What percentage of your posts should be 'selly'

IMPORTANT: THIS TRANSCRIPT IS AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED. WE GIVE IT A QUICK CHECK THROUGH BUT WE DON’T CORRECT EVERYTHING AS IT’S INTENDED TO HELP YOU FIND PARTS YOU WANT TO LISTEN TO AGAIN - NOT AS AN EXACT TRANSCRIPT. SO THERE MIGHT BE A FEW QUIRKY WORDS/PHRASES HERE!

:: 00:00

Hi, I'm Janet Murray. And if you've ever wondered how often you should be selling in your social media content, this short episode is for you. What percentage of your social media posts should be sales related? So let's say you post on Instagram four times a week. How many of those posts should directly link to a product or service that you sell? Well,

:: 00:24

I get asked that question all the time, and my answer might surprise you 100% of what you post should be sales related. Let me just repeat that again. In case you missed it, 100% of what you post should be sales related. So just to be clear, I'm not saying that every post you put on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook,

:: 00:50

or wherever you post should be about your products or services. It certainly shouldn't be buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff. Because if you do that, people will very quickly tune out. What I am saying is that if you're approaching your content in a strategic way, every single piece of content should have a purpose. So even if you don't have a direct reference to a product or service you sell,

:: 01:18

it should be part of your bigger strategy of moving people towards becoming a customer or client of yours or buying a particular product or service. So your content doesn't have to be about a product or service that you're selling today or next week. In fact, if you're approaching social media, selling in a strategic intentional way, you're probably not going to see that many posts about things that you're selling right now,

:: 01:48

because not everyone in your audience is ready to buy from you right now. Most people need multiple touch points with you before they'll even consider investing in your product or service. Even more say, if you sell a high ticket item like teaching or consultancy, it's just not something that people invest in on a whim, but it is also true for lower cost products.

:: 02:14

Take my courageous content planner as an example, it's 47 pounds this year. That's the headline price. Although we do offer generous pre-order discount, but most of us wouldn't invest 47 pounds in a product or service unless we felt reasonably secure. It was going to help us get the outcome that we wanted. So even though I know that because it's an established product,

:: 02:39

I've been selling it for I think, five years now, and that I always start my launches with a wait list, which means I'm generally going to sell hundreds in that pre-order week, which normally happens in August. If I want new people to buy during that week, it's no good me just turning and hoping someone will just see it and buy it on impulse.

:: 03:03

A few people might, but most people take longer to develop the note I can trust. They need to invest even in a relatively low cost product. So in order to make sure that there are new people in my audience to buy my planet each year, I create content that is designed to attract new buyers for what my planner, months in advance. It's why I publish content about content planning and creation all year round.

:: 03:33

Because if people have been listening to my podcast for months and finding it useful, when the pre-orders open generally in August, they'll be far more likely to buy. If you want people to invest in your products or services, you really do need to give them a chance to get to know like, and trust you otherwise. They probably won't buy. And in a sense,

:: 03:55

during the months leading up to my planet launch, I'm creating content that helps people recognize why they might actually need my planner. I'm educating them on why it's important to plan and plan ahead. Otherwise they may not even see the need to invest in a product like buy. Remember also that sales posts aren't necessarily always about sales. A sales post can be a piece of content.

:: 04:20

That's designed to get somebody to take action action that moves them closer to being a customer or client. So that might be about downloading your free lead magnet or signing up for a free webinar, which is why now seems like the ideal time to tell you about a webinar I'm running on Thursday, 2nd of December. That's 2021. If you're listening in the future, because it's about how to create sales,

:: 04:44

generating content for your business without feeling scammy or Sally, as I will go a lot deeper than I have in this short podcast episode on what kind of content you need to be creating to sell more on social media, the webinar is called how to create sales, generating content for your business. I will link to the registration page in the show notes for this episode.

:: 05:07

And the replay is available for 24 hours a day. If you're listening in the future, after it's gone out, you're probably not going to be able to access this webinar, but I will run something similar next December. So that's December, 2022. And it's definitely the kind of thing that I work on with my clients in my creators club, community opera link for that in the show notes tape.

:: 05:31

But hopefully this podcast has given you some food for thoughts about what sales content really is because it's not what makes people think.