How to Leverage Facebook to Get More Clients

Leveraging social media sites to bring in more business can be a great option for some businesses, but you need to have a plan. This week, Chantal Gerardy, an online business strategist, talks to us about how to leverage social media to generate paying clients.

Should You Be on All Social Media Sites?

In my opinion, no. We wouldn’t sleep if we are on every single platform. I honestly believe that we just need to be where our ideal customers are, but we also need to be where it makes us comfortable. If you’re not comfortable on a certain platform, then maybe that platform is not for you.

Why Is Facebook the Best Social Media for Marketing?

Facebook is my favourite because there are so many people on Facebook. I love being on Facebook, and I love working with clients on Facebook. It’s quite a user-friendly platform and it’s social, which means you don’t have to be overly sales-y. You can focus on building meaningful relationships, and you can find your ideal client on them.

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How does Facebook Digital Marketing Work?

Many business owners think that they must get a marketing degree, or they’ve got to outsource it to someone else. I’m massively hyperactive and completely non-techy and I taught myself social media marketing, but I learned how to do it the non-fluffy and cookie-cutter way. I was able to transform my business and get paying customers. If I can do it, anyone can do it. But there is a skill to it.

We have to realise that the social media platforms are businesses so they’re constantly going to be asking you for money. Does organic work? A lot of people say that it doesn’t work.

However, for myself and all the clients that I’ve worked with, we see massive results. It’s like building a house. If you don’t get the foundations right, which is kind of like your organic strategy and your organic marketing, it doesn’t matter how much money you put on it, it’s simply not going to work.

At the end of the day, it’s how you position yourself online. You have to make sure that you position yourself as a professional. You’ve got to understand your privacy settings. If you’re going to be a little bit aggressive or risque in your marketing, then you’ve got to have some sort of crisis and management plan in place. You’ve also got to know how to hide things, block people, and report things. If we’re going to use these things in our business, we’ve got to learn how to use them properly.

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How do I start marketing on Facebook?

If you choose to do organic marketing and you set up your profiles, you follow the instructions, and you do them correctly, then you learn how to get it all started and get it working for you. The next part of that is the growth side of it.

Just putting content on a page that has no one following is not going to get you business. Launching a product when you haven’t gotten some hype about it beforehand doesn’t mean you’re going to have a massive stream of clients coming in the next day. What’s important is you sit down and you focus on three things:

A lot of people will say that you’ve got to do advertising. I think everybody is hoping for a magic pill, and there isn’t one.

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Where Would $5,000 Be Best Spent to Get a Return?

When I came from South Africa to Australia, I knew absolutely no one and didn’t have a cent. I was in a saturated industry, and I didn’t even have $5,000 to put towards a website.

Nowadays, you don’t need a website. A lot of people say you’ve got to have the website first and then social media. For me, you can generate paying clients from social media. When you make money, go and get that website. You need that website, but which comes first, I’m always going to say social media.

If money is important, it’s more about getting those clients and you can position yourself online. It is something that business owners could do. If I had had $5,000 and the experience I have now, would I have gotten the website? I think I would have invested in myself as a business owner to be better in business and to develop my skills. I think that’s something that would have been a valuable tool, especially when you are just starting out and you don’t have customers. You only know what you know, right?

What Are the Best Facebook Marketing Tips?

For me, it’s your personal branding. Maybe because I came from South Africa, I was always around privacy. I wanted to understand the privacy settings of the social media platforms that I was using because I am cautious about how my kids would be seen online, especially when you’re trying to go out and generate customers.

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How do I want to be seen? I’m an extrovert, so I don’t mind having everything public, and I don’t mind going out there and shouting things from the rooftop. But I was very conscious of the fact that a lot of people are introverts and maybe they don’t want to be the face of their brand. So, it needs to be an understanding of how you want to position yourself on social media. There is no right or wrong strategy. There’s a different strategy for each person.

Second, don’t forget to tell your personal story, your journey, your business backstory, how you got to where you are and what you’re passionate about. At the end of the day, its social media, which is social, and people want to connect with you at a deep and meaningful level.

