Good morning and welcome to the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast. I'm Esther.
And I'm Melanie.
And today we're talking about selling on social media with Louise McDonnell of Sell On Social Media. Welcome, Louise.
Thank you.
Very cleverly named.
Thanks, Melanie. Thanks, Melanie. There was also availability of domains at the time. Do you know when you go searching for many in one domains and that just was available? So sell on social dot media. Everybody says sell on social media.
It takes a bit of getting used to. So we have talked on a previous episode about not selling on social media. So tell us now why we should sell on social media.
Yeah, that's great, Esther. I think a lot of businesses think they should be on social media because everybody else is or because somebody else has told them to. I think there's a lot of people who waste a lot of time and energy on social media and it doesn't deliver anything for their business. So I'm very much about that. It isn't about vanity metrics. It isn't about ticking a box. It's actually about making money. That's the approach I would have. And that's the only results that really matter is your bottom line, which I generally help people with. I help them figure out how they are going to actually sell on social media. So I kind of take an approach. It's taken me. Yes, okay, Melanie, I'm talking too much.
No, we should have warned you beforehand. Actually, we have this little code system myself and Esther, so we don't talk over people. And so we put our hand up to say we've got something to mention as you're talking.
Okay, fine.
But of course, we didn't tell you that. And we have now interrupted your flow.
Indeed.
We're hardly going to stop you, are we, Louise?
Goodness, delete.
But no. The point I wanted to put across is you've been doing this for a while now. So do you have like a formula that you offer people when you're starting to train them on social media, or do they come across to you with a starting point and you tell them whether they're right or not?
Everybody's always right. I do have a formula. And where it came from was I started to train and Facebook, I suppose, was the first social media platform that people wanted to learn how to use for business. And I remember getting the phone call, I remember the very day getting a phone call from Frank Fuller. And it was the county enterprise board, as it was the local enterprise offices, as they were. And he was in Mayo. And I had kind of known him from a previous job I'd been in. And he said, Louise, a lot of people looking to learn how to use Facebook. And I said, Frank, I don't have time for that. We knew each other really well because I was like, Frank, I'm too busy. No, I don't have time for that. And he said, you'll really be doing me a favor. Would you mind? I said, okay, so I'll do it for your bank. So I put together a course on. And I liked that, you know, when you've never done any training on social media? And it's like, how am I going to present this to people? And so I did. And so I would go and I remember the time Charlene Sanigan was working for me. She's Charlene Jones. Now she's working for me. Every time I come back from doing the course, we have a discussion about it. I was always trying to figure out, how did that go? Like, did they get it? Did they get what I was saying? You know how you do it after training? You're like, what would I change the next time? Or did they get it? So what I would find when I'd walk into a course and you probably find this, your sales girls is that you could have 15 people there, and they're all absolutely a totally different state level.
Yeah.
So you have somebody who's sitting there and they're like, oh, you have 16,000 followers, and you have somebody there going, I hate social media. And you've all that in the room. And so I used to come back on, how can I deliver a session for somebody that everybody in the room gets something from it and that they all go away with an understanding of where they are and where they need to go? It took me years. It did absolutely take me years to kind of I go and I do it, and I come back and I go and I do it, and I come back and I keep changing things. But I did eventually come up with, like a six-step system. And it does work because I can have somebody who comes into a room and they're like, I hate social media, and they'll go away with an understanding of what they need to do, and that's good. And then you have somebody else who's maybe they're really active on social media, but they're not getting any sales. And so you're able to show them within the system where they're falling down. So I generally have three questions. I have a question that I ask people when they're doing my training, and I'm like, are you the first scenario, the second or the third? The first scenario is ignore it, don't do it. Has it put a head in the sand. Okay, that's number one. Number two is, are you constantly on social media but you feel like you're not getting any sales or leads? You are not getting a sales or leads. That's number two. And number three, then you have the people that just want to do ads because they just couldn't be bothered with spending the time on social media, but they want to run ads, but they're not getting any results either. So I generally ask people, where do you fall into. And generally they'll fall into more or less fall into one of those three. So I'm like, if you're one, this is what you're doing wrong. So the six steps are number one is planning. So setting your smart goals, identifying who your ideal customer is and really profiling them at a deep level, and then setting your budget. So relating to your goals, you want to generate X amount of sales, how much you prepare to spend to get that.
Okay.
