So let’s say you own a kitchen ware store and you’ve got a fancy easy to clean kitchen blender with exquisite design, high-powered efficient motor, 2-3 horsepower, that’s being sitting pretty on your shelf for three months. Despite the numerous promo materials that you’ve put out there, you’ve only sold five pieces of it within 3 months! Come on! 5 pieces in 3 months, I stocked 50 pieces!!! How will I sell them all?

Well, at this point you are probably thinking I don’t own a kitchen ware store, it’s not my problem. True, that’s not the kind of business you operate but I’m sorry to burst your bubble, it is your problem. Irrespective of the kind of business you run, it is not immune to the ‘poor sales’ virus. At some point in your business journey your sales won’t be over the rooftop. So, what were you doing wrong?

Here’s what you doing wrong: you have poor sales when your sales pitch is more focused on the convincing words you need to say.

The moment you focus your sales adverts on scripts like ‘Hey, come patronise us, we have the latest kitchen blender with the latest high tech function, our new shoe collection is made off pure Italian leather’, you set yourself up for sales failure. I’m not saying this strategy is utterly bad and should be discarded but if you are ready to super boost your sales, add my next point into your next marketing campaign.

Show, Don’t Just Say
People love a good show, they get dazzled by it, the experience from it lingers longer on their minds. So tap in right away, introduce creative demonstration of your products at work into your marketing campaign. Don’t just narrate the amazing features and benefits of your products, put up a breathtaking show about the product you are offering, create the ‘WOW‘ experience that lingers on their mind. Exhibit your products and services maximum benefit with spectacular demonstration.

Here’s an example of how putting up a good show boost sales. In 2010 Blendtec launched a YouTube video series tagged ‘Will it Blend’, the video series showed Blendtec kitchen blenders grinding electronic devices such as ipad, iphones. Of course, they don’t expect their customers to grind their smart gadgets but those video series convinced both their loyal customers and prospects about the durability of their products and most definitely inspired them to make purchases.

So there you have it, your customer aren’t buying from you because your product isn’t fantastic but because you bore them with your sales pitch. Switch things up,show off your products and services in a spectacular way, create the ‘WOW‘ experience that imprints your brand into the subconscious mind of your audience.

Everyday your prospective customers are faced with thousand of tonnes marketing contents from over 85million business profiles on Facebook and Instagram combined, each aiming to leverage the power of these social platforms to achieve one business goal or the other. Now that’s huge competition for your brand whether big or small. Now you might be thinking, what can I do to beat the competition?

In order to beat this competition, you’ve done various things to upgrade your social media game including creating stellar visual contents, made your social media feeds aesthetically appealing, invested a significant part of your budget on sponsored post, yet despite all your efforts your target audiences are not showing interest in your products and services, invariably sales conversion on social media is still low.

What are we not doing right? Why are our customers not coming back? What can we do to build a loyal customer base on our social media platforms? I’m sure these and many more are questions you have asked yourself countless number of times. Well here’s the golden answer.

Make Your Contents Valuable

When you go social with your brand don’t base your post solely on marketing messages, create value with your posts. In fact, according to some experts, contents not related to marketing of your products and offers should make up 80% of your social posts.  Spice up your content strategy with valuable contents that your target market want.

So,what makes up a valuable content? Irrespective of the evolution that the social media landscape has gone through since it’s birth, the underpinning reason for it’s creation still stands, people get on social platforms to get informed about various aspects of their lives, entertained and interact with the rest of the world. Therefore, as brand seeking more loyal and engaging customers on social media it’s your utmost responsibility to ensure that your audiences are not starved of these fundamental elements.

Your contents become valuable when your audience perceive them as educative or entertaining. To get started on that, you need to be conversant with topics that your audiences need more knowledge about, social conversion they are into, fun contents that they find relatable.

Educate your audiences about your products and offers, share industry-related tips that interest your audiences, DIY videos, recipe videos, clothing styles inspirations. Curate and share funny contents that your customers can relate with, participate in social media challenges, you could start one for your social community. These and many are examples of things you can do to make your customers loyal to your brand and make them keep coming back.

In a nutshell, a large portion of your social contents should be more focused on information that your target market finds valuable and not solely focused on what you want them to buy from you. Your customers don’t want to be sold to every time, they want to entertained and educated.

