How not to depend on any one Social Sales Channel

Can you remember what it was like to market your product before the advent of social media?

That’s right, large companies who could afford it would pay millions to promote their products and services via traditional advertising avenues such as TV and print ads or radio jingles. The rest, short of carrying fliers door-to-door, had little other option.

Social sales channels have revolutionized marketing. Channels such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are powerful sales platforms many small and medium-sized businesses use. Although using these channels is not always cheap, especially if you are still building your brand and your reach, it’s still a viable and flexible option to play around within your budget.

The common phenomenon with social media marketing is that businesses tend to place all their eggs in one basket. A.k.a one medium. While this sounds convenient, make sure the basket doesn’t come undone at the seams because of reasons beyond your control. This may be because the rules pertaining to how the channel promotes your posts or offerings change, or because your audience simply moves on to a new and trendier medium.

This could be catastrophic, as now you may have to start over again or at least have to invest some time and effort to make sure your audience makes the move with you. This is why it’s important to know how to not become too dependent on any one social media channel.

The solution?

Create your own channel.

It isn’t prudent to just leave all your chips in one channel or social medium. Ensure you create an environment where you can directly and independently reach and convert your audience. This way, you have control over the situation.

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Here are a few steps to create and follow through your own social sales channel:  

1. Create a social sales channel that you own:

This could mean investing in your eCommerce website. Use this space to reflect the ethos and essence of your business, style it to best showcase your products and services, and place call-to-action buttons that are hard to ignore.

Most importantly, treat this as a store-front, adorn it the way you want to portray yourself. Succinctly put, create an easy-to-navigate eCommerce site with help available just a click away.

2. Create lead magnets that are attractive:

This involves creating value for your audience who visit your channel. Lead magnets usually entail attractive freebies for your visitors, contingent on them providing you an authentic email address.  Make sure an automated link is sent to the provided address to confirm their actual contact point. While attracting new customers to your site, freebies also enable you to collect your own database which is invaluable to the business.

3. Create a well-designed email campaign that will:

• Create a dependable sales channel for you
• Offer your audience value beyond only selling to them. Unlike being on a social media channel, being on your mail list can make your audience a priority customer with perks to boot.

4. Organize all social sales channel efforts to direct your audience to your landing page or your lead magnets.

This way, you’ll be using social media only as distribution channels to funnel customers to the source channel which is your own.

5. Keep offering value on all of your social channels to keep your audience coming back.

Once hooked, keep building on these channels to retain and convert them to loyal customers.

If you have more questions, feel free to reach out.