2023 5-Day Growth Challenge: Converting social followers into paying customers
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TL;DR: We sat down with Molly Balint, Instagram pro and small business mentor, to uncover hidden ways to convert your social media followers into paying customers. Read on to discover her top tips.
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Meet Molly Balint
Molly is a self-proclaimed Instagram geek and growth expert who recognized the power of Instagram for business early on. She’s a business mentor who coaches women on overcoming the overwhelm of Instagram and using it with clarity.
Molly also founded The Social Circle—a community that brings together education and support for women-owned businesses on Instagram—to empower women to share their gifts and what makes them different. She helps them stand out from the noise of social media.
Want to connect with Molly? Find her on Instagram or at mollybalint.com.
Curious about how you can leverage social media to grow your sales? Molly is sharing her secrets!
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How do I scale Instagram to build a thriving community and business?
Instagram (IG) is for more than boredom scrolling—it can and should be part of your business strategy. But there are a few fundamentals to conquer before you expect to scale your IG and start building a community:
- Look at the bigger IG picture. View every aspect of Instagram as a channel to connect with your audience and share your brand, including your profile, reels, and stories. Each element can help drive people to your website or checkout page. You can even share links to your opt-in forms to move your audience toward your email list.
- Start with your profile. Optimize your IG profile to represent yourself and your brand well. Be authentic and build a profile that your audience will immediately recognize as yours or your brand’s—from your profile photo and link in your bio to any hashtags you use and your business description. And use the lingo your audience relates to and understands to foster connection and help them find you. Don’t neglect it!
- Approach every element as its own. We now have reels (short-form videos), stories, posts, and IG lives available to us, but we need to recognize how we can use them differently. Reels often get pushed to people who don’t follow you, making them an exceptional tool for building brand awareness. Stories are for people who follow you, so leverage them to promote your brand or sell your offerings. Your followers have already made some commitment to you, so they may be more likely to work with or purchase from you. Use your feed and stories to help get them there!
- Find and stick to your niche. Instead of doing what everyone else is, create content that reflects what you do, your business, and what you believe. Your content should represent you and your brand to attract the clients you want.
- Be authentic (and yourself). Lean into who you are. People want to see the real you and enjoy what feels like a more authentic and personal experience. We all know a lot of people can be fake on social media, which is yet another reason you’ll stand out: people can tell when you’re being real (or fake).
A crucial tenet of building a following and a business is cutting through all the noise, finding your people, and standing out. It can feel impossible with thousands of people just like you doing the same thing, but Molly’s tips are the perfect place to start:
- Ask yourself what makes you different. Do you take a fresh approach to serving your clients? What do you value? Social media is crowded—being different is a highly competitive advantage here.
- After you find your differentiator, put that message out to your followers. Stay true to yourself, and make sure you don’t sound like everyone else. Your authentic content will ring true with the right people and help you grow and nurture your audience (and your business).
- Remember that your audience has a problem. You are the solution. We know—it can be awkward to sell, especially over and over. But there’s a high chance your audience might scroll past a sales post in your feed, miss your story, or not see a reel. And as your audience grows, they need to see your sales messages. It’s okay (and encouraged) to sell on your Instagram.
- Reduce friction and make it easy to find you. How should your audience contact you to work together? What’s it like to work with you? Tell people all the details they need to know and make it as simple as possible. Molly shares polls on her stories, asking followers what they want from her, and she’ll respond with the information in the DMs. It makes working with Molly ridiculously easy and finding the content they’re searching for simple.
Should I repurpose content from Instagram on other platforms? Should I use repurposed content on IG?
Molly sees it all the time—a business owner who feels like they’ve said something once, so they shouldn’t keep repeating the same message. But as Molly points out, many people won’t see your message the first time. Here are a few ways Molly recommends you repurpose your content:
- Grab content from your blog and repurpose it into a feed post or story. You can get creative with Canva templates to pull out a quote or blurb from the blog and explain it further in the caption.
- Are you on Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, or YouTube? Mine your other social platforms for content to repurpose for IG.
Our audiences need constant reminding of what we do, who we are, and what we’re offering—especially because you’re likely acquiring new followers. But don’t haphazardly repurpose content. Use data to understand what content performs well and then repurpose and create that content.
While you don’t own your social media channels, you do own your email list. Molly tells her clients to start building their lists immediately. You don’t need a website or anything else to grow your list. Her strategy involves building your email list while you’re on social so you can grow both audiences and funnel your social audience into your email marketing list.
Followers on social media have expressed interest in you or your content—that’s easy. But you want to take them to the next step: welcoming them into your business. Once you do that, you can nurture your subscribers and build rapport to turn them into paying customers. If you send your social audience into the inbox:
- Provide educational or entertaining content
- Offer your audience free resources that serve them (not you)
- Design a quality newsletter that keeps your subscribers engaged
- Send exclusive content they won’t get on social
More from the 2023 5-Day Growth Challenge
This challenge is packed with valuable tips, from building your email list and your business to finding clarity to set impactful goals. If you missed them live, check out the recaps below!
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