That's like step one. Okay. So if you've had your head in the stand and you've been ignoring social media, if you start with step one, you'll have a plan and you'll at least have something to follow. Okay. Step two, then is digital optimization, I call it. So you know this girl as well. You can have somebody who really is doing good stuff on social media, but then you go to the website and it's rubbish. Someone comes to me and says the ad isn't working like, oh, no, the ad is working perfectly. It's your website. It's not converting them. So you can have that as well. The analogy I like to use, it's like you get people's attention on social media, but then they go to check you out and they don't know what you're selling or why they should buy from you. So if you don't do step two, you can waste a whole lot of time and energy on money and ads and social media, but you'll never convert people. And actually, that is the number one reason why sales by ads don't convert, generally because people haven't done step two. If you haven't done step one or step two, and you just skipped to the content, which is step three, you can see why your content, you'd be busy doing content. But if you haven't done one or two, your content won't relate to your business goals and you won't have optimized your social media or your website. So you won't be converting people anyway. Okay. So step three, then is content. And that's the bit that everybody just wants to do. They want to do the content. But like content. If it's generic, if it's not communicating your core messages, if it's not relating back to that goal you want to achieve this year, what is it?
It's just awareness, isn't it? There's no call to action, there's no nothing.
Yeah. Sometimes people actually will say to you, well, this is the type of business, let's say they're a life coach and say, I really want to attract people who are about to retire. And then you look at their content, you're like, but why are you, Danny, you're putting out content to do with people start at work because they're like, oh, I never thought of it like that. Okay.
Or images with just really young people in them.
Exactly. They're not relatable.
What you put out is what you're going to get back that step three, then it's all about the content. And it's just showing people about that, about how the different types of content you can create, the awareness content, the educational content, the sales content, the advocate content, and then how you relate that back to your goals. That's step three, anybody who's on step one or sorry, who's the first scenario, who is ignoring social media. If they do step one and step two, they'll achieve more than other thing I say to them is that especially when it comes to Facebook and Instagram, like, if you really hate social media and you really don't want to be on it that much, you don't have to be on it that much.
No, you don't.
You just need to do maybe two or three decent posts a week and have some money to put to them and you'll be fine because you don't have to. If you're running a business and you're busy, that's absolutely good. Good enough, as long as it gets results for you. So then that's step one, step two, step three, step four, then is targeting, understanding how to target the creative audiences. So demographic audiences or audiences based on people's age or interest or whatever that is, but also retargeting audiences as well. So Facebook and Ads or Instagram ads, they're amazing for that. So setting up the Pixel tracking code, so many people don't have that on.
Again, that relates back to your website because there's where the tracking code goes into.
Exactly. And with the iOS update that came in last year from Apple, it just makes things a little bit more complicated for businesses that don't host the conversion element of their customer journey on their own website. So if you're sending somebody away from your website to a third party website, you can no longer verify that domain. You can track that you can still track. There's ways to go about it, but it's just a little bit more difficult. So it's all about making sure my noisy chair. It's all about making sure that you can track and that you're targeting people effectively and that you're targeting the right audiences. That's step four. And step five is learning how to use the ads Manager to create ads. So again, you know this, there's quite a lot to it, and there's so much to it that people don't understand.
So many levels and layers to add manager, isn't there?
There is, yeah.
And then they keep changing it.
There's like 13 different objectives. Each objective is going to give you a different result. Then there's different ways of targeting. Then you can run your ads on a schedule. Then there's other things that trip people up, like campaign optimization should have it on or off, or should they run their ads on a schedule? Or where should they run their ads on placements, should they select and all of that. All of that. Then that comes into step five. And then step six is about reviewing the ad, how did it perform? And is it performing? Do I need to tweak it? Do I need to change it? And the next time I do an ad, what would I do differently? Because I've learned now what worked from this ad. So they're the six steps. Some people as well that maybe just are running ads and aren't doing any content or aren't doing planning. They can waste a lot of money on ads if they haven't done particularly step one and step two as well.
So you don't think you should just do ads in isolation? You should post as well as do ads in order to sort of mix it up a little bit, because otherwise you're just constantly selling all the time I suppose
All the sponsored post keeps coming up for that first.
Well, I suppose sometimes the ad can be the ad doesn't necessarily have to be that you're selling something. Your ad could be like, you do a nice educational post, it's a blog post or it's a video post, or it's something where you're helping your ideal customer and you just pay to get that out there that can be really effective as well. But you're right, Melanie. In my experience, we take on about 15 clients at a time in our agency. And the clients that show up weekend week out are the clients that do best on that. And the people that just want to show up at the very end of it all and run ads, they don't have as much success. People that like, I know we're just after we're in January now, so we're still kind of reviewing the Christmas performance. The businesses that got the best return, and we work with businesses across multiple sectors. We actually have them are products, half of them are services. So it's like we get a good experience of it all. But the one thing that stood out to us is that the businesses that started the Christmas campaigns in September.
