Ashley interviewed Nichole Howson, owner of Aim Social Media, about all things social media and where to find ready-to-buy customers!
About Nichole:
Nichole is the owner of Aim Social Media, and she’s an award-winning social media strategist and consultant. Her work is really focused on reducing clients’ ad spend, growing their brand awareness, and increasing their sales leads. In only six years, Nichole has worked with clients globally decreasing the cost of ad spend by 91% and increasing traffic by 26% in as little as 30 days!
Is this you?
You’re putting your message out there, but nobody is saying they’re ready to buy or asking, “Where do I pay?”Â
We all fall into that trap of, “You know what, I have this amazing product, and everybody’s going to see the value in this!” People tend to turn into an infomercial when they post on social media. They bombard people with all this content and information and not really doing anything to convince people to buy it.
You can tell me that something’s really great for my skin, but there are also 100 other different options that are coming my way. It’s more than just putting content out there that’s saying, “This is what I can do for you,” and a lot of building those relationships with your audience first.
The Three E’s
People need to know, like, and trust you. There’s three E’s that we focus on: engagement, entertainment, and education. If you’re doing one of those three things in your content, a lot of people are going to resonate a little bit more with it than just posting just random content to get out there.Â
Some of the companies that I would go to are the ones that are engaging with me on social media quite a bit. It’s the companies that are putting in the work and standing apart. That’s going to make you want to go with them.Â
If companies are just pushing a sale or a product and they’re not providing any other value, they’re not going to catch my attention. That’s the same for a lot of people because we are marketed to so much online.Â
Engagement
Post a lot of questions to get people engaged and commenting. You want to give them a reason to comment. Sometimes it’s fun stuff like this:
Brussel sprouts. Yes or no?
Or asking if people like pineapple on their pizza.
You have to know your audience enough to know what they’re going to engage with. It’s this combination of knowing what your ideal customer is up to, what their day to day routine is, and what are the things they think about.
Entertainment
Sometimes that’s a viral video, a funny article, a thread, or a meme. It could be really anything as long as you’re getting some sort of positive reaction to it. You can go to the negative side of things, but for the most part, it’s a positive reaction. They’re getting some sort of entertainment and value out of your content.
They’re likely to want to share it with other people. I always watch for that on my social media feed to see what am I like most inclined to share right now. Whether you reshare it yourself or you create your model after it and create your own content based off of that, it works almost every time.Â
Education
You can partner talking about the benefits of your product or your service with something related to the industry. For example, Nichole works with businesses on social media, but maybe she’s going to talk about ways to use Zoom more effectively because right now we’re all using Zoom calls to communicate with our teams. It’s a way to educate but it’s getting that engagement again that we need on social media every time somebody engages with content on your page. More people see it and the goal is to get them to engage with it while educating them in some way about the benefits of your product or your service.
I know in the social selling world, we do a lot of curiosity marketing. Education could really be about your product for sure, or it could be like knocking over dominoes. They need to understand this piece of information before they’re going to be convinced that my product is right for them.Â
Watch Simon Simon “Start with Why” Video
What Simon Sinek talks about is that there are three layers in a circle. The inner circle is why you do what you do. Outside of that is how you do what you do. And then the most outer circle is what the product actually is.
Pitching to your Audience
 If you can get your audience to reach out to you, it makes the selling process a whole lot easier because they’re already asking questions. Then you can just provide more value and direct them to whatever you have for them.
If you are going to pitch to people, do it in a way where you’re not just spamming people. They can see it from a mile away and they’re not even going to respond to you. You want to be a little bit creative and build those relationships ahead of time.
What I always recommend is that you want to use social media posts to build curiosity. Let people self select if you are for them or not. It’s like you’re walking down the street and you are making eye contact with people and you’re seeing who lingers and who wants to have a conversation. You’re passing by people and seeing who’s engaging. After you see someone a couple of times, you can say, “I feel like we have a lot in common. I would love for you to join my free business bootcamp community. We talk about all things business, social selling, etc.”
Facebook Groups
Different Facebook gurus in the Facebook group sector say that members of your groups need to love you and they need to love each other. That is your number one goal when you’re building that Facebook community. I find that it’s like a bit of a softer pitch when you start engaging with somebody and getting to know them, and then you invite them to join that group.
Being visible and having people see your content and seeing you provide that value ahead of time is going to be really important. There’s this warming up period. With ready-to-buy customers, there’s still a process of convincing and trust and rapport that needs to happen before they’re going to be ready to buy.
“I’m putting my message out there and I’m not getting any engagement. I’m not finding new followers.”
There’s a certain point that you hit where when you’re not spending anything on ads and you’re just hitting the same people over and over and over and over again. You’re just like bombarding them; no wonder they’re not engaging! They’ve heard your message and maybe they’re not your ideal customer.Â
The two questions then are: what’s the best organic ways and what are the best paid ways?Â
One of the things that I don’t recommend doing ever is paying for followers. Having a strategy to get new followers is totally a great idea, but paying for likes on your Facebook page, or paying for followers on Instagram, nearly never works and usually affects the algorithm in a horrible way and you actually see way less reach.
One of the things that we like doing is building those relationships. When you are marketing, do it with the mindset of you’re just building relationships. Stop focusing on the money and just build those relationships. It’s going to be really important when you’re creating content.Â
Go for more of a documenting side of things like this is what my day looks like today. Once you have a strategy organically that’s working, then if you just put ads behind it and you’re pushing that same strategy out, all you’re doing is amplifying it. If it’s already working organically it’s definitely going to work in a paid sense and you’re going to see better results.
Tips to Build a Strategy Around Followers
You have to get yourself onto the feet of other people that aren’t following you. Coming from really focusing on that engagement side of things to get people to engage with you, when somebody engages with your posts, their friends are more likely to see that content. Focusing on that engagement side or entertainment side gives them a chance to share your content.Â
And then just providing pure value. I love coming from a personal side of things. One of the best things I did for my business was get really personal and authentic, because people are more likely to pay attention to my story, versus just me saying, “Hey, so I do social media for businesses, and this is what I can do for you.”
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It comes across way less productive than me saying, “Hey, this is how I started my business. This is the struggle I went through recently.”
Hashtags
One of the things I see all the time is people will use hashtags that are related to their industry. All they’re doing is attracting other people that are doing exactly what they’re doing. You want to go through and use hashtags that your target audience is using. There’s something called the $1.80 strategy that we love doing. The concept behind this is Gary Vaynerchuk’s strategy. He talks about finding the top 10 hashtags that your target audience is using and then go through and engage with the top nine or most recent nine posts in that hashtag. That way you will leave your two cents on each post and it will equal $1.80. This strategy can help increase your engagement get you into the comments of people’s feeds so they’re more likely to check you out and follow you and engage with your content. It is an investment in the sense of time, but you’re building up those relationships again, and then you’re going to see better results.
Get more on Nichole here: https://aimsmmarketing.com
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