How to Get More Leads and Sales with Organic Posting Techniques | EP. #54

On this 54th episode of The E-Comm Show, our host and BlueTuskr CEO Andrew Maff details how you can leverage Facebook and Instagram to collect more leads and get more sales. From organic posting to hiring a community outreach manager, Andrew will share all our secret social media growth hacks to increase your following, get more engagements, and ultimately, close more deals.

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How to Get More Leads and Sales with Organic Posting Techniques

SPEAKER

Andrew Maff

CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com  |  Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff

Andrew Maff

As a marketing expert with over 15 years of experience in e-commerce, Andrew Maffettone (Maff) has not only owned and managed multiple marketing companies in the e-commerce space but has also worked in-house at multiple online selling companies, driving brands to new heights.

With his knowledge of marketing and business strategy, love for staying ahead of the curve, and ability to execute effective marketing solutions, he created BlueTuskr, a team of specialized experts dedicated to the growth and success of e-commerce sellers.

Transcript:

00:03

All you have to do is set up retargeting. Nine times out of 10 videos is going to be the best; you're going to want to show them new content, and you're not going to want to constantly be showing the same video over and over and over again for a month. Hey everyone, this is Nezar Akeel  from Max Pro

00:18

Hi, I'm Linda, and I'm Paul, and we're Love and Pebble. Hi this is Lopa Van Der Mersch from RASA. You're listening to, and you're listening, and you are listening to The E-Comm Show.

00:34

Welcome to The E-Comm Show, presented by BlueTuskr, the number one place to hear the inside scoop from other e-commerce experts. They share their secrets about how they scaled their business and are now living the dream. Now, here's your host, Andrew Maff.

00:53

I'm your host, Andrew Maffettone. And today, I'm going to be talking to you about leveraging Facebook and Instagram, specifically, to gain more sales and more leads. And today, I'm going to step through social media is going to be the theme for the week. Which, yay, social media. I know it's overdone, but we're going to talk about it anyway; today, specifically, I'm going to stick to strictly organic so and by organic, I mean just posting; I'm not going to talk about any kind of paid advertising with the exclusion of boosting and things like that. But so one of the things I wanted to talk about is something that I've always found what I've believed to be the missing link between Facebook and Instagram constantly. And a lot of businesses don't do this. I think there have only been several times when I've started to work with a company, and they already had one of these people in place. And it's a game-changer for social media. And it is something that I think everyone should do and is worth the investment if you're doing any kind of additional posting on social media. So the obvious to me is the content. It's not something that if you're listening to this podcast, chances are you've listened to other marketing podcasts, and we're always preaching about the content needs to be quality, content needs to be quality. So I'm not gonna sit here and do that because it's obvious. So obviously, we're assuming that you have some good content that you're putting out. If you don't, UGC is my favorite way to go. So user-generated content if you can find some content from your customers, or from your leads, or from past clients, or anything. But so we're gonna talk about how to leverage your organic posts to start to bring in sales and bring in leads or even just grow your email list in general. So one of the things that I find most people don't do they, they get this great content they post on social media, they study up on the best times to post, and oh, I should post it this time. And then I should, you know, I gotta wait on Thursdays because my audience is here at this time. Great. You spent all this time making this great content. And you just posted out there, and you respond to, hopefully you respond to all the comments that are being mentioned in whatever posts you put out. Right. Great, awesome. That is nowhere near enough. And that's not going to drive anything. If you imagine you had an Instagram page that started literally from zero, you could post every day at the exact perfect time. It's not going to go anywhere. You can leverage hashtags, you can do things like that, and yes, it will help, but it's still going to take a very long time. The biggest thing to me has always been what I have, at least where I work now; it's kind of dubbed what a community outreach person is. So community manager is basically what we've done in this role; I outsource it nine times out of 10 until at least on an agency side until we have enough leverage at a company that they agree that okay, we can bring someone on full-time. So essentially, go to Upwork. Find. If, obviously, your audience is English speaking, find someone who's great with English and who knows how to write, and then send them over what I create. What we do is a brand voice guideline. So once you've figured out your brand voice, write out what they would say in this situation. Here's what they would say in this situation, here's grammar they would use, here's punctuation, they would use things like that. And so you want to add all that extra stuff in there and send them brand voice guidelines, send them to stuff to test with, like, Hey, you're gonna want to sound like this. They're going to do strict outreach. Maybe you'll have them respond to comments and posts on, you know, on your content that you're actually putting out but have them strictly do outreach. So if you're on Instagram, and you have all these hashtags you're using, have them go to set hashtags and start a conversation with anyone on their posts who are using those hashtags. Also, it's not someone who goes to the hashtag, goes to the top post, and then goes Hey, great picture with like a thumbs-up emoji that does nothing for Anyone; it needs to be very thought-provoking. The well written comment that clearly states I read your post and not, I mean, not literally states that put it should say something along those lines of, you know, hey, I read your posts, this is great. This is why I think this is this that is that there's no action item, there's no CTA, and there's nothing that I'm asking you to do. It's just starting that conversation; people then get curious and come back to your page. That is the most organic way to get people to come back to your page without doing any of this.

