Key Sentence:
- We all already know that social media is a powerful lead generation tool that can increase sales for any business or entrepreneur.
- But surprisingly, the number of followers you have doesn’t always tell you what’s happening behind the scenes.
Having lots Sean Sharma of followers is great, but it won’t work if no one cares about your content. In general, the higher the engagement rate, the more exposure the profile gets, resulting in more opportunities for organic sales.
Sean Sharma, co-founder, and CEO of several eight-figure companies is a 28-year-old entrepreneur. Who uses Instagram to build a travel and loan entrepreneurs community. His educational content allowed him to build a network of over 2 million followers on social media and expand his business. Across four industry verticals that generate over $10 million in revenue annually. He has a unique strategy that involves placing a DM (direct message) on Instagram. Here’s how you can do the same for your brand.
Shama Haider: Can you explain what a DM strategy is and how you implement it in detail?
Sean Sharma: Once you’ve created content and generated leads, you need to figure out how to turn them into customers. I proactively approach everyone I engage with on social media with the DM strategy and start a conversation. The point here is to bring perspective through the funnel into the feeding phase.
My team and I talk to potential customers in our inbox and ask them what interests them, their concerns, and what services we can offer. The more conversations we have, the more conversions we will get.
We also look forward to potential customers who have never seen our page but deal with similar content elsewhere.
These people are already interested in the same services we offer, but on different pages. Then we’ll message them and talk about what we can do for them. With this strategy, we let our competitors do most of the work of generating hot customers, but we went in and closed the deal. You’d be surprised how many brands out there create viewers but never speak directly to their followers.
Haider: Can you explain to us how you move customers further down the sales funnel?
Sharma: It all starts with publishing content – the more, the better. We then review each commit in our post. We treat them as warm information and proactively begin conversations, and sometimes even send them voice notes. We’ll be in touch with them as soon as possible to make sure we’re still thinking about it.
After all, we’re trying to get excellent customers – people who aren’t committed to our content. We believe they have good prospects based on their commitment to similar content or competitors found through market research. People are so used to exchanging messages on Instagram that we try to stay in touch with them on the instant message box for as long as possible before turning to texting or emailing. The key here is that we don’t go straight into the sale – we focus on asking for feedback and building relationships. Which creates a more authentic connection that will last.