How to convert followers to customersThis week we’re going further into the work we’ve been doing on sales funnels. One of the most difficult things to do is get people to convert followers to customers. This is about you getting the people that have shown a modest interest in what you’re building to go all-in on your product or service.
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Are you finding it difficult to break into the general market, beyond family and friends? This will help.
One of the downloadable resources we’ve created for you this week is focused on strategies to help you attract and retain your customers. That resource is a further deep-dive and framework that I really encourage you to engage with.
When you see that you’re not hitting the types of numbers you thought you would, it is really easy to externalise the problem and ask questions like, “why aren’t my friends and family doing a great job of supporting the publicity of your product or service?” instead of asking questions like, “why aren’t the people that are accessing my product or service converting directly into sales?” Even for a program like Side Hustle Support that is free to access, I’m sure I’ll be looking at the numbers somewhat regularly to see how many people go on the page and then cross-checking that with how many people end up signing up to do it.
If the conversion rate is high, say over 70%, I’ll be pleased. That’s a clear signal to change nothing of significance. However, if the conversion rate is low, say below 40%, then the team and I are going to have to start revisiting every part of our methodology, branding and communication strategy to understand where people are getting turned off from the program.
Since we’ve done all the work to target our ideal customers on social media, and we’ve found the places and spaces you frequent and marketed effectively there, the assumption is that the majority of people that are then accessing the page fit a lot of our ideal customer profile. So the question is, what are we doing that is making them say, “no” particularly to something free, when they get to our website?
Family, friends and other people that know you will probably give you the benefit of the doubt if something you are producing is not up to parr, or is a direct turn-off. They will see your intention and not immediately write you off. The same cannot be said for the general public. I remember 4 years ago when I first launched Do it Now Now, the text on the website was primarily in the third person. When I was talking about developing Black communities and Black people, the content on the site typically used the words “they” and “them”, instead of “we” and “us”. There were no pictures of me on the site, and the about page didn’t lean into my stories or experiences. I learned later that when a friend sent someone that could help me to our website, they thought it was run by some inauthentic liberal white woman trying to cosplay as superman here to rescue Black people. So obviously, I had gotten it wrong. Trial and error is a very big part of this whole thing. So while my friends got it, and got me, in the beginning, strangers didn’t.
Social media is an opportunity to attract the attention of your ideal customer.
I fully blame Kim Kardashian, or maybe I should really blame Kris Jenner, or maybe Ryan Seacrest for putting the whole thing on TV in the first place. For better or worse, the Kardashian-Jenners changed the way business is done. They, in my opinion, are single-handedly responsible for the rise of influencer marketing. People want to buy from people. They know you, they like you, they trust you, they buy from you. More often than not, people that grow an organic following seek to monetise that following through paid product placements and then eventually get big enough to cut out the middleman and start releasing their own products. On the flip side, businesses with great products feel pressured to build a large and organic social media following to legitimise the strength of their product in the marketplace. Social media matters so much more than anyone wants it to.
So, what do you do when you don’t yet have the social media following on your business page to help you effectively convert followers into customers? Use your personal page. Conflating your real life with your business life can be a really terrifying thing to do. However, the truth is, you as a human will be able to pull on your personal connections a lot more effectively than a nameless, faceless brand (at least in the beginning). Turn your personal social media pages into a space that you can also talk about the business you want to build. Delete or archive posts that no longer serve you, start posting things that point towards your expertise and business interests. Even if your friends, family and colleagues may not be the right people to buy from you, chances are that they might know someone that can help you push the needle forward in one way or another.
Once you’ve built your personal social media and your business social media to point towards the same goal, and you’re getting people to meaningfully engage in your product or service, you’ll start to recognise the strengths and weaknesses of your sales funnel. Are you effective in converting people you interact with from a social media follower to a customer, or using the terms from last week, from Everyone to Ones.
Who is actually following your stuff?
Have a look at your analytics across your social media platforms. Do your analytics reflect the core demographics of your ideal customer?
