We get results from social media when we’re able to identify the result that we’re looking to get, and identify the messaging that we need to create to be able to get in front of these ideal prospects to have them raise their hands and express interest. When we do those things correctly, then you can get to the point where nearly everybody you talk to is actually qualified to do business with you.
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David: Hi, and welcome back. In today’s episode, co host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing getting results from social media. Welcome back, Jay.
Jay: Hey, David. This is a big topic. Talk about opening a can of worms. It’s something everybody wants, and we talked, last podcast about learning online and what great resources there are.
This is a place where there may be such an overload of information and different ideas that I don’t know if you’re going to find the answer online. I really don’t.
David: You’ll find a lot of answers online. Yeah., Right? Whether or not it’s the answer you’re looking for, whether or not it’s the answer that solves your problem, that is the big question mark.
But I feel like this topic is so important because everyone’s on social media. Everyone’s trying to figure out what to do and how to do it. And the reason that I believe the word results is so important is that it narrows your focus. It forces you to think in terms of, okay, what is the result I even want to get here? What am I trying to do?
Because as we talked about in a previous podcast, you can go on social media and it’s nothing but distraction after distraction. And if you just turn it on and go in there without a really strong focus in terms of what you want to accomplish, what result you want to get, you’re not getting any sort of result, except you’re going to get pulled into other people’s experiences.
So from my standpoint, the first thing we need to do is to identify what is the result that I would like to get from social media? And then you can look at how much time that I spend on there is actually allocated to getting that result. That’ll tell you a lot right off the bat.
Jay: Yeah, and I think that there is a misguided focus that you need a large audience, right?
Like if I can get up to 10, 000 followers or whatever, that’s not true. it could be better to have a thousand dedicated followers who are potential clients than having a hundred thousand people who may just clog up your pipeline and who really never are going to be your clients.
David: Right. And if they’re not responding to what you do, if they’re not liking, if they’re not replying, then the algorithm says people aren’t interested in this. So you’re exactly right. If you just had the hundred people or so who are going to click today’s link on there. You’d be seeing everybody, everyone would be seeing your stuff. But of course it’s impossible to do that.
So you’re exactly right. It’s about saying, all right, well, how can I get to more of the right kind of people who resonate with the material that I’m putting out? And I am not speaking as an authority on social media. Okay. I want to be really clear about this. I’m not coming to you and saying, oh yes, I’m the guy for social media.
No, not saying that. However, what we have been able to do is to identify specific things that our clients have wanted to accomplish, and we’re very good at helping them accomplish it, once we decide exactly what those results are.
Jay: Yeah, I’ll tell you where we’re at right now in our company.
As you know, we offer Tax Services to a very specific group, so, I’ve told you in the past, we have spent two years identifying keywords for paid ads, and it’s been a constant process where we’re refining, I do the consultations, And so when I see that we’re getting consultations that are not in the strike zone, I go back to our keyword, you know, the person doing our Google ads, and we refine, and we refine, and refine.
And I’ve told you, We’re to a place now, it’s kind of like our secret recipe, where we don’t get a consultation that is not in the strike zone anymore. We’ve been that focused.
But it costs us a hundred dollars per consultation. That’s what we’re paying. And that’s a pretty steep fee. So obviously we’re like, okay, how do we get organic people to come to our website from social media, where they’ve seen something that we’re providing, and they’re clicking through and that doesn’t cost us anything, right?
So that’s the goal, that’s the dream. But now we’re in another problem. We could probably get tons of people coming to our site. But now I don’t want everybody clicking on the schedule a consultation.
Because I’d be back in that same problem. I’d be talking to a lot of people who I can’t help. So this is the dilemma. This is where we’re at in our company right now, moving to social media, but we have to be very strategic about how we do that.
David: Yes. But you’re very clear on the results you’re looking for. Yes. You’re looking for a very specific type of client.