You will become memorable just for the story that you’ve shared. Don’t forget to keep telling those stories online because someone who has a similar experience will connect with you, and that becomes a part of what you do.

Personal branding is important, but strategy or words are also important. When I first started out, everyone said to me, just be visible—take everything, give it away for free, and just shout it from the rooftops and go online and just go crazy. That’s freaking exhausting! It’s disappointing when there are crickets and you get absolutely nothing from them.

When you consider a strategy, it’s about working out who your ideal customers are, where they’re hanging out and figuring out how you’re going to best communicate to them, not in your language, but their language.

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We can communicate through written words, photos, and videos, so it’s important for us to take some time to consider how we are going to effectively communicate what it is that we do to the people that we want to do it with so that we can get a yes from them and then find those people online and then present it to them professionally with the end in mind.

Don’t just give it all away for free. It’s not selling if you’re servicing someone and they’re happy to pay you. It’s servicing.

A lot of people are scared about that call to action, but a call to action is one of the most important things that you need on social media. You have to let people know what the next step is. You’ve got to let them know how available you are, or else, they won’t click and then you won’t get a view. You’ll get scrolled over.

Can You Do Too Much Digital Marketing?

As a business owner, I think you can. You’ll just burn out, and you’ll get so frustrated.

Before starting with me, a lot of my clients used to sit on their phones or laptops all the time. They even go to the toilet with their phone. They couldn’t leave it because they were so scared that they were going to miss out on something.

That’s where the system comes in. You’ve got to book it into your calendar—your time to do your online marketing, create content creation, do your growth strategy, generate clients, and engage or follow up. It needs to be part of your business model.

If you do too much, you will burn out, you will get frustrated and it’s not sustainable.

If you’re constantly posting stuff, you’re not allowing the organic reach of things to come in. If people aren’t engaging, it’s just going to go dead. You’re not actually going to get that engagement, which means you’re not going to come up on people’s feeds. You might be posting every five minutes, but you’re going to mess up with the organic reach.

Content creation is only one part of it. It’s obviously a very important part, but the other part of it is the growth part of it, meaning that you’ve got to go and do joint ventures, collaborations. Get your customers involved in your marketing, i.e. user-generated content.

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Remove Ego Metrics

There are so many different aspects, and you cannot let your ego get in the way. Making it about just the engagement is what I call ego metrics, which doesn’t fly for me.

I have had many clients who called me. When I asked them where did they find me, they said they’ve been following me for 5 years on social media. And I had no idea. They’ve never engaged, they’ve never liked anything. They’ve just had all these touchpoints across all these social media. Suddenly the time was right and they picked up the phone.

Do I have to throw in the towel just because I didn’t get a “like?” No, so don’t worry about it. Just keep checking your insights, and make sure they’re green.

**What is shadow banning?**

On Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram, you can go to jail. The funny thing is when this happens to someone, sometimes you get notified but sometimes you don’t.

A lot of the time people didn’t even know that it happened or why it happened. I always tell people that they need to ask and to consider what they were doing that got them into that trouble because chances are they might go down that road again.

In Facebook’s Marketplace, you are not allowed to advertise your business. Facebook is a business. They want you to pay for advertising, and they give you a page. Use what they give you for free, but the Marketplace is to sell secondhand stuff. It’s not to sell your business. When you sell your business there, they’ll give you a warning. If you don’t listen, they’ll take that function away from you forever.

At the end of the day, it is about relationships. Spamming is not relationships. Spamming is like what you’re trying to do to get a quick magic pill.

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Messages: Dating and Marketing

Personal branding is always really important. I’m a little bit cheeky, so I’ll be a little bit cheeky, but I work one on one with clients, so they got to be comfortable with that when they work with me. So that’s kind of letting them get a feel for me even before we even start working together.

In recommendations or reviews on Facebook, you can’t swear or use profanity. If there is, you can actually report it and they can remove it. There is actually a setting in Facebook for you to turn off certain words on your page. So a lot of people that are in marketing or cryptocurrency might come onto their page, and you can control them. You can go into your page and you can set it up so that no person using the word “scam” can post on your page.

This comes back to skills. People don’t take the time to develop these skills and understand these platforms, but all those capabilities are there when you know how.

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