You’ve done all this work over the past few weeks to create a clear understanding of Why you’re doing, What you’re doing, Who you’re doing it for and How you are doing it. With those four parameters alone, you can create 24 different combinations of that information to share that should help you start turning the tide of your follower demographics so that you are attracting more of your ideal customers. Social media is primarily about consistency, engagement, relevance and aesthetic.
There are a number of platforms like Coschedule that release best practices for social media posting, so you’ll know how often to post on each of the different channels you decide to become active on as a business. Be aware of the types of people that use those social media channels as well. You wouldn’t typically find a 14-year-old on Facebook, and you’re just as unlikely to see a 60-year-old on TikTok.
Social media platforms reward engagement, not broadcasting or spamming. Rather than trying to become active on every social media platform, pick a few that you know your ideal customer would frequent, then get really deeply entrenched in the subculture your ideal customer inhabits in that space. Like individuals’ posts, comment authentically and helpfully. That’s how the platform algorithm knows who to recommend you to. A really good example of this is Black Twitter. It's not a separate Twitter platform, however, through years of frequent engagement, Black thought leaders built followings that empowered hashtags and then created semi-private spaces on the public platform. Through the algorithm, if you consistently and authentically engage in conversations about Blackness on Twitter, you will soon be ushered into Black Twitter. There have been many academic research papers into the power of Black Twitter as a driving force for social change that you can look up. One of my favourite resources on the topic is a conversation led by Kimberly Foster with the founder of #BlackGirlMagic.
It’s always a good idea to know who you are, but even more so when it comes to social media. There have been many times over the past few years when companies have just totally missed the mark with their followers. For example, the “who hurt you?” advert debacle that showed that there is a big difference between Spotify listeners and Netflix watchers. The premise of the campaign was, using the data of their customers, both companies would point out something like, “to the person that watched a Christmas Prince every day for the past 30 days, who hurt you?” Or “to the person that played nothing compares to you 89 times in a month, who hurt you?” While both companies received backlash for using consumer data for entertaining advertising, the level of backlash Netflix received was overwhelming. Despite both being large tech-based entertainment companies, they each have very specific demographics that don’t overlap as much as you might think. Netflix is a lot more family-friendly with many older, less tech aware or tech-savvy people using the platform. Spotify is much more of a young person’s company and young people no longer get too bothered about their data being used, as long as it isn’t for nefarious purposes. That’s why young people have abandoned Facebook. Well that and a number of other things.
Everyone. Some. Ones.
Get a piece of plain A4 paper and a pen.
On a vertical, draw a large funnel that takes up most of the page. Use thick lines to divide that funnel into three sections. Label the top section, “Everyone”, the middle section “Some” and the bottom section, should be labelled, “Ones”.
Go back to the thick lines and label each of them with the word, “conversion”. Now that you have some background information on how to gain followers, we are going to talk about how to convert them to commenters, meaning the “Some” and then to customers, referring to the “Ones”.
Now that you’ve labelled sales funnel, you’re going to work on building up your conversion strategy.
How exactly do you reach everyone that is your potential ideal customer?
This is about getting people to enter into the funnel in the first place. In a previous session’s further reading you have an article about the way Beyoncé uses different platforms to access new people to enter into her sales funnel. Make a bullet point list of all the different ways you get people to follow you on social media. What have you seen other people do?
How do you get some of them to engage with you meaningfully?
Make another bullet point list of all the ways you’ve seen people and businesses get their followers to comment on their posts. Each social media channel of yours has the opportunity to build a unique community, where you get to engage directly with people that are vibing well with the things you are putting out into the world.
How do you get the ideal ones hooked on what you have to offer?
Make a third bullet point list of the different ways you have experienced becoming hooked on a product or service. For example, which subscription services can you not live without and why? Instead of focusing on the problem they are solving, think about how they treat you, communicate their business and engage on social media, more specifically.
This is how you build a conversion strategy. Reach. Engage. Hook.
Review the bullet points you’ve made. Go back to the diagram you drew earlier and choose three methods you are going to implement at the first, second and third conversion lines.
