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Learn about driving more sales and leads to your business through social media.
Learning outcomes:
Hi there, I'm Gary Weis from SBIM, and today we're going to take a look at social media selling.
Now it's probably one of the most common questions that I get asked about, social media for business. And that is "How do I drive more leads or sales for my business?"
Unfortunately, so many businesses go about doing social media just all wrong, and end up, basically giving up, and thinking that social media just doesn't work for them.
The problem is that social media selling really does work. You just need to know how to do it properly. When looking at social media selling, you need to look at it from the point of view of the long game. It's not just going to be the case that you push out some content, or some ads, and all of a sudden your phone starts to ring off the hook or your online store checkout starts to melt down. It just doesn't happen that way.
You've got to be consistent and you've got to be patient. I'm not talking about sinking dollar after dollar into an endless pit, but rather taking time to consciously build your audience.
What do I mean by audience? What do I mean by build your audience? An audience, as we refer to it in social media terms, refers to both the people who already like and follow you or your page, and also anyone who has also interacted with your content, whether that's an organic post or a paid piece of content.
What's the best way to actually go about building that audience. The answer is consistency and patience. You've got to put out enough content to build your audience over time.
Please don't get caught up in the hype of trying to build 10,000 Instagram followers in 30 days, or how to get a thousand followers a day using one simple trick. And all that sort of other overrated rubbish you see out there on the web. Don't be tempted to try and shortcut the process. You'll just end up being disappointed.
In most cases, your local business doesn't need that level of social media or Facebook or Instagram followers in the first place to make this social media selling strategy work. So there's no need to head down that path.
The best way to build an audience is to get them to know, like, and trust you. Ultimately, the goal is for them to do business with you. What we're going to be looking at closely today is how exactly you do that using social media.
The first step is content development. When we market our own client's business, we always start off with a content development strategy. The reason for this is that it's the development of the content that typically becomes the stumbling point for many business owners. They just can't get their head around it.
The process that we go through, starts off with a creative long form content. Long form content can come in different shapes and sizes. The most common form we create is video content. Usually that video content is standing or sitting in front of the camera and delivering information that your target audience would ultimately find helpful.
What you have to realise is that you and your business are subject matter experts in whatever field you're in, and people who are wanting or needing your particular products or services are going to want to hear what you have to say in the buying process.
The quickest and easiest way we've found to create long form content is to pick a subject that relates to your products or services, make a short list of points that you want to cover in your video, and just go for it.
What we do is we usually try it and keep the list to about five items only. You should be aiming to keep your video to between three to five minutes. There's nothing wrong if it's longer, but to start off with just and keep it short and sweet.
Once you have your long form content, you can then create what we call micro content. That's another reason why we suggest five items, because you can cut your long form content into five micro pieces of content, which conveniently equals one piece of content per day for the working week.
You might even be able to cut it up into even more micro pieces if the content actually lends itself to that. That's exactly how we do it here at SBIM. We pick a topic, we choose five points with inside that topic, and we roll the camera. It really doesn't take that much effort or planning.
If you want to make the topic selection process, it’s really simple and get a jump start on. Here's a quick tip. Jump on a Google and just do a search for the 'top five whatever' that relates to your business. For example, if you're an air conditioning company, you can do the top five reasons why you need to clean your air conditioner. If you want more ideas, just go and search for the top 10. You'll end up with heaps and heaps of topics to choose from, and a never ending source of content ideas.
When it comes to creating your videos, simplicity is best. Don't be put off that you need to make it look fancy with high production values. Just keep it simple. The more organic and authentic your content looks the absolute better response you will get. We've tested just about every type of content there is out there and simple stuff comes out on top almost every time.
Just make sure that your audio is really good. Your audience will be a little bit more forgiving if the video is a little shaky or the lighting isn't quite right. But if the sound isn't clear, you're absolutely gonna lose them.
So now that you've got your content ready to go, this is how we suggest you publish it out there and start to build your audience.
First off, what we'll do is take the long form content and we want to post that to YouTube. We do recommend that if you haven't already set up a YouTube channel for your business, do so. It never ceases to amaze me just how many views are good video can actually get over on YouTube. It's something you really should be taking advantage of. With your YouTube channel, don't worry about how many subscribers you have or how many people have commented on your content. At the moment it's just being used as a place to house your videos.