05:33

Follow people and then unfollow them, or like every friggin post that's ever used this specific hashtag. That kind of crap used to work doesn't really work anymore. Now you got to try harder. Now you have to actually show what you're doing Facebook's algorithm, and Instagram's algorithm are definitely catering towards this. In fact, I think some people get shadow-banned now for liking too many things. So we actually didn't want to go out, and you're going to want to have a community manager, it is hands down, the smart thing to do is definitely what I would suggest doing. My favorite way to do it is for when I have someone come in for a new brand; I keep them limited to 1015 hours a week, say, hey, let's just see how this goes for a little bit. And then, as I start to see results, then we start to improve from there. And we start to scale. And that's when you start to bring in someone else, or they're sorry, that's when you start to bring in and allow them to bump up to a full-time job, or you bring in someone else or maybe you then bring it in the house or obviously things are different. Now we're all remote. But you know. So that would definitely be the top thing I would mention. Now, you're going to want to make sure that they're always very aware of what you have to offer, obviously. So having them DM you having them comment back, having your community manager then know, okay, we have this blog post that I could send them to help them with this issue they're having, we have this piece of data content that I could send them to help with this, I need, they need to know the tools that they have around them. And then that's what's bringing in your leads; it's great to have a conversation, it's great to bring in a bunch of followers, and I'm sure eventually they will end up over to your website. But if you're looking for a more direct return, you're looking for more results faster; you need to make sure your community manager knows the tools that they have available to them. And then you need to find ways to get them out organically without shoving them in people's inboxes and be like, Hey, you look like you might like this, like none of this sales approach. It has to be very organic; your community manager is there to provide value for your readers for your potential followers. And that's it. So consider your social media manager may oversee your community manager and help them understand, like, Hey, we're going to do these types of posts this week. And we'll also communicate with them about, like, hey, this landing page is available, or this ebook is now ready, or things like that. But they are a part of the social media team, at least the way that we run it. And it's not someone who basically is scheduling. It's they're not doing scheduled posts; they're not creating content; they're not doing anything like that. Their sole job is to be on social media all day or however long you hire them to actually start the conversation. That's what will get the ball rolling. That's what's going to bring in more leads, more people who are directly DMing you more people who are going directly to your website and purchasing. That is what I think is going to be the biggest thing. Leveraging paid advertising on social media platforms to gain more leads, more sales, more purchases, whatever it is you're doing. So this one's my favorite. And one of the reasons I love this is because of all the things that I read on social media and all the things that I actually engage with; I get more Facebook ad coaches and gurus than I would be happy to admit. And I find these hilarious because so many of them claim to get your ROI from, you know, zero, and we're gonna grow you 450% like great, well, I was at zero, and it's not that much. So your metrics are BS, but that's my own issue. So, okay, so we're gonna talk about leveraging the easiest thing if you've never done social ads before you have zero background in social advertising. Retargeting is the easiest damn thing you could do. It's almost always going to be the top returning campaign that you do. But what you're gonna want to do is test the amount of time from when they've left your website, and obviously, they didn't convert. So let's do