Your conversion strategy will be based on what you think you can implement in your business. You should be thinking about what your ideal customer wants from you, how they want to be treated and the market standards as well as the market criticisms, like Metro Bank which was brought up in another session.
Ask yourself, if one action logically leads to the next. If you do get them to follow you, how will you get them to comment? If you do that, how will you then get them to buy from you?
Reach.
In our incubator sessions, I sometimes use a handshake to illustrate the idea of the reach. Imagine yourself walking up to a complete stranger in the middle of a crowded shopping mall and extending your hand for a handshake. In this illustration, you, are you, the stranger is your potential follower, and the crowd are all the other social media profiles trying to get their attention.
When you reach out to a stranger in that circumstance, there are the four things the stranger will have to see in you to reciprocate that handshake.
In reciprocating, they move from “potential follower” to “actual follower”.
Go big, go wide, go large but don't go home.
This is a PRO Tip for Reach. It can feel very comfortable to rely on your existing connections, but more likely than not, you won’t be able to access the number of people or the types of people you need to turn your business from a hobby into a sustainable endeavour. Once you’ve got something to share, start testing it out in all the spaces you know your ideal customer frequents whether those spaces are online or offline.
Engage.
Keeping with the illustration, let’s say the individual that has become an “actual follower” is now engaging in a conversation with you. In that case, they’re no longer a follower, they’ve become a commenter. They are commenting on your feed and sending you DMs. How did that happen? You probably showed off your authenticity by complimenting their last post, liked a few of their posts and signposting something that could be helpful to them.
While at this point they are engaged, they aren’t yet buying from you. You've got their attention. How are you going to use it? One of the more effective ways to convert from commenter to customer is to offer the commenters an exclusive offer or freebie. Something that is easy for you to produce but is targeted very specifically to the needs of your ideal customer.
So, the commenter has seen an offer or discount you have available and they've decided to attend one of your workshops, events etc. How do you engage them further in the things you have to offer? I suggest you produce something that gives them further insight into your organisation, like a “private webinar with the founder”. Different things will work for different markets and industries. It’s up to you to devise the best thing to get them fully engaged with you and starting to champion you in their sphere of influence.
If you’re finding that you have a few hold outs, people that are still not converting into customers despite the investment you’ve made so far into the conversion process, you could consider providing them with a discount code, something like 10% off for a limited time period could make all the difference.
Though it can seem rather contrived and inauthentic, despite all the play at showing authenticity, it really comes down to how you do these things. It's all about messaging with your tone and values at the centre.
Do you know what their current pain points are?
This is a reminder to continually try to see the problem from your customer’s point of view. You always want to speak to your customer using their language. The point is to help them come to the conclusion that you understand them well.
No matter how good a service is, the buy-in and return rate drop if it just isn't communicated effectively. To entice your followers, you have to sell them the solution from their perspective in their own words.
Hook.
When your customer has bought from you once, you want to keep them buying from you. This is what keeping your customer on the hook is about. Customers are typically extremely hard to acquire, and it's well known that it's much easier to get your current customer to buy more from you than it is to get a new customer altogether. With that in mind, make note of the following:
TAILOR YOUR OFFER. Depending on your product or service, there are many ways you could tailor your offer, from creating bespoke packages to repurposing, bundling or repackaging old packages. All you have to show is that not only do you understand their pain points in general, you understand their specific pain points.
Based on what you know about them, you should be able to suggest their next purchase to them. For example, because you’ve taken part in Side Hustle Support, the next logical step is for you to join our Community. To get you to that stage, we could offer you a discount when you get accepted, as well as prioritisation on the waiting list. Mind you, this isn’t an official offer of either of those things! Based on your industry, we could also offer you very specific things to help you.
It’s important to have different levels in your product and services. Someone that wants to dip their toe in at your least expensive level could eventually become your highest spender if they’re motivated and supported appropriately.
You're on your way to success if you can design and implement opportunities and offers that transition your customers from Everyone to ones.
