Cindy Ratzlaff

Bestselling author, award winning brand marketing and social media pro, Cindy Ratzlaff, creates sales driving campaigns for authors, books and publishers.

How Authors Can Make Sales With Social Media

3 Ways to Drive Social Sales

By Cindy Ratzlaff

Turning fans and followers into clients and customers is the next step in building a Maximum Visibility Platform that connects customers to your products. These three steps are easy to implement and often overlooked but can have an immediate impact on visibility, growth, sharing and conversion.

If you want fans and followers to becomes customers and clients, make sure they know exactly what you’re selling and how to purchase it.

How to Drive Social Sales

Design an environment that smoothly, comfortably and easily guides the fan or follower to your offering and makes a compelling case for making immediate purchase decision, and reward followers and fans with a special discount or added value. Then invite them to share their purchase and share that special offer with their friends thereby helping your biggest fans gain status in their friend’s eyes because they’ve discovered and shared something before everyone else. Here are three ways to increase social sales by creating a social media customer-centric experience.

1.  Personalize:  A p3 Ways to Drive Social Salesersonalized experience can mean everything from software and plug ins to greet your returning fans by name to landing pages that offer a special discount or unique product just for fans. When fans and followers leave the social platforms they love to visit your site help them, via special links, to land on a “For Facebook fans only” style page that acknowledges where they came from.

2.  Ask:  Ask your fans to share their purchases. Add the social sharing buttons such as ShareThis or Shareaholic. Also remember that every social site has it’s only custom share buttons. Adding the Pin It button layered on top of your photos will increase Pins simply because it’s easy. Check out the variety of Pinterest button options on the Pinterest for Business resource page.

3.  Reward:  Reward fans who are ready to shop by providing Fan and Follower only style coupons, discounts, special products or free downloads.  Kate Spade offers a “Facebook Fans Only” special product each month. Dooney & Bourke is currently doing a Facebook fans only giveaway and in a nifty twist, Macy’s offers advice from fashion star Clinton Kelly for social media fans only.

 

 

If you sell a product or offer a service, ask yourself if there is a bundled offer, a free download or a special fan only twist on what you sell that can be reserved to reward your fans for becoming customers. Which of these three ways to drive social sales will you try first?

About Cindy Ratzlaff

Cindy Ratzlaff was named to the Forbes “20 Best Branded Women on Twitter” list and Forbes Woman called her one of the “Most Influential Women Tweeting about Entrepreneurship.”

During her 20-plus years as a publishing executive, Cindy created branded marketing and PR campaigns that ushered more than 200 books onto the New York Times bestseller lists. She was named to the Ad Age Marketing 50 list for the launch campaign behind The South Beach Diet.

She is the author of three books, and her essays on happiness have appeared on Oprah.com, CNN.com and her articles on social marketing have can be read on Business Insider. She speaks to conferences such as BookExpo America, Pennsylvania Conference for Women, Romance Writers of America, Ernst & Young, Garden Writers Association, Texas Conference for Women, United Way’s Ignite Leadership Network, Massachusetts Conference for Women, and more on the topics of happiness, personal branding and creating a digital footprint.

She engages daily with more than 450,000 people through her popular Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blog sites.

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