09:40

60. Let's do lead generation, right? So let's say you're a SaaS company, and you're driving all this traffic based on some blog posts that you've created. You're getting all the traffic is great, but you don't have any paid out you don't have any social ads running. What you're gonna want to do is set up a retargeting ad now, that's someone who has left your website and didn't convert, and it may not be someone who's not a customer but might be someone who uses haven't gained their email. So maybe your target conversion is email generation. So all you have to do is set up retargeting. Nine times out of 10 videos is going to be the best; you're going to want to show them new content, you're not going to want to constantly be showing the same video over and over and over again for a month, and you're gonna want to change it up. So you're going to have to look into the timeline when someone leaves your website to when it is they normally will come back, or to how long it will take them to become a lead, or how long it may take them to become a customer, you're gonna want to break that up, you're gonna want to segment it. So let's say, on average, someone comes back to your website after two weeks, and you're gonna want to speed that up. So I'm gonna set up a retargeting, you're gonna create an audience for everyone who's been to your website in the past seven days, and you're gonna create an audience of all of your contacts that you have. And you're basically going to run that audience; you're going to run the 07 audiences for website visitors. And you're just going to exclude all of your contacts. So basically, you're only showing this ad to everyone who has been to your website in the past seven days that you don't have their email. This is the most simple one you can do. Said the retargeting, do the video, and send them back to the website with some kind of gated content target. Now there are lead forms on Facebook; you can do that. So you don't even have to leave Facebook; if you don't want to do those, I would test those; you have to do those in a different campaign because they have a different objective. So you can do one with the target as a lead form, and you can do another one where the target is a conversion. And you can AB test by sending them to a landing page. But I would set up whatever gated content; you have as many as you can do. And I would test them all. And you can set them all up where Hey, you came to our website; you liked this, you know, here's a live calendar for you to download that you can, you know, check, or whatever I didn't do the copy. And so you can try that one. So that's your 007, then you can do a seven to 14, you can do a 14 to 21, then you can open it up and do 21 to 60. Like you want to break it up because I've seen way too many people do retargeting campaigns for zero to 60 days with like three different pieces of creative, which means that the next I visit your website, I'm now being punished by the show being shown the same three pieces of garbage crap content that you created for the next two months, that's ridiculous. So you have to break it up, figure out where it is that they're more likely to convert and send it there. A lot of times, you'll find, Hey, after 21 days, they're just not even. They don't even care anymore. So you won't even have to set up that audience retargeting the most simple one. I want to spend the most time on that. Because if you've never been on social media, you've never been on social media ads. I don't care what business you run. Everyone I've ever talked to about, like, oh, social media ads don't work. For me. It's total BS. If you do retarget, the easiest one. Now, top of funnel stuff is a little different, and may not always work. There are definitely some industries where I will agree with them that it can be difficult to do top of funnel stuff. And it's usually it's someone who has more of a need than a want. So for example, a dentist isn't going to do a top-of-funnel ad saying, Hey, I'm in your area, and you have a cavity like something like that; it's unlikely that a top-of-funnel will work as well. Not gonna happen. It's very possible, but it's unlikely. So if you're doing top of one on one, there are a couple of different ways. So top funnel nine times out of 10, I'd like to do a video that goes directly to the website. Hey, you know, check us out. This is what we do come to this website, and maybe it's going to piece a piece of content we made or something like that. It's not an immediate sale. It's never an immediate sale. Don't ever do that. Then what you can do is you're gonna do basically it's like a little baby retargeting, so you're not retargeting people who visited your website. If you do that video for the top of funnel, you can actually retarget people who saw the video but who didn't visit your website. So you're going to create an audience of 50% seems to be the one that works the best for me, but I would test them all. But you can basically create an audience of people who watch 25% of the video, people who watch 50% of the video, 75%, 95%, I think, is the next one.

