Why Aren’t Your Social Media Followers Converting? 5 Tips to Convert Them

What is the fundamental goal for any business? To increase profits, right?

It makes sense then, that the aim of any marketing activity should have a monetization aspect to it. This includes any social media marketing campaign. Without converting your followers into paying customers, the entire marketing strategy breaks down.

So, how do you start converting your followers into customers and brand advocates? Lucky you're here, because in this article we're covering some tips to help you do just that.

What is social media conversion?

A conversion rate is the percentage of consumers who take the action you want them to take. That action can be anything from clicking on a link to get more information or actually directly purchasing a product or service.

"What if I just want to build a community"

We hear you. Let's think about it this way, according to social commerce market statistics, 80% of internet users make online purchases. This presents a great opportunity for e-retailers.

1. Analyse your content

You spend 24/7 on social media. Your posts are handcrafted, beautifully presented, and getting a ton of clicks, shares and likes. You check your analytics and you find you're generating a ton of social media traffic. But all the traffic you're sourcing from social media isn't converting.

Does this sound familiar?

Here are a few questions you need to answer:

• Which social networks are your target audience going to be on the most?
• Where are you sending your social media traffic?
• Are you posting consistently at the right times?
• Are you selecting the right keywords?
• Can your content be repurposed easily for other mediums?

To find out if your content passes or fails these tests, you need to delve deeper into your analytics and use their performance metrics to tweak your marketing efforts correctly and attract customers to your website that are built for conversion.

2. Invest in paid social media ads

You'll find that most major social media platforms offer some type of paid ads system for their business users to use. Knowing the best practices when it comes to social media advertising can be the difference between a profit or a loss. It's extremely easy to waste budgets and burn through ad spend, if you're prepared.

Paid advertising (as opposed to organic marketing), relies on payment to achieve a priority placement across social media pages. Paid advertising can be used to achieve numerous goals, like growing your social media presence (top-of-the-funnel), and conversion (bottom-of-the-funnel). The beauty of paid advertising is that you can target users based on their demographic and interests, and send them down a relatively short conversion funnel.

A test and learn mindset is probably the best methodology to selling on social media. Ultimately, it boils down to knowing your target segments and formulating a winning adset:

• High anxiety products (like the purchase of a car) require more copy to sell
• Create a relevant landing page to send leads to
• Use high quality visuals
• Select the right call to action (CTA)
• Utilize retargeting ads, combined with high engagement posts

3. Become a storyteller

Ever read a novel or watched a movie, and remembered what that one minor character said or did, but remember nothing else? The reason you recall this particular character is because you related to something about him or her. It's true that people identify with vulnerability and authenticity. The common thread between all great storytellers is including your audience in your story.

What does this mean?

This means creating content that your audience can relate to, talking to them on social media, giving them regular updates, and sharing their stories. A great way to do this, is to reward your loyal customers by providing them with small prizes. This provides you with a method for engagement, but also their email ID's that you can use later for promotion.

4. Build customer loyalty

A well-designed customer loyalty program is one of the most effective retention strategies. You should know from our post-purchase strategies article, that the odds of making a sale to a current customer is 60-70%, compared to only 5-20% of making a new sale to a new customer. A points-based loyalty program can boost online conversions and it can be integrated with your social media channels. You could create an engagement model that rewards points for purchases, referrals, writing reviews, and following the brand on social media networks.

5. Improve your conversational marketing strategy

You've probably been a part of a community on Facebook or Reddit, where someone has just posted one of their articles, randomly, and said nothing. It probably has zero comments, zero likes and disappeared into obscurity as fast as it appeared.

The more you add value to the discussions or give valuable information to other people in your target communities, the more you can:

• Build a more authoritative brand who people will listen to
• Build your brand's authenticity (you'll rarely have any klout on a platform without particpating in discussions first)
• Create content that is more linkable and relevant to your niche
• Increase your click-through rates
• Build more brand awareness