How to Convert More of Your Social Media Traffic into Customers
Today there are over 2 billion social media users. People use social media to connect with their friends, read articles, check out products, and do various other activities.
If you regularly share your content and products on social media, it can be a good source of traffic for your business.
But if a huge percentage of the social media traffic your website receives isn’t converting to customers, it is probably because you haven’t optimised it for all the different types of visitors.
The traffic your website receives can be categorised into three kinds. These are hot, warm and cold traffic.
Hot traffic consists of people who want to buy your products immediately. Warm and cold traffic is made up of people who are interested in your products, but haven’t yet made up their minds. This could be because they aren’t sure if your products are the best solution for their needs or because they don’t have any immediate necessity for them.
Most social media marketers make the mistake of only optimising their site for hot traffic. They do this by creating product and service pages that detail the specifications of what they offer and little else. This is a big mistake, because as you can see in the above graph, hot traffic makes up only a small percentage. Warm and cold traffic together make up the majority.
This is why if you want to generate more business from your social audience, you should take steps to convert warm and cold traffic too.
How to convert more of your warm and cold traffic
As I mentioned earlier, there are mainly two reasons why people don’t buy from you. This is either because they aren’t yet convinced or because they aren’t in a hurry to buy. So, you should do your best to build trust and stay in touch with them so that when they are ready to buy, they will choose you over your competitors.
One way to begin this process if by offering a free lead magnet. A lead magnet is a digital product that you give away for free in exchange for details like an email address, phone number and name that can be used to stay in touch with potential customers.
One company that understands the importance of using lead magnets to generate customers is HubSpot. They take them so seriously that they even offer a library with hundreds of free resources.
When starting out, most businesses use PDFs like ebooks, cheat sheets and checklists for their lead magnets, because these formats are relatively easy to create. They work well, but they have become all too common.
Therefore, if you want to stand out from the competition and achieve a higher conversion rate, you should create something fresh that will wow your audience. In my experience, video courses do the job extremely effectively.
Courses take a bit more work than PDFs, so fewer businesses create them. Many businesses sell their courses, but if you give yours away for free, a huge percentage of visitors will sign up.
Melonie Dodaro knows that offering a free video training for free will help her standout. Therefore, you will notice that on this blog she promotes a masterclass on how to use LinkedIn to get more clients. You can sign up for it using various optin forms on her blog like the popup…
…the sticky bar…
…the side bar form and also on a dedicated landing page.
People will be more interested in signing up to a video training like this one over an ebook or checklist, as courses are rarer. Most people sell content like this, but Melonie is giving away hers for free.
Creating a course might seem like a humongous task, but it shouldn’t take you too much time, as you can repurpose much of your existing content into lessons.
You can easily take the most popular blog posts and images you already have on your website and convert them into a script and slides and then record your course with a screen recording tool like Camtasia or Screenflow. Your audience is already reading your content, so they would definitely be interested in a video presented in a more palatable form.
If you feel that a course where you are directly speaking into the camera would do better, then get a good camera and record yourself.
Setting up the course shouldn’t be a problem either, as you can use a learning management system (LMS) like Kajabi or Thinkific.
Using Kajabi as an example, you can create the gated course opt-in pages and to upload your videos via the native Wistia integration. The platform also has some advanced features like quizzes that will help your audience assess themselves.
Make sure you divide the course into several modules and deliver a new module every few days instead of just releasing it all at once. This way you can nurture your subscribers by emailing a link to a new module over time. Kajabi makes setting up this type of drip feed course easy.
Promote your products in the course
Your course will begin nurturing the warm and cold traffic, and they will begin to trust you as they will realise you or your company are the real deal. So, make sure you promote your products and services in the course.
You can promote products in the video lessons themselves or in the descriptions you include. Make sure you include links to landing pages where your audience can directly make purchases. This will help convert some of the traffic.
Continue nurturing those who don’t convert
Even if you follow the above process, a good percentage of people still won’t convert. This is why you should implement an advanced nurturing strategy using webinars, as they have a very high conversion rate. For best results you should consistently run webinars.
But if you don’t have the time, you can run a live webinar when possible and record it. You can then use the recording to run evergreen, on-demand webinars.
A tool that can help you run both live and on-demand webinars is ClickMeeting. The platform lets you schedule events and set up playlists of elements, so that your presentation runs as a replay and your Q&A session at the end is actually live, for example.
This will let you automate the process and convert a lot more of your traffic into customers. You can even set up retargeting ads on social media to continue nurturing your webinar participants.
You can also live stream your ClickMeeting webinars directly to YouTube and Facebook, so as to maximize your audience reach and to warm people up, increasing the chances of converting upon clickthrough to your site.
Conclusion
This is the step by step process you can follow to convert more of your social media traffic into customers. This might take a while to create. But after you set it up the entire process can be automated. The above funnel will keep bringing you customers, while you continue focusing on what you do best.
Mitt Ray is the founder of Social Marketing Writing, where you can download 100 free social media background images.