One of the downloadable resources we’ve created for you this week is focused on strategies to help you attract and retain your customers. That resource is a further deep-dive and framework that I really encourage you to engage with.
When you see that you’re not hitting the types of numbers you thought you would, it is really easy to externalise the problem and ask questions like, “why aren’t my friends and family doing a great job of supporting the publicity of your product or service?” instead of asking questions like, “why aren’t the people that are accessing my product or service converting directly into sales?” Even for a program like Side Hustle Support that is free to access, I’m sure I’ll be looking at the numbers somewhat regularly to see how many people go on the page and then cross-checking that with how many people end up signing up to do it.
If the conversion rate is high, say over 70%, I’ll be pleased. That’s a clear signal to change nothing of significance. However, if the conversion rate is low, say below 40%, then the team and I are going to have to start revisiting every part of our methodology, branding and communication strategy to understand where people are getting turned off from the program.
Since we’ve done all the work to target our ideal customers on social media, and we’ve found the places and spaces you frequent and marketed effectively there, the assumption is that the majority of people that are then accessing the page fit a lot of our ideal customer profile. So the question is, what are we doing that is making them say, “no” particularly to something free, when they get to our website?
Family, friends and other people that know you will probably give you the benefit of the doubt if something you are producing is not up to parr, or is a direct turn-off. They will see your intention and not immediately write you off. The same cannot be said for the general public. I remember 4 years ago when I first launched Do it Now Now, the text on the website was primarily in the third person. When I was talking about developing Black communities and Black people, the content on the site typically used the words “they” and “them”, instead of “we” and “us”. There were no pictures of me on the site, and the about page didn’t lean into my stories or experiences. I learned later that when a friend sent someone that could help me to our website, they thought it was run by some inauthentic liberal white woman trying to cosplay as superman here to rescue Black people. So obviously, I had gotten it wrong. Trial and error is a very big part of this whole thing. So while my friends got it, and got me, in the beginning, strangers didn’t.
Social media is an opportunity to attract the attention of your ideal customer.
I fully blame Kim Kardashian, or maybe I should really blame Kris Jenner, or maybe Ryan Seacrest for putting the whole thing on TV in the first place. For better or worse, the Kardashian-Jenners changed the way business is done. They, in my opinion, are single-handedly responsible for the rise of influencer marketing. People want to buy from people. They know you, they like you, they trust you, they buy from you. More often than not, people that grow an organic following seek to monetise that following through paid product placements and then eventually get big enough to cut out the middleman and start releasing their own products. On the flip side, businesses with great products feel pressured to build a large and organic social media following to legitimise the strength of their product in the marketplace. Social media matters so much more than anyone wants it to.
So, what do you do when you don’t yet have the social media following on your business page to help you effectively convert followers into customers? Use your personal page. Conflating your real life with your business life can be a really terrifying thing to do. However, the truth is, you as a human will be able to pull on your personal connections a lot more effectively than a nameless, faceless brand (at least in the beginning). Turn your personal social media pages into a space that you can also talk about the business you want to build. Delete or archive posts that no longer serve you, start posting things that point towards your expertise and business interests. Even if your friends, family and colleagues may not be the right people to buy from you, chances are that they might know someone that can help you push the needle forward in one way or another.
Once you’ve built your personal social media and your business social media to point towards the same goal, and you’re getting people to meaningfully engage in your product or service, you’ll start to recognise the strengths and weaknesses of your sales funnel. Are you effective in converting people you interact with from a social media follower to a customer, or using the terms from last week, from Everyone to Ones.
Who is actually following your stuff?
Have a look at your analytics across your social media platforms. Do your analytics reflect the core demographics of your ideal customer?
You’ve done all this work over the past few weeks to create a clear understanding of Why you’re doing, What you’re doing, Who you’re doing it for and How you are doing it. With those four parameters alone, you can create 24 different combinations of that information to share that should help you start turning the tide of your follower demographics so that you are attracting more of your ideal customers. Social media is primarily about consistency, engagement, relevance and aesthetic.
