Episode 264: Selling Through Social Media
Views and likes will not pay the bills, especially if you are not connecting to people. If entertaining people is your goal on social media, there’s tons of content out there already. What you need to do on social media is to create that connection so you can get them out of social media to have a longer conversation. How can you sell THROUGH and not sell ON social media?
In this episode, Adam Stott shares the strategy and mindset of selling THROUGH social media and how to avoid using social media to “entertain.” Adam also shares what you should do in order to connect and have a conversation that can bring clients into what you are providing.
Show Highlights:
- Why views and likes cannot turn your business big
- What is the Direct Route to market
- Importance of knowing who you are, who you want to serve, and how you serve them
- How entertaining people on social media CAN’T help bring in the money
- Getting potential clients out of social media
- Tools that you can use to drive people into your product or services
Links Mentioned:
Join the Ultimate Three-Day Business Event and learn more Business Growth Secrets
Be part of our Facebook Group Big Business Events Members Network
Connect with me on Instagram @adamstottcoach
Transcript:
Please note this is a verbatim transcription from the original audio and therefore may include some minor grammatical errors.
Adam Stott:
Welcome back to another episode of Business Grow Secrets. You’re with your host, Adam Stott. Got our mega episode for you. Today we’re gonna be talking about how do you sell with social media and how do you sell through social media. So how do you get your message out and convert customers? So hopefully you’re all in ready to listen.
And I’ll put the emphasis on the title of the episode today, selling through Social Media. And what I mean is the selling and the through part are the important bit. Because a lot of people wanna use social media to go out and get more awareness.
They want more people to become aware of who they are and aware they exist. But the reality is this, your followers, your views, and your likes ain’t paying the bills and they ain’t filling your bank account. So if you wanna make more money, we’ve gotta have a different approach. It’s not about how many views do you get, it’s not about how many likes you get. It’s not about how many people comment back to you. And the reason I wanna say this is, it’s important. There’s so much stuff in the out in the marketplace about how you use social media to grow your business. And most of the stuff is not aimed at small business owner.
It’s not aimed at people that are one man armies, one woman armies, it’s not aimed at that market. It’s aimed at bigger businesses with marketing teams or bigger corporate companies. They’ve got lots of people and they talk a lot about customer service, A lot about, making sure you’re consistent and putting your message out there, and that’s all fine if you got the time to do it.
But the reality is, if you’re listening to this podcast, you’ve probably got a business that’s going and growing, but you might not have hit through that million pound mark. You might not certainly, probably not hit through that 10 million pound mark and you’re searching. And if that sounds a bit like you, you’re searching for the answers. I’m gonna take you a bit more direct to the route to market.
Now what is direct route to market means? It means you don’t wanna focus all your time just on about posting on social media and putting stuff out that looks pretty. Instead, you wanna focus on who your client is,how can you have a conversation with them faster?
How can you increase the amount of conversations you’re having and how can you make a killer offer to those clients and get them off social media. So I’m gonna break that down for you a little bit more. But this is the fastest way you can get clients. You can make more money using social media.
First thing you gotta know is who that client is. I look at me as a, my business, my training, my education business, what’s it do? It serves a business owners. It helps business owners grow. We are business growth experts, and if you wanna grow your business, we show you how to do it. The people I wanna speak to are people that want to grow their businesses, and I’m very clear about that.
So every piece of content I make, every video I make, everything I do will be about how to grow your business, how to become more efficient in business, how to make more money in business. Everything I do, and that will make my message very, very attractive to somebody that wants to grow their business, which is my target market, by the way. But it will make it not very attractive to people that got no interest in growing businesses.
In fact, it will make it almost repulsive to people that are not interested in growing a business. If somebody’s following me and they don’t wanna grow a business, there ain’t really much point following me, right? Because that’s what I’m gonna talk about and that’s what I’m gonna talk about with the repetition.
