I know a lot of you love my motivational / confrontational style posts, and the reason I write so many of them is because I know, after working with hundreds of clients this year, that motivation and mindset is the BIGGEST thing preventing you from moving forward.
BUT you also have to have a little strategy know-how in place to actually go out there and make it happen. It’s mindset and motivation, ALWAYS, and then after that come the systems and strategies you need to support your goals.
So after the success of this post on the practical step-by-step to achieving your money goal, I decided that I would create more strategy-based posts for you.
Starting here with this I’m talking about something that SO MANY creatives seem to struggle with!
Social Media. Specifically… getting people to notice you on Facebook.
(side note; all of my strategy posts are best digested with a notebook and a coffee. You’ll want to take notes as this contains ACTIONABLE STRATEGY that you can go and implement right away. If you’re just going to skim read it, it probably won’t have much of an effect).
How To Stand Out On Facebook
Social media and in particular, Facebook- can be pretty sucky if you’re using it for business.
First, you might not be entirely sure of the ‘rules’ of using it for business, so you post a mixture of your work blended with your holiday and kid updates.
Second, you get frustrated that your posts seem to have barely any reach. It seems almost impossible to get Facebook to work for you unless you pay for ads, which also don’t appear to work either.
Third, you kind of wish social media hadn’t been invented because it basically serves as a very easy way for you to disrupt and destroy any creative thoughts in your brain and instead turn it into some rapid processor of people’s meals, nights out, and verbal disorders instead.
Anyway, if you want to get noticed on Facebook- and I’m talking Facebook here because let’s face it, everyone is on Facebook- if you want to understand how to use it properly to actually grow your business rather than just gain the odd few likes and shares here and there, there are some things you should know.
How To Use Facebook To Grow Your Business
It’s not enough to show off your latest work.
People get bored by this and see it as spammy and you trying to sell things, (unless you are already famous and then they will want more).
But you are trying to sell something! That’s the point of having a business page, right? Right. But it can’t be so OBVIOUS! Nobody likes to feel sold to. So stop using your page purely to sell what you do.
Remember the old storytelling rule, Show not Tell.
You want to get people interested in who you are as a person, because when they connect with WHO YOU ARE, they will naturally want to know more about WHAT YOU DO, because what you do is a part of who you are.
But again, and here comes the confusing part, you can’t just talk about yourself the whole time, because again that comes across as spammy.
Nobody likes the person who just talks about themselves.
So don’t. Instead, create dialogue with your readers. Even if nobody responds, it’s more interesting to read updates from a person / page who genuinely seems interested in YOU, rather than someone just spouting off into the facebook black hole along with everyone showcasing their holiday / friends / puppy / baby.
Ask questions. Be interested in your audience’s viewpoints and lives. And be GENUINELY interested.
If you’re not, you’ll come across as fake. I was recently pretty impressed with one of Gary Vaynerchuk’s facebook threads; he had hundreds of responses and every single one had a reply.
Admittedly these might have been completed by a VA / robot, but they sure sounded genuine. Either way he cared enough to make sure everyone at least felt they were being replied to, and that’s a big deal for someone with so many followers.
Can you do the same? Actually care about your audience EVEN IF they are NEVER going to turn into clients?
The point of your page isn’t to ‘get clients and bookings’, although most people seem to think that it is.
It needs to be about your MESSAGE – why you do what you do, why you care. What is it that you truly want to share with the world and what is the reason behind it?
That is what people resonate with. Genuine human stories, opinions, passions and emotions.
And when they resonate with your message, it’s only a short step away from them becoming clients and supporters of who you are and what you do.
And it needs to be about building RELATIONSHIPS. Often your social media is the place people first discover you. What do you want them to know about you, how do you want them to feel, when they first arrive on your page?
Do you want them to feel sold to, given a pitch? Overwhelmed, underwhelmed, not sure what to do next, bored? Obviously not. So give them what they need. Make them feel at home, familiar, comfortable, inspired, invigorated.
