Episode 7 Transcript

Hey everyone, it is me, Lisa, and welcome back to another episode of The Other 99%. Today, we’re going to be talking about the who, what, when, where, and why of social posting. I’m going to be specifically talking about the Facebook platform, but honestly, anything that I say can be applied to any other social platform out there. But I just wanted to say that because I might specifically bring up groups or pages and stuff like that. And it doesn’t really make sense when you’re talking about stuff like Instagram.

So let’s dive in and talk about, or start talking about the who. I’m a strong believer that we need to create content specifically targeted at our ideal customer. So yes, our products may be able to be sold to anyone, but Content doesn’t typically have such a broad blanket. So you can’t typically have content targeted at everyone because it doesn’t really apply. So let’s dive a little bit deeper into that. So for example, if you’re looking at my business, for example, and you’re asking me, do you have an ideal customer? It’s like, I absolutely do have an ideal customer. My ideal customer has a name and age range. I know why they need my product. So I’ll just share a little bit about it. So my ideal customer, their name is Sue. She is a mom. Her kids are probably grown or she may be an empty nester, but typically wants to get her products or her food on the table in 20 minutes or less, and she’s looking for products to help her do that. She doesn’t want to sacrifice on flavor, and she doesn’t want to sacrifice on quality, but she definitely doesn’t want to spend all day in the kitchen. So that’s my ideal customer. So when I’m creating content, I’m specifically thinking, how is what I’m posting going to help solve the problem of Sue? So that helps me pinpoint say, let’s say, Randy is scrolling through Facebook and he sees my content and reads it. It doesn’t mean that Randy’s going to say, oh, no, she’s not talking to me. She’s talking to Sue. But it just, it might mean that when Sue stops and sees that content and she’s like, oh my God, Lisa gets me so much. She understands the fact that, you know, I still want to have great food, but I don’t want to spend a ton of time in the kitchen. So my product can to everybody, but I’m specifically speaking to Sue when I’m creating my content. So I hope that helps. I hope that clears up about the ideal customer because I’ve had many people say to me, oh, I don’t really need to create an ideal customer because I could just sell like my products are good for everyone, especially like food. I mean, everybody eats, but I strongly disagree about your content. Your content can’t speak to everybody even though your products can be used by everyone, if that makes sense.

