, at any point in the process, they can turn into a sale. It doesn’t happen overnight and takes time so don’t get discouraged when you can’t attribute any sales to social media. You might never be able to directly attribute a sale to social media but it’s working.
As we wrap up, here’s a little story for you. One of our clients called saying we needed to delete a post as soon as possible because it has some wrong information on it (accidents do happen on occasion and we deleted it immediately). They explained that they had received several calls with questions about the post and were able to set up appointments to discuss further. While that’s not the ideal scenario, the big takeaway here is that if you trust the process and let it work, it will work for you. By the way, when this happened, that page only had 30 followers so don’t let your follower count take up too much space in your head. If you need help or don’t quite know where to start, give us a call and 4/4 Solutions will be happy to help!