Do you remember when shops started to spring up on Facebook pages?
This was the way forward. You could now buy on Facebook so websites were not going to be that important any more.
But these shops started disappearing and the main reason for this is that you can make money from social media but not on social media.
You build up your audience and relationships on social media channels but if someone wants to buy your products or services they are still likely to go to your website.
So what is the process for going from sending a Tweet or a Facebook update all the way through to a sale?
You can follow our five step framework called PRISM.
Let me explain each step:
P for People
You need to build up an audience on your social channels. Work out which channels are the best place to find your current or potential customers and build a relevant audience.
On an ongoing basis assess if you are building the right audience. For example, if you are on Twitter you can use Twitters free analytics tool to assess what are the interests of your target audience.
There are various tools available for doing this analysis across other platforms. For example, you can use Socialrank to analyze your Instagram followers.
You want a relevant following that is growing on a consistent basis.
R for Relationships
If you build relationships with your audience they are more likely to take action.
You build relationships at scale using valuable and useful content.
You build relationships with influencers on a one to one basis.
I for inbound traffic
The sales for your products and services typically happen on your website so you need to encourage your social media fans and followers to your website.
You use specific tactics to encourage more traffic from social media channels. For example, evergreen content is content on your website that doesn’t go out of date. If it doesn’t go out of date you need to regularly share it across different social channels. This will help drive more traffic.
S for subscribers and social retargeting
The vast majority of visitors your website will leave and never come back. To encourage them to come back and to build the relationship even further you need to incentivize people to become part of your email list.
As a member of your email list they become part of your own community. From there you can continue to build a relationship and, over time, give them the opportunity to buy your products or services.
If someone visits your website and decides not to buy a product or become a subscriber you can still capture the fact that they visited your website. You can then target these people with ads on platforms such as Facebook.
M for monetization
Monetization is the a process to convert website visitors or email subscribers to customers. You build out your sales funnel which is really just a sequence of pages or emails that people go through that ultimately lead to an offer or series of offers. At the end of the day, to accept money, you’ll need to setup some kind of ecommerce website.
While you can sell directly through social media, most businesses find that their social channels are better used for brand awareness, relationship-building, and customer service. Keeping social media at the top of your funnel and using it to feed new prospects into your site as inbound traffic is where you’ll find the most success.
Summary
To sell more on social media you need to build the audience and relationships but you also need to build out your full PRISM! Take the time to map out the best way to organize your site and online activity, then execute it. Be sure to monitor your progress so that you can accurately test adjustments over time!
Questions? Put ’em below.