I, like most business owners, understood long ago that I would have to embrace the Internet if I wanted to increase sales and survive a changing economic landscape. With everybody and their
uncle writing and talking about it, how could we not be convinced that we needed to be using it?
But like most owners, I was simply overwhelmed by all of the choices and how to use them!
The solution is to do what Stephen Covey wrote in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and start with the end in mind. The end result of having a social media and Internet presence is increased sales and profits!
In this video I discuss how to turn social media into sales.
Keep that in mind when faced with the dizzying array of choices that you have. How do you use
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, podcasts, digital publishing, and whatever they will invent next to increase sales? Many business owners just throw their hands up in disgust and decide to do what most people do when confused—nothing! And as I wrote earlier in this issue, that is a fatal mistake.
So what is the secret to using the Internet and social media to your advantage? The secret is designing a consistent message to get prospects to provide you with an email address so that you can sell them your products or services in the future. The following is a brief plan to accomplish this:
- Talk to your current customers. Find out what they would consider valuable information to receive from you. Make a plan to deliver this information to them. Don’t consider it a sales pitch. Just find out what they are looking for. Remember: Providing them with information in your area of expertise helps build your relationship with them and increases their loyalty to you.
- If you don’t have a blog, start one.
- Open accounts with FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, and YouTube. Later you can learn to create podcasts, Internet TV shows, and e-zines.
- Create an editorial calendar for the next year. Create one main theme for the month.
- Spread the month’s theme across four weekly articles. For example, if this month my theme is Maximizing the Profit Formula. I could cover increasing sales to current customers, maximizing referrals, using up-selling scripts, and cutting costs without affecting customer service.
- Post an article to your blog each week related to the theme you have chosen for that week.
- On each one of your social sites, post a short item pointing them back to your blog. Don’t post the whole article; you want them to visit your blog. – Include an “irresistible bribe” in each blog post (or in each email that your blog post links to). The goal is to get their email so that you can market to them in the future.
- Read our article in this issue called Just Get Their Email! where we show you how to design a complete marketing program just for gathering email addresses.
When you post the same message to multiple social sites and on your blog, you are increasing your ranking with Google and other search engines. I don’t imagine that there are that many other accountants and business advisors posting content on “maximizing the profit formula” at least four times each month on their blog and social sites. Search engines love this focused approach and it almost magically forces you up their rankings (assuming the algorithms don’t change again) .
Follow the steps I outlined here for six months. I guarantee that you will be amazed at the increased sales you will see as you become a recognized expert and an authority on your subject. This “authority” is what separates you from your competitors and makes it much easier to win new customers and keep your current customers loyal to you.