If you’re like many small businesses, you’re struggling to turn Facebook fans and “likes” into paying customers. Getting it done is easier than you think. After a year of interviewing business owners who are actually selling using social media, I found the common reason why they are successful.
Converting Facebook Fans and Likes to leads and finally customers (and repeat customers) is as easy as solving their problems—in ways that create desire or entice them. Here’s how:
Step 1: Solve Customers’ Problems
You’ve probably heard that posting a certain number of times, on certain subjects, on certain days is the key that unlocks success with Facebook. It’s simply not true. Technical skills are essential to have, but making a sale demands focus on needs of members, not “secret sauce best practices.” The true secret is getting back to basics and that means solving their problems.
For instance, grocery store Harris-Teeter pays customers to ask its dietician health-related questions on Facebook. Why would a grocer—or your business—do that? Because helping customers put out a fire is powerful. Answering questions in an honest, bold way opens the door to make a suggestion. It can be a friendly tip, useful trick or if appropriate, outlining benefits of becoming a customer.
Step 2: Be a Thought Provoker
Solving your audience’s problems on Facebook works if you do it in ways that compels your target audience to share their insights with you. You’ve got to provoke them.
For instance, let’s say you need to generate inbound inquiries for your business. Or, you need to convince an already attentive member group to take advantage of another product or service. In either case, you need to provoke responses. The key here is sharing useful and original knowledge with them on Facebook in exchange for understanding their intent to sign up—what’s holding them back, for instance.
Give your audience something valuable and generate insight on them—qualify them as leads and nurture them to fruition. Some of the more innovative business owners I’ve been interviewing are “ethically bribing” customers with knowledge they’ve never had access to before or providing solutions to problems they don’t yet know they have. That’s the candy. That’s how you can become addictive. The trick is showing customers ways to take action on opportunities, avoid risks and solve problems that ultimately connect to your commercial offerings. Think of it like making everything you do on Facebook scratch members’ itches.
“The key is to leverage your club’s strengths in ways that reveal what you and/or your employees are seeing that customers are not right now,” says Gunnar Branson, CEO of marketing and innovation consultancy Branson Powers. “For instance, what do you or your employees know—right now—that’s relatively unknown and revealing? Think in terms of a risk or opportunity that your customers will react strongly to,” he says.
Step 3: Take Action
The final step is to align your behavior on Facebook in ways that help customers solve problems or aid them in getting something important done today.
Here are tips on getting started:
- Talk to me: Give customers a reason why they need to think about something important to them in a powerful new way that gives them a reason to talk to you… so they can more clearly understand what you just provoked.
- Make it easy: Use contests, calls to action, bold statements—do what it takes to prompt a reaction and make it easy for customers to qualify themselves as leads.
- Re-purpose content: Are you already helping customers put out fires or do more with less? How? Where? Collect and organize this information using simple, accessible tools like a blog. Consider ways to prompt customers within Facebook to visit your blog, induce a response and capture a lead.
This is a guest post from Jeff Molander, who is the author of Off the Hook Marketing: How to Make Social Media Sell, adjunct professor of marketing at Loyola University Business School and is a social media keynote speaker. He blogs at www.offthehookblog.com and can be reached at jeffmolander.com.
[Image credit: coletivomambembe]
Posted In: Social Media Tips
