5 Conversion Tips to Add to Your Social Media Strategy

Despite earlier predictions and fears, social media marketing is actually growing. People spend around 142 minutes a day on social media sites, which is more time than people spend checking their emails, even if it’s part of their working routine. (On average a person spends around 94 minutes a day reading their email inbox).

Social media sites are doing a fantastic job drawing their users to their sites and keep them engaged.

However, social media traffic is not easy to engage outside of the platform itself. Social media users are mostly lurkers. Unlike users who type search terms with the intention to perform an action,  external links and offers interrupt the user experience.

No one comes to Facebook to buy insurance. But a search user typing “insurance” into Google’s search box is most likely to be actively shopping for one.

With that said, conversion optimization tactics should be different when it comes to these two major sources of incoming traffic:

• Search users can be easily lured in with a good copy and nice special offers.
• Social media traffic conversion path is often longer and more fragmented. (Unless you are in fashion or food industry where you can build sales from social media thanks to impulse shopping effect).

Here are a few conversion tricks that work for social media traffic:

1. Create a secondary asset that fits social media users

Whether it’s organic social media traffic or social media advertising campaigns, in most niches the golden rule is always the same: “Don’t try to sell right away. Engage and build interest first”.

We had a great chat with Susan Wenograd who put it best:

That being said, if your product costs more than ~$50, you may need to come up with a secondary product to engage social media users and collect data before selling more to them.

A few ideas of those secondary engagement assets include:

• A fun survey leading a user into the problem and getting them curious enough to optin
• An insightful whitepaper / tutorial describing the problem and then offering a solution which can be paid for
• A free brochure (e.g. interior design ideas, Halloween part ideas, etc.) that can be email or mailed to the customer and inspire them enough to buy, etc.
• Your own original research (based on your customer research or external survey results)
• A free course that takes seconds to join and can later convince people to pay for upsells (the full premium course, access to premium membership, etc.)
• A free evaluation of a problem that can be further solved by your product or service, etc.

Kajabi is a comprehensive platform that can help with most of those ideas above. It helps you create paid and freemium course, set up a membership site, engage users with surveys and polls, schedule and automate email notifications, etc.

If you were looking for some ideas to engage your site users better, setting up an educational course and/or a membership site is a good idea.

2. Re-target those who converted

Taking this idea of marketing secondary assets further, you can use re-targeting marketing to actually convert those who previously downloaded your brochure or became part your membership site.

Almost any (interrupted) user experience can be revived by retargeting campaigns including both:

Re-targeting a user on Facebook

A natural re-targeting platform to start with is, of course, Facebook advertising platform. For that you need to install Facebook’s tracking pixel and set up a campaign to automatically show ads to people who previously performed some type of an action (e.g. downloaded your brochure) and/or viewed your products.

Retargeting a user on your own site

You can also re-engage your return users with Finteza retargeting feature. For example, you can serve on-site ads to people who:

• Previously read your guide
• Viewed your product page
• Registered an account

3. Match your social media content to seasonality

One of the most effective ways to overcome that lack of intent issue, is to match your social media updates and ads to seasonality. When a hot season is approaching, many people find themselves interested in performing in action even if they were not there to act.

For example, in Fall of 2014 37% of U.S. consumers bought a pumpkin-flavored product, whether they were planning to or not. The power of seasonality has long been recognized by markers. Lots of brands come up with new temporal products and offers to generate new interest and sales.

It’s no wonder, Starbucks keeps marketing their Pumpkin Spice Latte at around early September and their Toasted White Chocolate Mocha closer to Christmas. Moreover, their holiday offering varies depending on the country to better meet their customers’ needs and traditions.

The power of seasonality can and should be utilized in social media marketing too. To get more organized, year after year, use social media editorial calendar to plan seasonal campaigns months ahead.

ContentCal is one option that offers “Campaigns” feature to ensure that your brands’ social media updates align to seasonal trends. ContentCal is minimal and highly collaborative. You can schedule campaigns months and years ahead and your team will be alerted of approaching seasonal trends whenever they login to contribute and schedule social media updates:

4. Diversify your CTAs

As mentioned above, social media users hardly ever stop. It is not at all easy to convince them to “download a free whitepaper” considering they came to your site after watching cat videos on Facebook (and are probably willing to go back to keep watching those).

Creating engaging copy for social media users involves much more creativity and experimentation. Play with CTA placement and wording, create an actionable context to naturally lead your readers into your conversion channel.

For some inspiration, try Text Optimizer, a semantic analysis platform that includes “Action words” section allowing you to see what may prompt your page users to act:

[Use these suggestions to create actionable context and word your on-page calls-to-action]

Adding visual content to attract more attention to your on-page CTAs is another way. You can put together effective visual assets using tools like Canva and Placeit:

Furthermore, make good use of these ideas on how to create conversion-oriented content to build a more engaging copy.

Diversify Your opt-in forms

Finally, while banner blindness has been an issue for years now, a new type of challenge is upon us. More and more web users ignore opt-in forms. Too many sites are asking for their email address and growing privacy awareness is not helping either.

A few short years ago giving away a free eBook in exchange for an email address was enough to boost your email list growth. These days most publishers are finding it more and more difficult to get anyone opt-in:

5. Experiment and then experiment some more!

Alter is a nice recommendation engine that helps engage more site users by adding an artificial intelligence component to your email list growing efforts. The tool learns more about your site users and customizes its CTAs based on their behavior boosting your opt-in rates:

Alter integrates with major email marketing platforms allowing you to grow your current email list.

Have you found any effective ways to convert your social media traffic? Please tweet your ideas to @seosmarty!

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