So the first thing is you’ve gotta know who you are. You’ve gotta know who you serve, and you gotta know how you serve them. Really important stuff, really simple stuff. But if you haven’t got those principles, Right. They’re very important principles. So my first tips for you, My first tips to start getting your social media working, delivering clients, and making income is: one, you write down and you get clear on who you serve. For me, I serve business owners that wanna grow. Then you’ve gotta get really dead set and really certain on how do you serve them? What is it you do for them, right? So you know what your product or service is, and you wanna be talking about that product or service and how you can actually help them and how you can solve their problem, right?
So how do you help them is the next one. And the third one is, how can they get in touch with you and start that conversation? This is another thing that people do. They don’t have enough call to actions to actually get people to come and have a conversation with them. Now, my biggest problem with people on social media and what they do is they wanna post content.
They wanna post information out there. They wanna post lots and lots of nice pretty stuff and they wanna show off and all that kind of stuff. But that stuff that gets you more views and more likes, a lot of the time that aint paying the bills, the thing that’s gonna pay the bills is you get more clients is getting more sales and the way you get more clients and the way you get sales is not entertaining.
People on social media. If all you ever do is entertain people on social media, the problem that you’re gonna have is they follow you for ages until they lose interest. Then you lose the business. What you need to do, and this is the most important part, and this is why I’ve recorded this episode pretty much, right, It’s because I want you to get this. You want to work through social media.
Your job as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, as somebody that wants growth, is to go and find your who. Find your clients on social media and take them off social media to have a conversation elsewhere. That should be your number one goal. You find them on social, you take them off social, and in order to do that, you’ve gotta have a place that they can have a conversation with you away from social media. Why is this so important and why is this like my main point? Well, this is people on social media. Imagine this is a mobile phone in my hand right now. What do people do when they’re looking through social?
They pay no attention what’s going on, even when something really interests them. And catcher attention. How long do they stop for? 10, 15, 20 seconds, are they gonna be able to buy your product or service in 10, 15, 20 seconds? No, they’re not. Right? So we need to get them very early in a short space of time, and we need to take ’em away from social media. So how do you do that? One of the ways that we do that is we do that by hosting events. So what we’ll do is we’ll go out, we’ll market on social media, tell people about the events. They then go, Oh, there’s an event on I’d like to go to that. Now they’re come to the event, they’re off social media.
Well, what does that mean?
Instead of having 12 to 15 seconds to build a relationship with them, I’ve got eight hours. Because make no mistake, building businesses is about building relationships and having longer conversations with your prospects. If you have 10, 15 second conversations with your prospects, you ain’t gonna have no clients.
So you’ve gotta have longer conversations. So how do you meet them on social? Take them off social. Maybe you don’t wanna run events. I understand. But could you do a strategy session? Is there a free problem that you could help people with? Is there a way that you could meet them on social, intrigue them enough to pull them off and have a longer conversation with you because that’s what you wanna be doing my friend. If you want more clients, it’s not about entertaining them on social, posting content nonstop. Cause all that’s gonna do, that’s gonna entertain them.
But there’s billions of things out there can entertain them on social. We don’t wanna entertain them. We wanna have longer conversations. So you gotta sell through social, and that’s exactly what the title of today’s episode was. Sell Through Social. The way you sell through social is you go straight through it. You find the client, you pull them off social to have that longer conversation. Once you have that longer conversation, you can get to know what their problems are. You can get to know what their fears are, you can get to know what their needs are.
You can get to know why they need your product, why they need your service, why they need your help. And then you can start to make them an offer that’s gonna help ’em solve their problem. But you can’t do that in a 10, 15, second post or video. So if you’re trying to do everything facelessly, or if you’re trying to do everything online all the time without ever having a longer conversation, you are gonna struggle.
Right? So it’s really important that we make that transition. Now for somebody listening to this podcast, it’s e-commerce. Your job, you might not talk to your clients and I understand that, right? And if you are e-commerce and you sell small products online, you just wanna sell more of those products, right. And that’s your main goal, that’s your main ambition? Or what do you do?