There are a number of platforms like Coschedule that release best practices for social media posting, so you’ll know how often to post on each of the different channels you decide to become active on as a business. Be aware of the types of people that use those social media channels as well. You wouldn’t typically find a 14-year-old on Facebook, and you’re just as unlikely to see a 60-year-old on TikTok.
Social media platforms reward engagement, not broadcasting or spamming. Rather than trying to become active on every social media platform, pick a few that you know your ideal customer would frequent, then get really deeply entrenched in the subculture your ideal customer inhabits in that space. Like individuals’ posts, comment authentically and helpfully. That’s how the platform algorithm knows who to recommend you to. A really good example of this is Black Twitter. It's not a separate Twitter platform, however, through years of frequent engagement, Black thought leaders built followings that empowered hashtags and then created semi-private spaces on the public platform. Through the algorithm, if you consistently and authentically engage in conversations about Blackness on Twitter, you will soon be ushered into Black Twitter. There have been many academic research papers into the power of Black Twitter as a driving force for social change that you can look up. One of my favourite resources on the topic is a conversation led by Kimberly Foster with the founder of #BlackGirlMagic.
It’s always a good idea to know who you are, but even more so when it comes to social media. There have been many times over the past few years when companies have just totally missed the mark with their followers. For example, the “who hurt you?” advert debacle that showed that there is a big difference between Spotify listeners and Netflix watchers. The premise of the campaign was, using the data of their customers, both companies would point out something like, “to the person that watched a Christmas Prince every day for the past 30 days, who hurt you?” Or “to the person that played nothing compares to you 89 times in a month, who hurt you?” While both companies received backlash for using consumer data for entertaining advertising, the level of backlash Netflix received was overwhelming. Despite both being large tech-based entertainment companies, they each have very specific demographics that don’t overlap as much as you might think. Netflix is a lot more family-friendly with many older, less tech aware or tech-savvy people using the platform. Spotify is much more of a young person’s company and young people no longer get too bothered about their data being used, as long as it isn’t for nefarious purposes. That’s why young people have abandoned Facebook. Well that and a number of other things.
Everyone. Some. Ones.
Get a piece of plain A4 paper and a pen.
On a vertical, draw a large funnel that takes up most of the page. Use thick lines to divide that funnel into three sections. Label the top section, “Everyone”, the middle section “Some” and the bottom section, should be labelled, “Ones”.
Go back to the thick lines and label each of them with the word, “conversion”. Now that you have some background information on how to gain followers, we are going to talk about how to convert them to commenters, meaning the “Some” and then to customers, referring to the “Ones”.
Now that you’ve labelled sales funnel, you’re going to work on building up your conversion strategy.
How exactly do you reach everyone that is your potential ideal customer?
This is about getting people to enter into the funnel in the first place. In a previous session’s further reading you have an article about the way Beyoncé uses different platforms to access new people to enter into her sales funnel. Make a bullet point list of all the different ways you get people to follow you on social media. What have you seen other people do?
How do you get some of them to engage with you meaningfully?
Make another bullet point list of all the ways you’ve seen people and businesses get their followers to comment on their posts. Each social media channel of yours has the opportunity to build a unique community, where you get to engage directly with people that are vibing well with the things you are putting out into the world.
How do you get the ideal ones hooked on what you have to offer?
Make a third bullet point list of the different ways you have experienced becoming hooked on a product or service. For example, which subscription services can you not live without and why? Instead of focusing on the problem they are solving, think about how they treat you, communicate their business and engage on social media, more specifically.
This is how you build a conversion strategy. Reach. Engage. Hook.
Review the bullet points you’ve made. Go back to the diagram you drew earlier and choose three methods you are going to implement at the first, second and third conversion lines.
Your conversion strategy will be based on what you think you can implement in your business. You should be thinking about what your ideal customer wants from you, how they want to be treated and the market standards as well as the market criticisms, like Metro Bank which was brought up in another session.
Ask yourself, if one action logically leads to the next. If you do get them to follow you, how will you get them to comment? If you do that, how will you then get them to buy from you?