So the next thing we’re gonna talk about, what are you posting? Like, are you posting just, you know, sales or product posts over and over again? Your customers are gonna see right through that. I mean, I know for myself, I don’t wanna be sold to 24-7 and when I see all these sales posts coming from other direct sales on direct sellers on social, I typically just start scrolling and I’m in the field and I know what it is. Like I mean, you’re trying to provide value, but we’ve just been conditioned. And it’s like, I know for a fact, because I’ve heard this many times, people join the business and they’re told, just copy what I post. Just take the content from your back office on your business site and just post, post, post. Well, all that content on your business site is all sales based posts. You can’t do that. You can’t be selling to somebody 24 seven. So when you think about what you’re posting, you want to have some sort of engagement posts, you want to have people interacting with you in posts other than what, what you’re selling. So let’s use Epicure for example. So I can always say something like, well, I’ll use this one Facebook post that I did recently. I heard that they were having chicken on sale at a local supermarket here. So I sent my son over to grab these chickens. Now he comes back and these chickens were like massive. And I think it was like less than $9 for two huge chickens. Like, I mean, guys, these are the size of a small turkey. So I posted these, a picture of these raw chicken on my page, just as like a public service announcement. Hey, if you have chicken on your menu this week, and you have a Zara’s in your area, I would suggest go checking it out. My son just scored these at this great price. Like this is like a start the car had so much engagement on it, it was crazy. Like people were in awe of the pricing. I had people saying, I’m running over to get them. It was just, you know, an engagement post to get people talking, to get people watching me and listening and seeing that I can actually provide value and that I’m not just selling to them 24 seven. That post helped boost my algorithms, which. What happens then is because these people are commenting on my posts on Facebook, then they’re actually being seen. I might, my posts are being seen more because Facebook thinks like, hey, these people know each other. They’re talking to each other. So we’re going to slip more of Lisa’s content into, you know, say Cathy’s feed because we think that they’re friends. They’re socializing on social media because let’s face it, social media was created to socialize, not to sell. So next thing, when are you posting? Do you just go out and post about your business or engagement content about your business when there is a company sale? Because if you do, your customers can see right through this. They can see that you’re not being authentic. All you want to do is make a buck and you’re not really in it to help them. So think about that because if you had somebody coming to you or posting or contacting you only when there was a sale, unless somebody specifically says, hey, when there’s a deal, let me know. I wanna know every time there’s a deal because I have a project broadcast group specifically for deals. These people wanna know every time a deal comes out. So they get bombarded with these messages when Epicure or…when my company launches a special offer because they’ve asked for that. But I don’t go out and bombard my entire feed. I share that with my email list once, no more than twice a month. I’ve made an agreement with them that, I’m not spamming you with this stuff. So if you want to stay up to date with all this other information, get on my deals list and I’ll make sure that you have it. Otherwise, you’re just gonna get the beginning of the month and mid month information. Other than that, I’m not spamming you because that’s not what I do. So think about when you’re posting. You need to be in front of your customers consistently, but not constantly. So whatever that consistent timeframe looks like for you, then that’s what you need to do. Whether you’re doing this in a VIP group, on a business page. Guys, I hate that word VIP group, but it always comes up. I like to refer it as your customer community. It just sounds more, I mean, there’s people in there who aren’t shopping with you. And how can, like I have over 600 people in my VIP group or my customer group and I don’t have 600 VIPs, let’s face it. So I like to use that term very loosely, but I prefer to call it a customer community, especially when I’m talking to the members of my group. But make sure when you’re posting that you’re, I mean, a good ratio is two engagement pieces to one sales piece. And when I’m talking about sales piece, I cringe guys, I cringe when I see these, but try to refrain from posting like, images that have words all over them with like, you know, this product is only $8.95 now or Facebook is not dumb. Facebook has bots that that scan stuff and if your content has more, if your images have have more text than pictures, that’s a red flag for their bots and your content typically isn’t going to be seen quite as often as somebody who has a nice picture that is very engaging that you know stops the scroll because that’s the whole point. People are just on their phones mindlessly scrolling and you want to be able to stop the scroll. So when you’re posting these sales like maybe post for example like our saute pan is on right holding the saute pan or I could be posting a picture of me or a little quick video or a reel or something of me cooking in our saute pan. That’s going to stop the scroll more than a image that says on sale now, buy it now, get it while it lasts, supplies limited. Just don’t do it. At least I don’t think you should be doing it, but you could take anything that I say with a grain of salt, but I’m just giving you my advice from what I see, what I hear. I do a lot of research in this stuff. I have a lot of contacts that I like, I take in a lot of training, I listen to a lot of this stuff. So I’m just trying to share my knowledge with you, but typically those posts don’t work. So don’t try to add more text onto an image. Less is more when it comes to that, make the image bright and cheery and The whole idea, like I said again, is to stop the scroll.

