Winning the business: Five tactics and tips for boosting your social conversion rate

15 February 2020By Michelle

You put in blood, sweat and tears. You spent time (copious amounts of it) perfecting your posts. But you have little to show for it.

When time and effort don’t translate into leads and sales, the promise of social media can feel like a shiny lie.

So, what gives?

After all, there are plenty of stats flying around the web that tell us content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing and generates three times as many leads. Oh, and then there are the 73% of marketers who believe that their efforts through social media marketing have been “somewhat effective” or “very effective” for their business.

Now then, what about you?

If you’re not winning the business on social media that you feel you should be, it’s time to sharpen your tactics by implementing the following social selling tips.

1. Your branding – make it personal

Social media should be a place where you demonstrate your uniqueness and set yourself apart from your competition. Your content, images, and tone of voice all have vital roles to play in this, but so do YOU (as an individual person).

Companies of every size, in all industries, have owners who are part of their company’s uniqueness. Think Steve Jobs for Apple, Richard Branson for Virgin, Elon Musk for Tesla and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.

By being an individual person who represents your brand, you provide a human connection, and once your audience buys into you, they’ll cheerlead you on as you develop products and services, and hit your milestones.

2. Tell them, in no uncertain terms, “What’s in it for Them?”

Seconds. That’s how long you have to hook the average social media user. And our attention spans are getting shorter, and shorter. In the year 2000, the typical attention span was 12 seconds, in 2015 8 seconds and today 9 seconds.

This means that EVERY time you post you MUST ask yourself WIIFM (what’s in it for me)?

Ask how you solve their problem with your content and how your profile serves a deeper purpose than merely telling your visitors about your products or services.

3. Get creative with your content

“Social media posts with video have 48% more views”

Given how time- and attention-short social users are, dull, dreary content will get you nowhere.

These 30 brands showcase exceptional media strategies that you can learn a lot from. And in each, the following points slot in unobtrusively, while educating, inspiring or engaging…

• Who you are
• How you help
• Why you do what you do

Note also how these brands also mix up their content – videos, Facebook live, infographics, imagery and more all play different roles in presenting bite-size content.

4. Go all in on education (and learn from the questions your audience ask)

“Engagement rates on Thursdays and Fridays are 18% higher than the other day”

What matters to your audience? What problems do they have? What desires do they yearn? Knowing the answers to these questions will help you shape your social strategy and guide your content.

If you’re not sure what your audience want to learn about, ask them. There’s nothing quite like crowdsourced content ideas that kick the conversation off before you’ve even written the blog post or recorded the video.

5. Be fast to follow up

“30% of people go to a competitor when a brand doesn’t respond”

When your followers take time out of their day to comment, question or complain, be fast to act. People on social media are more expectant than ever when it comes to the speed of your reply.

Get a process in place for a set response time (for example – an hour response for comments, 30 minutes for messages), and develop a workflow that always re-connects with potential leads – whether through a tweet, email or phone call.

So there you have it – go strong on the personal branding, and creative with your content. Then ask: “WIIFM?, educate your audience and get speedy with your social responses. And those are the five things that should underpin ANY social media selling strategy.