So first, let's dive in to number one, attracting customers. This is where we're going to spend the least amount of time in this article because again this is a whole another topic that I have a lot of resources about, different ways to get people into your funnel. For today's sake, we're assuming that you already have some audience. Again, it doesn’t need to be a huge audience, but there are lots of activities that you're doing to attract these customers, to put your name in front of them, to bring them into your world in the first place.
So we'll just talk about this a little, but the first thing I want to tell is, forget the numbers. Oh, this kills me in social media. So many people are obsessed with their number of Twitter followers, their number of Facebook friends and blog subscribers and they go for quantity over quality, and that's a huge mistake when we're doing this from the point of view of making money for our businesses. It's nice to be popular. It's nice to be famous, right? I always teach you about being famous in your field. But remember we're being famous for a reason and that is to sell people stuff. That's why we're in business.
So don’t get strained by this whole numbers thing. It's such a useless waste of time. People get so obsessed with numbers. Yeah, it's really easy to get 50,000 people following you on Twitter who don’t care about you and don’t care about your business. That's a huge waste of time. You can imagine yourself just standing on the street corner shouting at random passerby. This is a really bad strategy for getting customers. So please stop the numbers obsession. Start thinking about attracting people that are good matches for you who are going to want to buy from you, not just anyone and everyone so that you can get your numbers up.
So the best way, in general, to attract customers is through great content. Again, we're not having it super in-depth but that's sharing blog posts, sharing videos, sharing all those little pieces of content that show your unique philosophy, that show your value and get people interested in what you have to say. Show off that you're a smarty-pants that you know what you're talking about basically.
In this phase, it's really important to let people self-select. This goes back to the numbers thing. A lot of people because they are obsessed with their numbers will try to please everyone with their content or with their messaging because instead of finding customers their goal is to find numbers, right? So if your goal is to find numbers, you're going to want to put stuff out there that you think can just get as many people as possible and you don’t want to put anything out there that’s going to lose people. That's the wrong way to think about it because you actually do want to lose people who are not your right match. You want to lose people who are not interested in you.
So maybe you talk about a certain program that you offer and then you have people complain that they don’t want to hear about your program. I know this recently happened with my colleague who is a really talented, brilliant social media marketer. He recently introduced a new program that's like a lower cost kind of mass consumer marketing training type program and something new for him. He's just on big name consulting and speaking before. I know that he got a lot of people complaining that he was offering content that wasn’t free because he offers a lot of free content.
Now, he was rolling out some paid content and a lot of people were saying -- you know how it goes like, "Oh, you sold out" and "We don’t like this" and all that kind of stuff. Those people are not good matches for buying things from Chris Brogan obviously. If people are complaining about the fact that you sell things, they're not going to buy from you and you do not want those people in your world. (1) They're just kind of negative people anyway, right? And (2) They're certainly not going to buy anything from you or encourage anyone else to buy anything from you.
So don’t worry about losing people. I mean obviously you don't want to be super offensive or anything like that, but whenever you lose people, remember that you're just calling your list to people who are actually interested and that's what you want. You want as much as you can to have an audience of people who want to buy from you or who want to refer other people to buy from you in some way. Remember, you're not here to win a popularity contest. That's not why we're doing this.
It's also really important when you're attracting customers to go for targeted matches over huge crowds. Again, this goes back to the numbers thing and something really interesting that I've been noticing lately in my business is looking at different affiliates and the amounts of opt-ins they bring in. so I have an affiliate program where people who are a good audience match can get a referral fee for referring one of my programs. So they can tell someone, "Hey, Orange Analytics website would really be great for you. You need to make a website." And then when that sale goes through that affiliate, they receive a referral fee.
So the data that I can see online affiliates is:
- How many hits they bring to my website
- How many of those people actually opt in.
But what I've been seeing with my affiliates that are completely fascinating to me is that different affiliates have vastly different conversion rates for their opt-ins. So one affiliate might send me 100 hits. So 100 people come from this affiliate's recommendation and they go to my website, but maybe only one of them opts in, signs up for something. So out of those 100 people, only one has really shown me that they're raising their hand and they're saying, "Hey, I'm a really good high quality match. I want to buy your stuff." Where I've seen that I'll have other affiliates who send 100 people to my website and maybe 25 or 30 of those people will opt in for something which is a really high number.
So what's so interesting about that is it proves that it doesn’t necessarily have to do with the page. It's not because the page had better graphics or a better message or whatever it was. These affiliates are sending people to the exact same page but for some reason one affiliate is getting 1% of the hits he sends saying, "Hey, I'm a really good prospect. I want to buy something." And the other affiliate is getting maybe 25% of the people that he sends saying that they want to buy something. They're opting in. They're not buying anything yet, but they're telling me that they're a good quality lead that I want to have in my world.
So in my mind what that goes to show you is that it's really important to spend your time collaborating with people who are really good quality matches audience-wise. If somebody has a really, really different philosophy from you on how they run their business, they might have a huge audience, a huge number of people they can reach out to. But because of that philosophy mismatch, those people might not be interested in your philosophy. Does that make sense?
Okay. I feel like I've spent too much time on this topic because I'm totally fascinated by it, to be honest with you, that there could be that big of a disparity coming from different people. But the point I want to make is in my experience it makes a lot more sense to go for -- when you're talking about advertising or promotional partnerships or even being featured in media, it seems to be much more effective to go again for quality over quantity, to go for sources that are going to send you people who are good matches to be customers over just the biggest numbers you can possibly find.
- Profitable Relationship Through Social Media
- Chapter Two: Engaging Customers
- Chapter Three: Sales and Prospects
- Chapter Four: Prosects
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