Let’s face it, selling is difficult for a lot of people, particularly on social media. You see posts with products proffered like so many limp vegetables just past their “best by” date, or the same sales pitch posted time after time after time. There is an art to selling on social media and the base of it is not to sell blatantly, but to sell subtly. As Mary Poppins so memorably sang, “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,” and a little bit of subtlety can make your sales message that much more successful.
So, if the idea is to sell without selling, how does that happen? There are many ways it can be done, but here are some of the best practices and the easiest methods to implement.
Tactic 1 – Share information
A lot of businesses guard their processes and procedures like they are trade secrets, when they’re really not. Every customer likes a peek behind the curtain. Show how you printed a really amazing six-color shirt order. Share how you took bad art and made an amazing design for those sublimated tumblers. Show the customers how the sausage is made and let them marvel at the amazing, finished product. And, somewhere in the post, throw in a casual aside that “Oh yeah, we can do this for your products too.”
Tactic 2 – Use psychology
Pricing psychology is actually a science and is how it was discovered that prices ending in .99 make people think things are less expensive than they actually are. Same with BOGO deals or buy five get the least expensive free. The psychology of placement can also be used to move products. Post about products in a variety of price ranges in one post and spotlight the one you’re really hoping to sell as the midrange price. Odds are, you’ll sell the most of that one. Psychology says people will want to avoid the highest price option, but won’t want to look cheap, so they’ll go for the midrange product.
Tactic 3 – Study your competition
The goal here is not to compare yourself to your competitors and decide if you’re doing better or worse. It’s to find out what they’re not doing that you can do, or where they have a weakness that might be your strength. If their customer service is lacking, make sure yours is always responsive and helpful. If they don’t offer sublimated goods, is that a niche you can fill? If their deadlines are consistently being missed, make sure your orders are always delivered early or on time. Monitor your competitor’s social media to see where they may be leaving gaps that you can exploit to your advantage.
Tactic 4 – Talk to people, not at people
Social media is about building trust and community and having a conversation and, remember, conversations are call and response. Make sure you respond to messages and comments on your social media profiles promptly. Ask questions of your followers and really think about and respond appropriately to the answers. Be transparent about your policies and deal with problems on the profile in full view of everyone. While your profile is for a company, let your followers see the people behind that company and learn to know and trust those people. That way, when you do post a product or service for sale, you’re a known quantity asking potential customers to buy, not some random person they don’t know.
Tactic 5 – Know your target market
And finally, perhaps the biggest tactic in the game of subtle selling, know your target market. This one needs a bit more discussion than the others, so it won’t be confined to a heading. Many businesses often overlook figuring out their target market. They assume that their market is “everyone” which, spoiler alert, the biggest company in the world doesn’t have a target market of “everyone”— they have a lot of different target markets or market segments.
A company that is marketing to a generic “everyone” has marketing messages that are so broad, and probably bland, that they don’t appeal to anyone. In order to market and sell successfully, particularly on social media, your company has to narrow down the population at which your message is aimed.
Finding your target market means sitting down and thinking about your business, your products, and who would want those things. Start with your business. Are you a brick-and-mortar who primarily wants to sell in your area? Is your business selling exclusively online and willing to ship all over the world, or are you only willing to ship to certain geographic locations? Do you have staff to handle labor-intensive products and large orders? Or are you more of a niche producer willing to do one-off orders? The size of your business, production capacity, and location all matter when considering who your target market might be.
Next, consider your products. Are you selling something intangible, like a design that you download? Or are you selling hard or soft goods of some kind? Are you offering stock designs that might apply to a specific group, or will you design on demand? To whom would your products appeal? If you print baseball jerseys, for example, then little league teams might be a logical market. Basically, the question is what products you want to offer and who would logically want to buy those products.
Finally, do some market research. Who typically buys the type of products you want to sell and where are they located? What social media platforms do they use? How can you best communicate with your potential target market? Take a look at potential competitors as well; how are they selling to their markets?
Pay particular attention to which tactics are successful and which are not. The goal of all this research is to build a profile of the ideal customers for your business. You want to know who they are, where they are, and what is likely to appeal to them in terms of sales messages and products. Once you know them, you’ll also know how to sell to them, which is the goal.
