There is a huge disconnect in business today — one that wastes enormous amounts of time and causes salespeople and business owners to miss out on enormous opportunities. While it’s common in many businesses, it’s rampant, even among those who might be great at everything from social media, to content marketing to traditional selling.
It’s the disconnect between digital and physical, between content and conversion, between social media and your sales funnel.
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Over the years, one of the biggest disconnects in business that I’ve been complaining about is the disconnect between marketing and sales. In many organizations, marketing makes promises that sales struggles to keep. And sales says things that are completely inconsistent with marketing. Sales complains about marketing and marketing complains about sales, because there is very often little communication between the two departments. That is not the disconnect I’m talking about today, but it’s pretty similar!
Today, it seems to me the biggest disconnection is between our digital presence and our physical presence, between online content and offline conversion, between social media and actually selling stuff.
Some people are pathological about social media. They are there, consistently, like clockwork, posting on Facebook, tweeting on Twitter, connecting on LinkedIn, blogging, vlogging, podcasting, and whatever comes next. They are in the market, commanding attention, making noise, waving their arms and legs, and getting themselves heard. And that’s great.
But it is far greater, far better, far more profitable, and far more valuable to prospects and clients, when all of that messaging, chit-chat, and content is actually pointing in the right direction and connecting up with your sales funnel.
If you want to do that — if you want to monetize your message by crafting communication that sells — you’re going to have to recognize that it’s not just about tossing content against the wall.
Throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks is a huge waste of spaghetti and it’s exactly the same with your content.
Instead of just putting out quantity, you are far better off crafting meaningful communication that creates a direction and a connection.
Each piece of content you create should help you demonstrate your authority and bond with your audience, of course! But beyond that, it needs to lead them away from the endless loop of noise, chaos, competition and confusion on social media to the quiet, focused, helpful refuge of your client base.
This requires direction and connection. The direction should be away from others and to you. You want to direct people from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Linked In and iTunes to connect with you on properties you own, like your website, your blog site, your email newsletter and opt-in pages where people can make themselves known to you, one-on-one.
The flow should always be from confusion to clarity, from distraction to focus, from chaos to order, from everyone else… to you.
Remember, the goal is to get people on social media to become loyal, established clients. The goal is not to drag loyal, established clients onto social media. That’s backwards. It’s like actively sending people at the bottom of your sales funnel back to the top. It’s like sending your best clients into the lion’s den.
I believe the only place you should ever ask a loyal, established client to follow you on social media is ON social media, so you can then use your presence there to lead them right back to you and your funnel.
With very few exceptions, your messaging should be a one-way street directing people off of social media and connecting them with you.
We connect our social media presence to our sales funnels, so we can pull people into our orbit, not to send them back off into outer space.
So don’t direct people from your email, where you’re communicating with them one-on-one to Facebook, where they’ll become distracted and overwhelmed. Instead, do the opposite. Direct them from Facebook to opt-in to your emails.
Don’t direct people from a podcast, where they’re listening to you, to social media where they’ll be listening to everyone else. Instead, direct them to an opt-in page where they can make themselves known to you and access a free report, a tip sheet or video series that will help them.
The direction of your communication should always be toward you and away from your competition, unless you have a very specific reason for doing otherwise.
If you’re ready to get some help with this, then let’s schedule a time to talk. Just go to TopSecrets.com/call. That’s TopSecrets.com/call.