How to convert traffic from social media into sales

Social media has exploded. A total of 58% of consumers follow brands on social media. Facebook on its own has over 2 billion monthly active users. In addition, this social media networking giant is responsible for 85% of all e-commerce orders. Your company simply can’t ignore social media marketing anymore and if you’re already conducting a large portion of your marketing on social media, there’s always room for improvements. It’s not enough to just create an account on your favourite social media network or to run ads. The resources which you spend on social media have to lead to sales.

Social media sales are the new craze for marketing specialists all over the world. Contrary to an outdated belief, social media sales can be profitable for any industry. It doesn’t matter if your target market is made up of millennials or generation X, high schoolers or huge business owners, fixers or college professors.

Considering the fact that there are approximately 3 billion active social media users worldwide, can you really make the assumption that there are no people who would like to buy your product among these users? Your job is to find these people.

As opposed to traditional marketing, social media sales have many advantages. For example, this channel of communication is relatively cheap. In addition, it is seen as more authentic and trustworthy, which makes it perfect for conversion.

The reason to optimise your social media sales funnel

Social media marketing is without a doubt one of the best methods for growing organic traffic. Unfortunately, most of these visitors won’t be concerned with buying from you.

A lot of the traffic from social media will be termed as cold traffic. These are the people who have never bought from you. In addition, they are probably visiting your website for the first time. Warm traffic (in other words, people who opted into your list) in addition to hot traffic (individuals who have already purchased from you) will be in the minority.

It is for this reason that you need a sales funnel to accompany your social media marketing strategy. A funnel which is well-designed has the ability to capture cold leads, nurture these as well as get them to trust you in addition to convincing them to purchase from you.

Start from the basics

Research is – without a doubt – the Holy Grail of marketing. This is because it is impossible for you to ]sell anything without acutely understanding how the individual, who would like to buy your product, acts as well as how they make decisions. That’s why, first and foremost, you are required to analyse the sales process that lies behind your sales funnel.

The questions which you are required to ask yourself in order to analyse your social media sales opportunities are the following:

• Which channels are currently conveying leads into your funnel?
• What is the sales process?
• How much time does it take in order to close the deal?

The response to these questions may surprise you. Perhaps you’ll find out that you’ve been focusing on the incorrect platforms all along. In this case, you may discover it to be helpful to perform a little research which is dedicated to choosing the optimal social media platform for your business.

You can do this research by following the social media activity of your competitors in addition to seeing which platforms are the most valuable for them. However, there’s a much more effective as well as elegant way to do it. All that is required is a social listening tool. With this it is possible for you to monitor mentions of any keyword on social media and the web in real-time.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Want to discover more about social media marketing and how this can benefit your business? If you do then you need to do our Social Media Marketing Course. For more information, please follow this link.