Next thing I wanted to talk about is where are you posting? So I know that I have many team members who have small VIP groups or small customer communities. And I mean, when you’re posting continuously in a customer group of say like 30 people, that is like…bringing these same 30 people into your living room every single night and trying to sell them your product. How many sales do you think you’re gonna have at the end of the week? So if you’re only posting inside of a closed VIP group, your business is gonna take a very long time to grow. The only way you’re gonna grow is by getting out into the public so I’m not saying posting salesy posts on your personal timeline, but definitely go in. And I’m going to, again, I know Epicure, I’m going to use Epicure as an example on your personal timeline. You might want to go in and post a picture of a meal that you made, or, you know, especially if you made a meal and it flopped, like people can relate to that. Like Just say, oh my God, I don’t think I added eggs to this cake. No wonder it didn’t, you know, it looks like this, or something like that. Be relatable. You’re gonna get more engagement when you’re relatable than if you’re just posting your sales posts after sales posts, okay? So really think about where you’re posting. Something that I challenge you to do if you haven’t tried it yet, get into your stories, start creating reels. I had a silly real go viral. I mean, it went over 600,000 views in less than a few days. And it was simply me pushing a hard boiled egg through a cooling rack and showing people a quick and easy way to make egg salad sandwich. And I was surprised at how crazy people like, I mean, the comment section was going crazy. People were interacting. I had my, customer community grow because of that. I had a few sales because of that, but just get outside of those closed VIP groups, those close customer groups and get into the public. The whole idea is to start interacting with people and to take those interactions to a private conversation where you can start to build that know, like, and trust factor. So the best thing that you could do is get into Like even something like as simple as a story, post like a question, you know, would you add beans to your chili and have it as one of those polls and see what happens, see who answers and then everybody who answers or comments or likes or anything on that story, be sure to contact them and try to start a conversation. And the conversation is not gonna start about, hey, have you ever heard of Epicure? It’s gonna be a true authentic conversation. Like, oh my God, I can’t believe you don’t put beans in your chili. Like seriously, tell me what you put in your chili. If you don’t put beans, I put ground meat, beans, tomatoes and you know, seasoning. I couldn’t imagine chili without beans and just start a natural conversation because you, like I said, your whole intention is to build that know, like and trust factor. And once you have that built, you’re gonna be able to turn that lead into a customer authentically.

Okay. And the last thing I want to talk about is why are you posting? Do you really feel like your products can help help people? So for example, are you posting like for for me with Epicure? I truly believe that Epicure is the tastiest seasonings out there, the easiest seasonings out there. I’ll be honest when I am out of a seasoning, I sit there and I look, I’m like, okay, well, what do I have to do? Oh my God, I have to take this, this, this, and this and put it all together to make my chili. I could have just opened up a jar of the chili seasoning and it was all there. It’s all in there. Or, you know, our products like something like our taco seasoning, somebody who is trying to watch their sodium content. Well, our taco seasoning is drastically lower in sodium compared to your store-bought ones. So if I’m offering somebody our taco seasoning, I truly believe that our taco seasoning is gonna help them with their low sodium diet and our products 100% gluten-free. So anyone who’s dealing with celiac disease or anyone is gluten intolerant, they really need to look at Epicure because it’s surprising how many products are out there on the shelf you know, have hidden gluten in them. And I’m talking about seasonings. I’m not even talking about like full blown processed food. I’m talking about seasonings because they’re adding, they’re adding fillers to them to make them a little bit easier to fill up the jar. And those fillers may have like gluten contaminants in it. So I have a ton of customers who are celiac and they, truly appreciate the fact that Epicure is 100% gluten-free. Now, having said that, I mean, we don’t sacrifice on flavor either. So I’m just not gonna target my gluten-free clientele. I can offer my seasonings to everybody because I truly believe that everyone should have Epicure in your home if you wanna make meal time easy. So do you have that passion? Is that why you’re posting? And I always say to my team, tell me who your best customer is. Now, this is really a trick question. So I want you to think about that for a minute. Who’s your best customer? Can you name them? And I typically have team members posting, oh, my best customer, their name is Tracy, or my best customer is Beth. And I’m like, well, stop, stop, because it should be you. If you’re not your best customer, if you don’t use this product every day, Why do you think someone else should? So that’s something to think about. Like for a Norwex consultant, if you have Lysol wipes under your counter and you’re promoting your EnviroCloth, why do you think that your customers should throw away those Lysol wipes and just use EnviroCloth if you’re not doing it? So, you know, practice what you preach. Be a product of the product and your products will sell.

So guys, I hope that you enjoyed this little ramble. It’s been a while since I did a solo podcast. I’m gonna be doing a few more of these over the next few weeks, but I was really passionate about this topic because I was talking to one of my sidelines and it was just a topic that came up. So I wanted to come on here and just dive into it with you. But again, Thanks guys for watching, not for watching, but for listening. And let me know in the show notes what you thought about this podcast. We’ll talk to you soon. Take care.