You’re looking for a very specific criteria. And for you, you know that even though a hundred seems expensive, you know that it’s worth it because you know that each client is going to be worth quite a bit more than that. If the service that you were offering cost 50 dollars, you could not do what you’re doing.
And that’s something else that I think is important for people to understand. Not every product, not every service is going to work in terms of social media advertising, no matter how great you get at it, because there’s always going to be competition for various keywords.
There’s going to be a number of factors that go into it. So if you don’t have a product that justifies that kind of investment, if you’re selling a pack of gum at a time, right? When you go into a grocery store and you check out, there’s a pack of gum, they’re like, Oh, I’ll have a pack of gum. You take it as an impulse buy, right? That sort of thing. It’s very unlikely that you’re going to be able to run ads on social media and sell a pack of gum, right?
I mean, just the shipping costs on it, it’s not going to work. There’s some things that don’t work. When you understand that, then you can recognize that if you want to sell something that doesn’t sell particularly well on social media, you need to find other ways to do that. And of course, that’s the subject of a totally different podcast.
But when we think about the results that we’re looking to get. There are a number of different ones, right? The first one is, in your case, it’s about getting someone to have a conversation with, who is qualified. Getting a qualified person to raise their hands and express interest. And you’re talking about your secret recipe.
And I’ve always maintained that any business that does not have some secret recipe in it, is not going to last very long. And I’ve had people argue with me about this a lot. It’s like what are you talking about? You know, we’ve got a commodity business, essentially, like if your business is a commodity, that’s going to be a reflection on your sales, right?
If it’s just a total commodity, it is going to reflect in your numbers. There’s got to be something special, something different that you bring to the table, either in terms of the product or service that you’re offering, or in terms of the way that you sell it, right?
Because if you’re selling a commodity, Then you need to be better at attracting the type of clients who want to buy that commodity.
We do a lot of work in the promotional products industry, in the print industry, and a lot of people view that as a commodity. I sell print services. I’m an offset printer. Everybody sells offset printing. It’s like, that is correct. But what are the types of clients that you really want to bring in, right?
Who are the kinds of clients who are going to spend the kind of money with you that you want to actually encourage, right?
You don’t just want to take anyone with a pulse, anyone who can fog a mirror. You don’t want to just take anyone who comes through the door. When you’re building a business proactively, you’re deciding who you want to work with and who you want to choose to leave to your competitors.
So again, I want to stay focused on our topic, which is social media. We need to recognize that there are specific results we want, and then once we’ve identified what those results are, we can start to figure out what the specific plan is for getting those things to happen.
Jay: Yeah, and I’ll tell you, I don’t say this very often, but I really think this is a situation where you may be better off not trying to learn it yourself.
You know, I’ve watched videos, I’ve taken online courses, and everybody’s like, even down to the thumbnail you put on your YouTube videos and the, you know, what do in the video where I’m pointing at the, you know, taking all these pictures, I’m, looking like surprise and look, this is amazing and the clickbaity titles and all of those things,
but that’s always changing. That target is always moving, right? I’ve used something as simple as Fiverr, right? Where somebody who charges me 50 bucks a week, but this is what they do. I’ve gotten more results from that than I have ever gotten from trying to follow somebody on YouTube, and so I’ve just decided I’m not going to learn it. I’m paying somebody else to do it because I want to focus my time on what’s most important.
And that’s what we’ve found. Again, I’m not saying everybody that’s the solution for you, but we have spent a lot of time in this arena, and that’s how we’ve gotten results.
David: It makes perfect sense. I think it was Dean Graziosi, who I originally heard this from, he was talking about the fact that when you have the money to solve a problem, you no longer really have that problem, unless you’re too cheap to spend the money, right?
And so if you can pay somebody 50 dollars and you can get ad results that allow you to multiply your ad investment, it’s silly not to do that.
That also goes to the topic of “who, not how.” Dan Sullivan wrote a book about that. If you’re looking to do everything, every aspect of your business, you shouldn’t, because there are going to be things that you’re not going to be naturally good at.