When you’re using someone else’s platform, you’re subjected to their whims and mercies and these can change at any given time without warning.
(which is why it is essential you use your email list as the main form of communication with your clients, as you control your email; nobody can suddenly delete your page, remove you without warning, or change whether or not you get accepted into somebody’s inbox).
So you can either constantly stay attuned to what’s going on at Facebook, or you could continue to create and share things that you give a damn about and not worry about whether or not one single post might not get ‘good reach’.
What you want to be most concerned with is creating content that is VALUABLE, interesting and meaningful.
Why your Facebook ad isn’t working.
People are very quick to dismiss Facebook ads as not useful, and that’s probably because most people have never bothered to figure out how to use them properly. When used properly, Facebook can be the biggest and fastest way to grow your business, get clients, grow your list, and generate profit.
Step One; You need to make sure you are using Power Editor, to target specific audiences. I mean super-specific, not just age / gender/ location.
Step Two; that you are promoting a free optin offer to get people signing up to your list,
Step Three; and THEN when they are on the list you continue to create a RELATIONSHIP with them – which then leads to sales.
Let’s get real here- you’re not very likely to generate direct sales straight from the ad itself. What you CAN generate instead is either create an event to sell from (such as a webinar)
OR, to get people on your list, which enables you to build a relationship with your clients so that they come to know like and trust you and THEN they buy from you!
So create a GOOD optin, which needs to be based on what your clients want to see.
Your optin should solve a specific problem your clients want help with.
To find out what your clients want help with, comb through questions in facebook groups where your target clients hang out. What questions pop up most often? What do clients seem to be struggling with? And how can you provide them with a quick and easy solution to that problem in the form of a PDF, audio, video, or photo response?
This forms the foundation of your optin.
Next, you create a good advert to run to your OPTIN PAGE (not just your website or page).
And right there in your list is an endless marketing and promotional opportunity (as long as you don’t abuse it).
and then use a story to describe what they will receive and most importantly, why it matters.
This is how you get people clicking through to your optin page.
When you are paying for clicks to your optin page, your page will naturally gather Likes as a result, as people who want to click through will usually also want to then head on over and like your page.
THIS IS WHEN YOU THEN USE POST BOOSTERS!
When you already have an audience – no matter what the size is – of people who have chosen to like who you are and what you do and who have very clearly chosen to like you based on what you are already giving them.
If you boost a post to your page and your audience who have Liked you because you have asked them to, an audience that is filled with people who also do what you do, an audience of your friends / family / contacts, you will maybe get a load of likes as these people also support what you do but here is the key thing to remember –
Classic example – I see this happen with photographers a LOT! It’s definitely not exclusive to photographers and I see this in other groups too – people creating a ‘Like ladder’ and asking for Likes on one another’s page… but the reality is most photographers are not your main target client!!! So yes they might all Like your campaign or post… but they are not the audience you want to target!
UNLESS they of course are going to all share your incredible post and get it going viral, which they will only do if it is POWERFUL / PERSONAL or MOVES THEM EMOTIONALLY.
Generally, your most amazing piece of work will not get shared by competitors in your industry, though you will get likes and comments.
If you want people to BUY, you need to get them on your list, and then promote your offers to a page full of potential clients- (which is what you will get when you use the power editor feature to target a specific audience).
Facebook is useful for getting clients on to your mailing list, for building relationships, for showing people who you are and for why what you do matters.
These things >>> WILL THEN result in sales and increased bookings.
If you’ve found this post useful, I would love it if you shared it over on … Facebook.
Love and Light
If you want to know what to do with your clients once they are on your email list, how NOT to sell and yet still make sales; how to get to grips with growing your newsletter, creating irresistible content, and how to convert views into sales; you’ll want to check out an EPIC mega strategy training I’ve created.
Three quick and easy to action trainings followed by a big Q+A session will give you everything you need to know about how to get started + grow your list.
Want it? This is just a sprinkle of all of the trainings I’ve got planned for Shining Lights this year, the online program + community designed to get your creative business growing- fast.
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