Next we create a blog post on our website and we embed that YouTube video onto it. If you don't have a blog function built into your website I strongly suggest that you go and have one put in. It really is simple to do and it gives you a place to publish the new company and the video content that you're about to create.
Again, don't worry about how many people view your blog post or how many people share it or comment on it. It's just being used for the moment as a place to house your video content, just like YouTube. You can also transcribe the video using a service called Trint. There's plenty of transcription services out there that you can choose from varying prices as well. Or you can choose to just do it manually yourself with more time, but just as effective.
Now what we have is both a YouTube and text version of our video on our blog posts. Now that's great for search engine optimisation value as well.
Now the blog post is up and running we need to send out an email to our list, and post our blog to our social networks, and let people know that there's something new for them to go out and check out. All pretty simple and it doesn't take a hell of a lot of time to do all that.
The other thing I would suggest is setting up a form. This can be a popup or just a static form on each of your blog post pages. The reason for this is that you can capture the email addresses of people who have actually watched your content and enjoyed it. And who they want to go on to join your list, to continue receiving either helpful tips or whatever it is that you're sharing.
Rather than having them subscribe to your YouTube channel, actually encourage them to sign up to your email list. Again, this is a slow burn, so don't expect overnight results, but it is something that you should set up now and just let it run.
Now we're going to head on over to our social channels, and we're going to schedule the five pieces of micro content to go out now. But all you need for the moment is just one single piece of micro content per day to go out. You don't need anymore. Just post your video with a brief description and a link to the blog post on your website in the description. This link enables people to go and check out the full length video on your website.
The trick here is to post and make sure that your video is posted natively to Facebook and your social media channels. Don't use at YouTube or any other sort of video service here when you're posting. You won't be able to post the link on say Instagram, but you can certainly pop the link in your bio if you want to.
What you want to do is for the next step is keep an eye on your posts for the week and take a look at the post that actually received the most engagement. Depending on the size of your existing audience and the people who like, and follow you, you might have limited reach and you may have low engagement. Don't worry about it. If that is the case, just keep going. Keep posting each week and keep pushing out the value. Just don't stop. It's the consistency that will have your audience sort of get to know, like, and trust you over time.
I see so many businesses post only a couple of times, and then they just give up. Remember if you stop posting, then social is never going to work for you. You've just got to stick with it. Over time your audience will build, just be patient.
On the other hand, if your posts are getting reach and engagement, you will be able to see which posts are getting traction and the most interest. It's these posts that you're now going to want to promote and put a few dollars behind.
I'm going to take you through the exact same process for running the paid ads that we use for our own business, and that of our clients.
For this example, we're going to we'll be using the Facebook ads platform. In particular, we're going to be using the Video Views marketing objective.
The reason we want to use the video views marketing objective is because Facebook's algorithm will promote your paid content to people that have a higher likelihood of watching your video based on their previous usage behavior. Facebook wants to know what you're up to. We also want to take advantage of what we call the through play billing feature, and also the video engagement metrics that are available with this type of campaign.
The question is what is a through play? Now a through play is feature by which you only pay for the ad if someone watches your ad the 15 seconds or more, or on the other hand, if the ad is less than say 15 seconds, that's to 100% or all of it. Now, 15 seconds is quite a long time. You can get a lot of information across in a video in just 15 seconds.
We're also going to be taking advantage of a phenomenon called self selection. Thinking now of your own viewing behavior, when was the last time you watched an ad - or any piece of content on social media for that matter - for anything longer or anything near 15 seconds, if you weren't really interested in the content or the ad? This answer is probably not ever, or pretty small amount of time.
The reason is we simply just don't watch what we don't want to watch. We keep scrolling past, we keep scrolling past. What this self-selection phenomenon allows us to do is really widen the targeting for our ads.
What normally happens when you're running ads on Facebook or any platform for that matter, you need to select an audience to target. This works really well if your audience is easy to define. For example, if you sold golf balls it would be easy because you could target people who we're are interested in golf. Pretty simple.
The problem here is that everyone who sells anything related to golf is targeting that very same audience. The more advertisers targeting the same audience, the more expensive it is to target that audience. It's simply a matter of supply and demand.
Here's another example. What if your product has a much, much wider appeal, and let's say what if you're offering with say a service, like a personal injury lawyer. Who would be your target audience for someone who has just had an accident. Now that's not so easy and not so obvious. Let me tell you there's no interest option in Facebook that you can tick that says just had an accident.