Apologies to everybody. I know that's really annoying.
But the people that started in September, they didn't necessarily start getting the results straight away in September, but they got amazing results in November and December. And the businesses that came to you, you know, the businesses that come to you late and they say, we really need your help and you're gone, it's too late. You're going, look, it's a bit late in the day. You're not going to get the same results. And they're going, please, just please just do it first. And you do the ads and they're not as successful and you feel bad, even though you knew that was going to be the case. The businesses that show off weekend regards. And here's another thing as well. I think people have unrealistic expectations. So people think that they're chasing the shiny viral post. Well, I had a post and 500 million people saw it. I was saying, like, so what? Like, that means nothing. I would rather see somebody show up and reach three or 4500 people regularly. Then to see one post having a big viral reach, it means nothing. And sometimes as well. Like the mainstream media, their only interest in social media is the big shiny stories.So they will feature the TikTokers that have 2 million followers. How does that relate to a small business who doesn't have time to be on TikTok or to do what you need to do in order to get that level of following? It doesn't relate at all. And then that's where people think can maybe go onto social media. And they say, oh, God, I only reached 300 people with that post. I'm not doing it again. Whereas 300 people, if you're reaching 300 people regularly and if you can augment that, reach them with some paid advertising, you will drive sales and you will increase leads to your business, but it won't come immediately. The work you do now, the leaves that are coming through the door now are the result of work you did a few months ago. And the work that you do now would bring in leads in the future. But it's not a light switch. You know this. You don't go in and then you start getting leads. It doesn't work like that. I also say as well, when you're running ads, I've come to the point now, I say to people, if you're not prepared to spend money on social media, ads like you're all going to be limited on what you can achieve. I will say with ads as well. If you're on an ad, you have three benefits of running an ad. You have the direct sales you get from that ad. So with your tracker, your Pixel tracker, you can see those direct sales coming in and then you get the indirect sales, right? So somebody screenshots or then they go on a different device and then they come in and they buy on your website. But you can link that directly back to the ad or you're advertising product day and they come back and they go, can we have product C? And you're like, that has come from that ad because they've seen what you've done and they want to do business with you. And then here's the future sales. It's the people who aren't ready to buy it, but they've noted you, they've mentally noted you or they've saved you or they've written it down for later and you get that sales in the future. So yeah, all the benefits from running out as long as you're running them properly.
Okay, so I've been talking about the main ads and stuff, but there's also the boost. What would you say to people who just want to boost post for a Fiverr's
around boost in a post? Boost in the post is an ad. Once you're paying money, it's an ad. What I would say the Fiverr is the problem. I would say I think I ran an ad, I ran €2 for a day, for ten days. I spent whatever that is. I can't even do math. €20. Right. I kind of say general rule at home. General rule at home, €10 minimum per day and run your ads three or four days, maybe even longer. That's the one thing we found with the ads this year that they needed a few days to get going.
Yeah, I've noticed that.
Yeah.
The learning as well. It takes a few days to learn, do you think, because, you know, doing the seven day cycle now, has it actually made things easier during a seven day or are we missing out on the old 28 day optimization?
It really depends on what you're selling.
I was counting on you
attribution, the Attribution.
We got there eventually.
I think that's more relevant for higher ticket items. So if you're selling something that's if you're selling something that's a few thousand euros, your 28 day window of Attribution, I think is probably more relevant then I think for lower ticket items, the seven window, I didn't notice a huge difference, to be honest. Across lots of clients, we would have kept a really close eye. It didn't change it too much. So at the end of the day, it goes down to this. Every week we meet our clients, every week we check what are the direct sales. Then we go, you can go into the events manager and the ads manager and you can see you can just count the sales and compare. I'd like to compare one week against the other. So we'd look and say, okay, on average, there's maybe ten sales coming in on that website. And then when we started running the ads, that went up to 13 and the next one to 14. The next week I went to 15. And this is above and beyond what you're able to track directly from the ad. So these are just sales that are coming in. But sometimes people like your clients will go, oh, no, they just came in. But you were running the app. I once tried and I said, your app. She says that isn't performing that well. The number of sales on your website has doubled. And they're like, oh, no, that's not a good I'm like, okay, that's fine. And then when the ad turns off, I said, when the ad turns off, it won't be like a cliff. It's not going to stop. It will go down like this. It's going to go down gradually, but it will go down. And they're like, no, I don't think so. And then it does. And you're like.
That's pretty. I told you so.
Yeah. And I suppose it's a learning curve for people as well. There's a lot of people out there who are very distrustful. Rightly. Of meta or metaverse, whatever you want to call it now, Facebook, whatever you want to call it. They're very distrustful. And there's a conspiracy theory that once you run a ad, then your organic reach will drop. Because I don't buy into any of that. Okay. I don't buy into any of it. I'm just like they want your ad to be successful so that you spend more money on ads.