But I think the core of this particular topic, when we talk about getting results from social media, The biggest problem is not social media. The biggest problem is people don’t know exactly what result they want, right?
They may think, “Oh, I just want to get more sales.” Well, yes, you do want to get more sales, but there are steps to that. And the first step, particularly if you’re using social media is going to be figuring out a way to somehow identify who those people are, whether you’re doing it organically, whether you’re doing it with paid ads, there are specific things that you need to do.
If those things don’t happen, you’re not going to get more clients. And whether it’s you coming up with the how on how to do that, or whether you’re paying someone else to do it for you, you’ve got to be able to convey to them what you want, and that’s where a lot of people get stuck.
They’re just so unclear on exactly what they want to have happen that they can’t get it done because they can’t even convey it to someone who can help them do it.
Jay: Yeah, such an important point. I mean, I’m just sitting here thinking, if you imagined our business with a storefront, you would think I want to line out the door and down the block.
I don’t. Right? I want the door locked and I’m buzzing you in, once I’ve decided that you fit in a specific category. That seems to go against everything. that we’ve learned about business, but we know that because we’ve spent so much time defining exactly what you’re talking about.
And what I think is the core, if anybody takes away from this podcast, and that is, if you don’t know what you want, how are you going to craft social media or any type of marketing towards that specific thing? That’s got to be job one.
David: Yeah, and the truth of the matter is that that situation you described about buzzing people in versus having the line, anyone who has been even remotely successful at identifying their audience and identifying ways to attract the right people into their organization would much rather have the buzzer, right?
Because otherwise you’re having to swat people away, and that is time consuming and it’s difficult. So when we’re able to identify the result that we’re looking to get, identify the messaging that we need to create to be able to get in front of these ideal prospects to get them to raise their hands and express interest.
When we do those things correctly, then you can get to the point where you are, where nearly everybody you talk to or everybody you talk to is actually qualified to do business with you.
Jay: Yeah, I mean think about it. We’re literally saying how do we get fewer leads? You know what I mean? It just seems like it’s such a different approach.
And I want to add one more thing. We’re about out of time here. And I think we should talk about this in another podcast. People who do have successful social media programs, you don’t want to rely on social media. They change their algorithms all the time. And your goal should not be just to get a sale.
It should be to offload them onto one of your properties. Your mailing list, your website, something else. Because you could spend all this money and have a great system and then an algorithm changes and you’re sunk.
So I’d love to dive into that a little bit more in the future.
David: Yeah, that’s a good one. And also the fact that the people who do this extremely well are not just running one ad forever. It’s very unlikely that’s going to happen. There are constantly going to be changes that are necessary because either the market has seen it and it’s gotten stale or there are approaches that work better and differently, or as you indicated, the algorithm could change.
There are a lot of different factors that go into it. So if you think you’re going to come up with one magic thing that’s going to work forever, it’s very unlikely that’s going to happen. But when you’re aware of the factors that you need to be able to focus on, you’re going to be a lot more likely to get the results you want.
Jay: Yeah, eventually competitors are going to steal that secret recipe. And what are you going to do then, right? How do you define yourself? David, as always, it’s a pleasure. How do people find out more?
David: Go to TopSecrets.com/call. Check out the video. See if it makes sense to have a conversation with myself or our team.
We love having conversations with really sharp, motivated entrepreneurs, salespeople, those who are looking to grow their sales and profits in a way that is sustainable. You’re not looking for just the next new thing, the next whatever it is that somebody says is going to get you the business you’re looking for.
It’s unique to everyone, and we need to be able to recognize and utilize your unique strengths in your solution. Otherwise, if you say, well, the solution is Instagram, the solution is Facebook, the solution is this, it’s that. No, the solution is identifying what is going to work best for you, and that’s what we do with our clients.
So, TopSecrets.com/call.
Jay: Fantastic. David, as always, a pleasure. Thank you.
David: Thank you, Jay.
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