Look, it's very difficult, if not an impossible audience to exactly target. In these cases that self-selection phenomenon really works and helps you out because you can show your ads to a much wider audience and with self-selection they'll only watch the ad if it is of interest to them in the first place.
Now you couple that with say the 15 second through-play feature, and you've really got a cost-effective way of promoting your content now.
You essentially only pay if someone is interested in your content now, and there aren't that many advertising mediums that give you that sort of deal these days. You just can't go and pay billboard or TV ad or newspaper or magazine ad based on the number of people who showed interest in your ad. This is really a great media buying option that you need to be taking advantage right now.
And this is why we're heavy into video view campaigns and video marketing. It has to be one of the most value for money forms of marketing available, not just now, but ever.
Now we're going to quickly run through how to set up your campaign on Facebook. First off you need to create your campaign and create your first ad set. Now you want to set up an ad set for each of the videos that you're going to promote, and I'll explain why you need separate ad sets in a minute.
But what you're going to do is set up the ads for three of your pieces of content only. So just pick the top three performing posts or the best three pieces of those five pieces of content. You want to have all these ads set up and ready to go at once.
So what we're going to do is this we're going to load the first ad and let it run for the period of the campaign, and we won't be stopping this ad at any point along the way. So you gotta make sure that that piece of content, that piece of promoted content is really, really strong.
So this first ad will be running the whole time and will be driving people in to your video funnel. So you're going to make sure it's really, it's a really good piece of content to kick things off with.
So now your first ad is up and running. Let's say that your first piece of video content is just one minute long. What we're going to do is set the second ad to only show to people who watched a minimum of 15 seconds or equivalent to a through play of the first ad. Now you'll be able to see in the video engagement report with inside your Facebook ads manager, just how many people watched to, what percentage of your video.
Now, this is really handy to know when trying to sort of understand the level of consumption you are getting for each of your videos. Cause it's one thing to know how many people watched your video, but knowing how long people watched your video for is also incredibly important.
So to target the people who watched a minimum of 15 seconds of your first ad, you need to create what we call a custom audience. You then use that custom audience to target your second ad with. So when we create your custom audience, you do have options to choose three seconds, 10 seconds, 15 second through play. 25%, 50%, 75% and 95% engagement levels for your videos. And you can choose a different engagement level based on your content, but you just remember three seconds is probably too short, and on the other side and selecting the 75% and 95% could actually make your audience size too small to work with. So in our experience 15 second and 25% tend to work the best again, play around and test it out for yourself.
A little bit earlier I mentioned that you'll need to set up each of your ads in separate ad sets. The reason for this is that you'll have different custom audiences for each ad set. The targeting for your first ad will be very broad whilst the targeting for ad two will become the custom audience created from ad one.
It's going to be the same process showing content piece Number three. You'll create a custom audience from the 15 second views from ad number two, and that will sit in its own ad set as well.
Now, finally we move on to the fourth ad, and you're going to show them a static based ad. This is not a video ad. Okay. Now the static ad is usually a screenshot from one of your videos previously, which enables you to keep the whole sequence really familiar. And you'll also be able to have some supporting texts, containing a strong call to action, telling people exactly what you want them to do. Which is like to buy now, or download, or book now, or whatever your call to action needs to be to get them into your sales process.
So the questions I always get is why a static ad at the end of the video sequence? Well, the simple answer is at some point you need to focus in, on actually asking for the sale. You don’t need all the goings on inside the video to do that. Okay. A simple image with a strong call to action does the job pretty well.
Along the way, you've got to remember in each of the ads, number one, two, and three, you will also have a call to action, but it's usually a lot softer, it’s a softer call to action. For example, for more information, or if you'd like to know more etc.
Okay. Now the final ad in the series needs to be a hard call to action. Okay. To get the deal across the line. So when you plot out this entire strategy, it's going to look something like this. So by running your content and social media ads, this way, you're delivering value to your audience. And you're also building goodwill before you ask them to engage with your business. Now, this is going to deliver far better results than just straight out asking someone to buy something from you on the very first interaction. Yeah. You've probably heard the saying a thousand times you need to make a deposit before you can make a withdrawal.
Well, in this case the content is your deposit, and the call to action, or the offer is hopefully going to be your withdrawal. So that just about brings us to a close for this social selling workshop. I hope that was of some help. And we'll see you next time on our next workshop.