Absolutely.
And I have lots of clients who generate huge amount of revenue because they follow the six step system consistently. Does it affect their organic reach? No. Some posts are going to perform better than others because they're better posts, or they just resonate with people at a different time or whatever it is. The awareness post are always going to perform better. The sales post will always perform poorly. At the end of the day, it's all about the bottom line. So you can argue and have the conspiracy theory. But if you just buy into it and spend your money wisely and careful of how you do it and track what you do and learn all the time, you'll have more money, you'll make more money.
And speaking about tracking and learning and everything like that, you have a planner, don't you, Louise?
Oh, yeah.
About your planner. Seriously, woman.
I was so busy talking. This is my planner. I'm absolutely delighted with this. It's going really well.
Jumping off the shelves.
Did you see that?
I saw the ad.
I didn't.
That was my daughter, my 13 year old daughter. So we were doing one of those transitions where it looks like you're just pulling it off the computer. So anyhow time has gone really, really well. Honestly, I've sold more of it in America than I have in this side of the pond, which is really
Congratulations.
Yes. Thank you. It's really exciting to see. So for anyone who hasn't seen it, what I wanted to do with this planner, because I'm always thinking. I've always think I want it to be everything in it that should be in it and not anything at all that shouldn't be. So I didn't want it to be this big, bulky thing. Last year's plan I really liked. But at the end of the day, when I thought I said, oh, it's too bulky. I wanted to simplify it. I just want this to be nice and sleek, something small, something you can put in your bag, in your handbag, in your computer bag, or your briefcase or whatever it is. So that was part of what I wanted. The first section is all about the different social media platforms and what has changed and what you need to do to adapt in 2022. There's also a section on big teams and big teams that are affecting not just social media, but all advertising. So the eco, awareness, diversity, how women are represented, all of that. And if you watch the ads on the TV, you can see all of those big things coming through. So for small businesses, I also give you tips on how you should adapt than your own strategy for the big teams.
I don't suppose the six points are in there. Are they?
There's a workbook section that takes you step by step and ask you questions and you fill it out. And that's going to help you get clear on your message. Then there's the prompts. All the prompts. For example, what day? Today is the 17th. So today is whatever. There's lots of different days. Last Saturday was National Half Day or National Hogging Day. The 23rd. I can't even see it now. The 21 January or Celebration of Life. All these prompts, they're supposed to give you inspiration for your social media. And then there's a diary that's a planner. So I kind of want people that are using it. It's a daily, too. It's something that's just going to make your life a little bit easier. If you just stuck for something to post about, like a Celebration of Lifeday, how can I relate that back to my business goals and my core messages? And so rather than just putting up a generic post about Celebration of Life Day, it still needs to relate back to you.
But you won't find that on sell on social.Media, will you?
No, it's only actually available on Amazon or the book Depository at the moment. And believe it or not.
Get it on your website, Louisemcdonald.com.
No.
Well, this is confusing.
This is where she was talking about. When you send people to your website to buy something, then you send them somewhere else to actually pay for it.
Esther, you're so right. Because you know what drives me crazy with Amazon is I can't track anything. I hate that about it. But what I do like about Amazon is this print on demand. I don't have to order. Figure out how many copies I need to
You get stacks around the house.
No, last year I have that. And last year I was over by the post office constantly. And, like, if you were in Australia and you ordered it, it cost a fortune to send it. Whereas this year, if you're in Australia, they printed in Australia and they send it to Australia, you probably have free shipping.
Oh, that's cool.
More economical, more eco friendly as well.
It is actually more eco friendly. It's print on demand. The other thing about print on demand is for anyone who's ever thinking about doing a book, if you find a typo, just go and change it. And so the next person awards. That's not there anymore.
Wicked tips and on there.
So how do we find more about you, Louise? And if anybody wants to get some direct either one to one or group training, how do we learn more about yourself?
So actually, if you go to Louisemcdonald.com, all the links are there. So it will bring you to the Amazon. If you want to find the planner, it'll bring you to my sell on Social Media Academy website as well. And again, I love to connect with people on social media. You'll always find me under Louisemaktysocial facebook.com Louisemaktysocial instagram.com.
Brilliant thank you so much, Louise, for joining us today and for all that wealth of knowledge. I'll certainly be going back through it and noting down those six points and we'll all have happier and healthier businesses because of it.
Yeah, Amen to that.
Thank you so much for inviting me.
We'll be back next week with more Monday morning marketing until then. Bye.