Present day online users are continuously being flooded with numerous marketing contents of various formats and as a small business seeking to make more sales online, you need to stand out from the crowd, to achieve that your marketing messages must be able to grab your potential audience attention at first glance and that can only occur if you are communicating in their language. So,what’s your customers language? Simple answer, KEYWORDS.

Keywords are terms people use when searching for products or services on search engines such as Google. It’s how they tell Google what they want. Keywords are not necessarily single words, they could be phrases or sentences. They help you communicate with your potential customers in the language they are already using. Choosing the right keywords for your SEO journey is not only an integral part of your SEO strategy but also essential for the growth of your brand online.

Keywords help you discover what your potential customers are looking for and when you incorporate them in your marketing contents, you make it easy for your target audience to find you, you’ll be able to get their attention and ultimately extract the desired action you want from them.

Deciding which keywords to use can be daunting especially for a small enterprise new to the SEO game but before you become overwhelmed with the technicality and array of words, here’s 3 things you should have in mind when looking for keywords.

1. Frequency
This implies the number of times a particular word or phrase was searched for on Google. You’ll need to give subtle consideration to terms that people often search for in relation to the products and services you offer.

2. Competition
Let’s be honest, it’s difficult for websites of small brands to compete with big industry giants on the search result pages of popular keywords. As a small business aiming to get good ranking on search engine you should be looking out for long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are those large numbers of search queries with low search volume, they are usually specific to a particular niche and often offer instant SEO results for small businesses. Long tail keywords tells you the exact things online users are looking for, an example of a long tail keyword could be ‘customized handmade footwear delivered in Lagos’.

3. Relevance
Your chosen keywords should accurately depict the product and services you offer. There shouldn’t be a mismatch between your selected keywords and the intentions of the people searching. For example, if visitors clicks on your website looking for custom made cakes but discovers you only sell doughnuts, they’ll leave, which will result in your website have a high bounce rate. That’s bad news because when a website has a high bounce rate it’s chances of ranking high in search results reduces drastically.

So there you have it, the 3 things you need to look out for during keyword research. Paying attention to these things will not only guide you to selecting the right terms but also ensure that you are putting your best foot forward on your SEO journey.

Now that you are on Instagram you have probably come to the realization that getting noticed on IG is not as easy as it seem especially with the ever changing algorithm that’s constantly declining the rate of reach of organic posts. The frustration that you feel every time you view your organic posts analytics and realize that not even one tenth of your followers saw your post can not be overemphasized.

Despite all the efforts put into crafting that visually appealing content, your post is not reaching your target audiences, if they are not seeing your content, how will they engage with it let alone carry out the desired action you expect from them and with an already stretched budget, running ad campaigns is not a luxury you can afford all the time. What should I do to boost the reach of my organic post?

IG stories are quick photos and videos often accompanied with visual filters and features often displayed at the top of a user’s IG timeline. Stories disappear after 24 hours for viewers but high performing stories can be stored in an archive which can be reposted again.

Instagram stories, yes!!! Instagram stories, the Snapchat model Instagram copied and launched in 2016. Since it’s launch IG stories has grown in popularity with over 500 million people viewing stories in a day and one third of the most viewed IG stories belonging to business thus providing business both big and small and avenue to showcase their products at no extra cost. What’s IG Stories?

If you want your audience to see your brand frequently at no extra costs,IG stories should be your new best friend. The strategic position of IG stories ensures that you are more likely to show up in front of your customers more often. Likely? Yes ,likely.

Although, you have a high chance of been seen if you use stories to exhibit your contents, Instagram will only give your stories priorities on your target audiences timeline if they engage often with your stories.

To create engaging IG stories, your contents needs to have a personal feel. Loosen up a bit with your IG stories, make them look as natural as possible, unfiltered, let your stories radiate the funny aspect of your brand.

Here are examples of things you can incorporate into your IG stories, organize Q&A sessions, quizzes, flash sales and discount announcement, teasers about upcoming new clothing line launch, behind-the- scenes videos showing how your latest shoe design was made, Live videos.

Mastering the free features of IG stories is crucial to the growth of your brand on IG, asides from the fact that you’ll grow the number of your followers organically, it’ll help you cultivate a highly engaged community.