I am seeing a lot of posts online lately from small business owners who are really frustrated because they are spending a lot of energy on social media and getting lots of followers and engagement, but not seeing a resulting uptick in sales. It’s maddening, because they feel like they are doing everything right, but why spend all this time on something that doesn’t generate results?

It’s difficult to give generic advice that applies to everyone, so instead I’m going to digress and talk about my cat.

I used to have a cat, and I also used to have houseplants. Unfortunately, both of them wanted to be in sunny windowsills, but could not happily -share- sunny windowsills. My cat would eat the plants or knock them down or both.

Now, I was young and naive and thought that this undesirable behavior could be somehow -trained out- of the cat. Like, if I nudged him off the windowsill often enough, or scolded him enough, and I was super consistent about it, my cat would stop wanting to hang out in the sunny windowsill.

This is a losing proposition in all ways, because hanging out in a sunny windowsill, like hanging out in a box, is in the cat’s NATURE. No matter how many times I repeated my behavior, he was going to go right on repeating his. That’s what cats are like.

If I wanted him to behave differently, I had to behave differently, and in this case it meant rearranging my living room. If there was one sunny windowsill that was empty, and the cat could get to it by hopping from the couch to the bookcase to the windowsill, he would go that way. If there was another windowsill with plants in it, and no easy way to get to it, he would leave it alone. I had to change my approach, so that it was easy for him to do what I wanted, and difficult for him to do what I didn’t want.

Improve profits by streamlining your funnel

So, in the case of a business with their customer, think about every single click between their point of origin and the “check out” button (or whatever it is you want them to do). Look at that journey and remove every possible obstacle, making it as fast and easy as it can possibly be for them to act on the impulse to buy your product.

It is normal to have a progression of dropoffs. You might have 1 website visitor for every 100 social likes. You may have 1 item in a shopping cart for every 100 site visitors. You may have 1 actual completed transaction for every 100 items placed in shopping carts.

Look at where and how your traffic falls off, and try to eliminate as many of those dropoff points as possible.

Current shopping cart abandon rates are between 60-80%, for even the biggest brands, and a full 60% of those are due to users finding out the true and final purchase price of the item with shipping. Another 30% are people who wanted to buy something without creating an account on the site. That’s nearly a third of people who would have bought something, but didn’t want to have to create an account. Can you ease that pain point with guest accounts? With a super-fast, no-struggle account creation process? With a shipping estimator on the project page? You get my drift.

Improve profits by directing your traffic

In the case of social networks, you have a battle on your hands, because the social network’s objective is to keep the traffic, not send it through to you. For example, a big factor in YouTube algorithm rankings is not views, and it’s not engagement, it’s whether a viewer goes on to watch another video on YouTube. There is a reason that, when someone taps a profile on Instagram, they see the Instagram user’s profile page (rather than their website or some other user-defined destination); Instagram wants to keep people on the platform.

So, when considering what social channels to engage most with, consider how those social followers may or may not convert, and spend your time accordingly.

For example, on Pinterest, when a user clicks on an image, it can take them directly to your product page, where they can click and buy without navigating your website or searching for anything. On Instagram, you can do that with paid ads, but by default they make it difficult to leave the platform. Twitter makes it easy to direct your followers to any link you like, Facebook makes it a little more difficult.

And what social networks do people use to make purchase decisions? Snapchat might be a decent channel to increase brand awareness in your demographic, but do they consult Snapchat when they are comparing your product with a competitor’s? My guess is that they don’t.

If your objective is to use social channels to not just raise awareness or build relationships, but to directly drive sales, you need to do two things:

1. know your customer and the platforms they are likely to use and engage with, particularly when making purchase decisions
2. spend your time on the channels that drive sales, not just follows and likes

Improve Profits by Leveraging your Data

Basically all I’m saying is:

• Look at all your statistics and data for how traffic progresses through your site. Review abandonment rates. Study your customer data. Look at which reviewers are working for you.
• Map a typical customer journey and take out every. single. non-essential. click from the moment they are interested in your product to the moment they purchase it. Make it easy for them to do what you want them to do.

I’m going to close here with another cute cat because I like cats and don’t get enough opportunities to put cats in this blog.