14:17

So you test those different audiences. So you can target people who watched the video but who didn't visit your website. So they showed some interest in your content, but it just wasn't enough to get them to the website. So now you have to just show them a new piece of content. So now you've created in many ways you can do three different campaigns there. So you have your top-of-funnel campaign. You have the little baby retargeting campaign; I can't remember what we actually I think it's like a, I think we call like a top-of-funnel retargeting. I like baby retargeting, and then you have like true retargeting. If you're an E-commerce, you've abandoned the cart. That's a very easy one to do as well. I don't care who you are. If you think that social media ads never worked for you. That's not true. You can definitely do an abandoned cart email. That one's the most obvious. It's very simple. You simply just audience of people who visited you who added some of their carts and didn't convert. Dynamic ads can sometimes be the best ones. So the dynamic one is the one where it will show you the product with just a plain white background that they missed out on that they left in their cart; you can give them 10% off or come back and close out your cart or whatever you wanna do. So we've made it our way through there. That's the most high-level basic way to look at paid advertising to drive leads and drive sales. Honestly, this isn't something that's mind-blowing; this isn't something that is going to be a massive game-changer. I would say that the easiest thing for you to do, though if you've never done them before, would be to set up a retargeting. And then of course, if you're an E-commerce seller, at the bare minimum, set up an abandoned cart, the top-of-funnel stuff is very different. That's the stuff where you have to do a lot of testing; you have to try new creative, you have tried to copy, you have to be showing them different things, and constantly testing constantly. That is the more difficult way, however, is absolutely the most lucrative if you can get a great top-of-funnel piece of content. As I said, most of the time, video works. The best carousels can work well also, especially if you're doing Instagram or something like that. I've always had better luck with the dynamic stuff with it much further down the funnel, so an abandoned cart, possibly a retargeting. And then there's a ton of other stuff too, which one of the things that I have done several times that always seemed to bother people, when I first pitched the concept is what I would call, like, just a thank you campaign. And this is someone who converted. So we're only targeting if it's ecommerce, we're targeting purchasers; if it's SAS company, we're just targeting new customers or something like that. And so what it would be is basically, you're sending out, an ad to only people who have converted, and you're saying thank you, and you're going to offer them a little bit of something. And usually, what I prefer to do, this tends to work the best, with more b2b companies, where let's say you sell flooring equipment, which I've worked with more of those than I know, at this point, or you may be your contract or something. At the end of this, you're now running an ad saying thank you for working with us. Here is a Facebook group we've created that only has flooring contractors, and we keep it exclusive. And we just want everyone to help each other and build a community and blah, blah, however you want to word that. And that is funny enough, one of the most successful campaigns I've had, it always is an issue to discuss because there's no real immediate return on it. Your target is just how many people can get in this group, but the benefit of that group is now you own that conversation, you're having that, and you're able to see what it is people are talking about. Sometimes you will, if you're, you know, they may have a complaint about something you're working with. And it's actually a good thing because then people might even be able to solve that problem for them.