Reach.
In our incubator sessions, I sometimes use a handshake to illustrate the idea of the reach. Imagine yourself walking up to a complete stranger in the middle of a crowded shopping mall and extending your hand for a handshake. In this illustration, you, are you, the stranger is your potential follower, and the crowd are all the other social media profiles trying to get their attention.
When you reach out to a stranger in that circumstance, there are the four things the stranger will have to see in you to reciprocate that handshake.
- familiarity: they need to see themselves in you
- trustworthiness: you need to translate as safe
- opportunity: they need to see that they'll gain something from associating with you
- authenticity: you have to look genuinely interested in connecting with them
In reciprocating, they move from “potential follower” to “actual follower”.
Go big, go wide, go large but don't go home.
This is a PRO Tip for Reach. It can feel very comfortable to rely on your existing connections, but more likely than not, you won’t be able to access the number of people or the types of people you need to turn your business from a hobby into a sustainable endeavour. Once you’ve got something to share, start testing it out in all the spaces you know your ideal customer frequents whether those spaces are online or offline.
Engage.
Keeping with the illustration, let’s say the individual that has become an “actual follower” is now engaging in a conversation with you. In that case, they’re no longer a follower, they’ve become a commenter. They are commenting on your feed and sending you DMs. How did that happen? You probably showed off your authenticity by complimenting their last post, liked a few of their posts and signposting something that could be helpful to them.
While at this point they are engaged, they aren’t yet buying from you. You've got their attention. How are you going to use it? One of the more effective ways to convert from commenter to customer is to offer the commenters an exclusive offer or freebie. Something that is easy for you to produce but is targeted very specifically to the needs of your ideal customer.
So, the commenter has seen an offer or discount you have available and they've decided to attend one of your workshops, events etc. How do you engage them further in the things you have to offer? I suggest you produce something that gives them further insight into your organisation, like a “private webinar with the founder”. Different things will work for different markets and industries. It’s up to you to devise the best thing to get them fully engaged with you and starting to champion you in their sphere of influence.
If you’re finding that you have a few hold outs, people that are still not converting into customers despite the investment you’ve made so far into the conversion process, you could consider providing them with a discount code, something like 10% off for a limited time period could make all the difference.
Though it can seem rather contrived and inauthentic, despite all the play at showing authenticity, it really comes down to how you do these things. It's all about messaging with your tone and values at the centre.
Do you know what their current pain points are?
This is a reminder to continually try to see the problem from your customer’s point of view. You always want to speak to your customer using their language. The point is to help them come to the conclusion that you understand them well.
No matter how good a service is, the buy-in and return rate drop if it just isn't communicated effectively. To entice your followers, you have to sell them the solution from their perspective in their own words.
Hook.
When your customer has bought from you once, you want to keep them buying from you. This is what keeping your customer on the hook is about. Customers are typically extremely hard to acquire, and it's well known that it's much easier to get your current customer to buy more from you than it is to get a new customer altogether. With that in mind, make note of the following:
TAILOR YOUR OFFER. Depending on your product or service, there are many ways you could tailor your offer, from creating bespoke packages to repurposing, bundling or repackaging old packages. All you have to show is that not only do you understand their pain points in general, you understand their specific pain points.
Based on what you know about them, you should be able to suggest their next purchase to them. For example, because you’ve taken part in Side Hustle Support, the next logical step is for you to join our Community. To get you to that stage, we could offer you a discount when you get accepted, as well as prioritisation on the waiting list. Mind you, this isn’t an official offer of either of those things! Based on your industry, we could also offer you very specific things to help you.
It’s important to have different levels in your product and services. Someone that wants to dip their toe in at your least expensive level could eventually become your highest spender if they’re motivated and supported appropriately.
You're on your way to success if you can design and implement opportunities and offers that transition your customers from Everyone to ones.
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This webinar was presented by:
Bayo Adelaja, Chief Do-er at Do it Now Now Connect on Linkedin, Instagram and Twitter Buy me a Coffee This is How I got Here |