Well, the difference is you’re gonna need to use funnels to have that conversation for you. Right, Because you’re gonna need to have a longer conversation in order to get them to make a buying decision. And that’s why you wanna embrace funnels and you wanna use lots of copy, lots of video, lots of storytelling, but you don’t wanna do it on social media. You wanna drive them off social media into your funnel. Okay. Just to make that clear. But the important thing here is social media is a collection of.
A collection of billions of people. And in that collection of billions of people, there’s lots of your prospects. There’s lots of your clients in there. There’s lots of people in there that need your help. So our job is to identify who those people are, get out to message with them, have a conversation with them that helps tem.
So I’m gonna give you another tip here, don’t put anything on social media unless it is one educational. Or motivational or inspirational, or it adds value to them in some way. You gotta make sure what you put out gives someone something. You gotta remember before you put anything into the market, you gotta say, when the end user sees this, what’s in it for them? Like what I’m making right now.
What do I think about? I don’t think about me. I think about you. I’m sitting there going, Well, how can this message serve this person that’s listening? How can it serve them? How can it help them? Well, the way I see it is if you follow the methodology, you can stop wasting time trying to entertain people, start pulling people off and get yourself more clients, which is ideally what you wanna do to create more income, right?
So you always gotta ask yourself what’s in it for me, but not you? What’s in it for your client, right? And make sure anything you put out adds value to them, and then you won’t have a problem in terms of getting clients, and you need to make sure that you have a solid way that you can continue that conversation outside of a social media environment.
Lots of my clients who’ve been super successful, I’ve given them this knowledge. I’ve took them by a hand and walked tem through the process. And when they’ve worked with me and my coaching programs like Business Circle, Gold Circle, Inner Circle, one of the things that I will do is I will develop with them what is their off social media conversation. How’s that gonna take place? Right? That might be that it’s gonna. That consult call, but if you’ve been listening to the podcast, we don’t call it a consult call. We might call it a strategy call. We might call it a, you know, detailed audit of their business, or detailed audit of their marketing, whatever it might be.
We’re gonna give ’em some value and we’re gonna give them a reason to come and join us off of social media to have that conversation. You know, for many other my clients, I’ve got them to set up community meetings or meetings on Zoom, where lots of people, they’ve got the same things in common, can come. So now they’re on a two hour zoom call and the two hour zoom call. We can add more value to them. We can have a deeper conversation. We’ve got a better concentration from them. But we’ve met them on social. We’ve used social to meet them.
Then we brought them over to the call where we spent more time with them. You could use a podcast for example, right? Market on social. You get people on social to follow it, to understand it. You move them off social, they get listening to your podcast.
I mean, if you are listening to this right now, you’re probably in the car, in the gym sitting on your laptop, or you’re probably sitting there with concentration listening to the episode, and that’s what you want. You don’t wanna be in that 10, 15, second scroll war, right? You don’t win the scroll war at scroll war unless you start doing crazy things, right? And you ain’t got time to be setting cars on fire and jumping off roofs just to get attention, right? So what you need to do is make sure you don’t battle the scroll war.
You win it by getting their attention quickly, taking them off social media for the longer conversation. And that is the way my friends that you sell through social media. And then on the longer conversation, you’ve got more time to make more impact, to get the client, to get the business.
So everything you do in your strategy on social media should be, how do I add value? How do I motivate and inspire? How do I reach the people I’m trying to reach? And how do I reach that target market and how do I help them to see that if we had a longer conversation, we could benefit you in a much bigger way? And if you switch your mindset to selling through social media, Rather than selling on social media, you’ll find you go and meet lots and lots of people on social, you take ’em off social and you start closing more business.
So hopefully that’s been a really valuable episode for you and it’s a very, very small, intricate insight. And I want you to hear it. Don’t sell on social. Sell through social. It’s a different mentality. It will yield you different results, and it will power up your business beyond measure. So start taking the action. Make that mindset switch and look forward to seeing your new results.