18:03

So a quick little background years and years ago, right around when Instagram came out, I was in an agency that focused on hospitality. So we were taking these great food pictures, posting them on Instagram, and then just kind of hoping that something would happen. And it just never really worked. And it wasn't doing as well as it was. So shortly thereafter, I really started to dig into social media and Instagram specifically to try to figure out what it is I was missing. And basically, this is what I dove into. And this is now what I've proven is okay; this is how this works. Now there's the caveat of you got to know your audience, and you need to know your, and you need to know how to do great creative because if your creative sucks and your imagery is garbage, then no one's gonna look at you anyway. But I'm going to plow through that. So the first section, we're gonna talk about here research. So follow your competitors, and see what they're doing. Use websites like answer the public also asked or things like that, to decipher what type of content you're going to post your Google Analytics to make sure you know who your demographics are. Find yourself a talented social media manager and a community coordinator. As well as curating a list of influencers, you might also want a designer; it kind of depends on who's working there. So if you've already noticed, what I've mentioned, is that the top social media team has at least three people, but that doesn't mean they have to be full-time. However, if they can be, that's great; that's ideal. That means you're really plowing through your social. Well, let's get into branding now. So making sure everything looks the same by now and hope to think that this is common sense, but it needs to be aesthetic and used to look the exact same way. Keep your brand voice, your brand aesthetic, and all that stuff the exact same. Come up with a cohesive look, and find yourself a graphic designer, which I kind of just mentioned. And you're going to want to have your graphic designer create templates, so it doesn't need to be wildly templated. Otherwise, it's going to look wildly templated. But if you have them create kind of a concept for each category of post that you're going to be doing. It's going to make it go a lot faster. It's gonna be a lot more efficient posting. So You're gonna want your social media manager to post daily. That's my suggestion, at least daily, and around three to five stories a day, at a minimum, sometimes more. made very rarely less, you're always going to want to share your own posts and things like that. But always tag your products, always tag influencers, or whoever else was mentioned in the video or in the image that you posted; use anywhere from 10 to 30. hashtags. Now, once you pass that 10,000 follower mark, you can slow down the use of hashtags; you don't need to overdo them; they really help in the beginning to kind of get that extra reach. But you don't want to use shadowbanned hashtag hashtags, which you could go to the hashtag, it will literally tell you that it's shadowbanned. And you don't want to use too many hashtags you want to use just right, and you want to change them up. test using geotagging. So if you're local, if you have a retail shop or your brick-and-mortar somewhere, geo-tagging will always work for you. If not, you might want to change your geotagging based on maybe the influencer you're using or something like that. So tagging that location of the post can always work great as well. Experiment with doing single-image carousels, which can work great because of the engagement or video, test all of those, and then share all of your new posts into stories. What's an easy one, a one-off story post that you have two more here. Okay, so outreach. So this is the most important one, everyone thinks that this was the issue I had years ago when I was in hospitality. Everyone thinks that I made this beautiful picture, or I had this great video, and I posted it on Instagram. Now, where are all my followers? That is not how this works. So you have to go out social media is about being social; you can't just be a wallflower and hide in the corner. Not everyone wants to approach the wallflower. Some people do, but not everyone. So you have to go out and talk to other people, and then they'll start coming to you. So have your community and coordinator contact people or comment on other people or like other photos and things like that for at least three to five hours a day. And this is just Instagram; I'm not talking about having gotten into Twitter or Facebook or anything like that; that'll be another day in other podcasts. You want them to like and reply to all comments. So whether they're on your, they're in your DMS, they're, you know, from stories and things like that, or obviously, they're on your own posts, or maybe they replied to a comment that you made on another post. Once a new post goes live, this always works really well. So once a new post goes live, you're gonna want to go back to your previous posts, and really like everyone's comment. So let's say I posted yesterday, and I got 500 comments, and I liked and commented on all of them. And then I post today, as soon as that goes live, I'm gonna go back to my post yesterday, and I'm gonna read, like, all those comments, it's a way that Instagram will basically give them an alert that so and so liked your content, and they'll look and go, why they just liked my comment again. And they will actually go back to your profile and see that there's a new post; it sounds kind of like a weird growth hack. And it pretty much is, but it's got a great snowball effect of getting people who engage with you the day before to come to the next day and so on.

23:04

Then, go to the hashtags you're using and talk to people there that's kind of self-explanatory. And then share other people's posts. And again, this is kind of relevant to what your branding is. So you may not always want to do this, but I always like to share at least one to two other companies, other influencers, or customers' posts as long as they're not a competitor. And then last optimize. So on a monthly basis, have your social media manager go back and see what were the best times that you posted, and have them tag the type of posts that you're doing; you can do this and Sprout Social, which is what we use. And you can basically go back and see like okay, all of our videos did well, or all of our videos containing this did well, and you'll really start to know what's working and what's not. You're gonna want to optimize your profile image description link; try using link tree stuff like that. That was also kind of explanatory, have a pretty self-explanatory CTA. And then on a weekly basis, reevaluate the hashtags you're using and adjust accordingly. So make sure you're always seeing which hashtags actually worked. You don't want to overuse them because you could get banned from using them. And the last thing you want to get banned on Instagram is Pena but feel like that was more than enough. So that's all I got. Thank you

24:18

for tuning in to the E comm. So head over to eat calm show.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTuskr YouTube channel. The show is brought to you by blue Tasker, a full-service digital marketing company specifically for E-commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to Blue tusker.com Now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the E comm show.