If you're a business owner or marketing executive who wants insightful, jargon-free tips on making social media work for your business—FAST—you're in the right place. Jeff Molander is the authority on making social media sell. He's an international speaker, publisher, adjunct digital marketing faculty at Loyola University and an entrepreneur who co-founded the Google Affiliate Network. His book, "Off the Hook Marketing: How to Make Social Media Sell for You," is first to show how fans, readers and followers can be converted to leads, subscribers and sales. Make Social Sell is your practical resource on making social media produce leads and sales.
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Publishers who represent non-fiction authors and experts can use social media to drive sales of books and information products by following the three habits of successful social publishers.
Successful publishers who know the difference between wasting time with social media and selling with it rely on developing three habits. These are:
You can immediately begin selling books and other info products on social media platforms by applying these three success principles. Let's look at each more closely and make them actionable in your everyday work life—let's make them habits.
Habit No. 1: Solve Problems and Create Experiences
Here's how the idea of solving problems to create sales works for non-fiction books, reference kits and informational products like webinars, DVD collections, etc. The main idea is to use social media platforms to:
This is the best way to effectively coax or nurture prospects toward buying books, webinars or any kind of published information products. The objective with social media is to convert visitors to a lead. Then it's up to you to nurture this lead into becoming a buyer of your books and information products.
But good news: This is easy work if you follow the formula.
Habit No. 2: Provoke Response and Earn a Lead
Blogging using this technique helps buyers discover answers to specific problems in search engines and make subtle yet direct, controllable connections with what you want to sell them. You see, when readers type specific questions into Google or Bing, your blog (or your authors' blog, assuming you've coached him/her on this technique) will pop up and direct them to experts and authors with terrifically useful answers—yours.
The trick is to supply prospects with answers (within the blog post) in limited, short-form ways that provoke them to interact more with you/your author... so they can more clearly understand the thought you just provoked.
The key to selling more books and products is to answer potential buyers' questions in ways that allow distribution of small samples of the more comprehensive solutions your books or products provide. To accomplish this, simply give prospects a clear pathway to "get more of that kind of thinking" into their heads/companies; give prospects something to sign-up for.
Help prospects act on their impulses by giving them a way to "get more" of what you just sampled. Mix in a direct response marketing element—a clear, irresistible call to action.
Habit No. 3: Begin a Courtship, Not a Drive-By
It is best to not ask prospects to trade their email for a whitepaper or access to a single video. Yes, most B-to-B marketers do this, but please don't do it yourself. Don't do a drive-by!
Grabbing at email addresses (just because you can) will reduce both the take and conversion rates. Ultimately, prospects likely will not connect taking the offer with your lead follow-up routine. They will feel spammed and unsubscribe.
Think about it in your own experience. Ever download a paper only to become part of an irrelevant sales follow-up call? Compare this to opting-in to a series of logical email messages that helped you get clear on something or learn a new skill.
Bottom line: You don't need prospects' email addresses to deliver a single piece of knowledge. Instead, when you give prospective buyers a way to act on their impulses, just be sure to set the context.
This (action your prospect takes) begins an educational process or journey for them. This approach will make it easier to connect your ultimate product pitch to that journey in ways that create more conversions.
Don't Quit!
If you're feeling overwhelmed join the club but don't quit. Social media marketing is heaping on more work—and you've already got too many to-do's on your list, I know. You may even be skeptical that social media can help publishing companies create sales. It's tough moving beyond being liked, followed or re-tweeted.
Successful publishers know the difference between wasting time with social media and selling with it relies on developing three habits. These are solving readers' problems on social media, designing it to sell (by provoking responses from prospective buyers in ways that connect with books, coaching and other relevant products) and translatin—discovering customers' evolving needs & desires, using them to induce sales transactions.
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