How To Sell Products On Social Media and Build A Raving Audience

Hey gang. Ryan Daniel Moran here and in this video, what I'm gonna share with you is building up your own independent sales channel and succeeding off of Amazon and building your own raving customer base that is not dependent on any particular channel. So I work with a lot of physical product sellers, particularly Amazon sellers, and to them this is a big mystery to them of I've got all my eggs in Amazon's basket and what if Amazon makes a change, you know, how am I going to succeed? So a lot of times the temptation is to build up a Shopify store or to build a funnel or to follow some other tactic to try and be quote, independent of Amazon. And I get the desire for this. I just think that it is a misallocation of attention and resources and we give you a few things for you to focus on that I think is a much better use of your time. But it is absolutely a good idea for you to have a moat, a support structure and to have a plan B that is independent of Amazon sales or wherever you're taking your regular daily sales. Actually just had lunch today with the CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey. Whole Foods was just acquired by, by Amazon.com@a little less than a year ago and even he was saying, you know, you should probably tell all of your Amazon sellers to not be all dependent upon Amazon.com and there seem to be a couple of different camps. Some people will go all in on Amazon, which I'm a fan of and I'll clarify in a second. They go all in on Amazon. They focus all on their reviews and their rankings and their keywords and their images and optimizing all these things. And those are good things to do, but they don't have any depth to it. They don't have any soul to the business. It often becomes about just selling products rather than it is about people and customers. And so that crowd tends to get very tactical, very product driven and, and that can reap really great rewards in the short term. But it doesn't produce the long term results that really create multimillion dollar companies where on the other side there's people who are either very direct response or they're very wide. They go after a lot of different traffic sources, a lot of different customer channels without getting any depth to the channel that they are building. I think that there is an ideal hybrid between the two. And anymore when I am investing in a company or buying a company, I'm looking for this as much as I'm looking at anything else. And it's the audience and the following and the raving customer base behind the brand itself. So I've experienced in some of my brands where there's a change on Amazon and as a result of that, you have to be very reactive to Amazon because there's no other way to collect orders. There's no customer base that you can go to that ticket to rally behind you. Where on the other side, when you have that audience, the Amazon piece is really easy, or if you have the audience, the funnel piece is really easy. If you've ever read the book the One Thing, the primary question inside of the One Thing is what's the one thing that you can do that by doing so makes everything else easier or unnecessary? And I would argue that having a raving customer base is the one thing that makes all other channels easier or unnecessary. If you have a raving customer base, they will buy from you. Whether you are on Amazon, whether you are in Whole Foods or Target, or whether you are collecting orders on your Shopify store or through a funnel, the mechanism for sales is less important than the people behind the transaction. So oftentimes, entrepreneurs get obsessed with their product and so they start saying, my product's so great, my product's so great, buy my product. Rather than going to where the people are and letting your product be the bait that gets all the people around it. So there's a couple things that I'm going to recommend that you start to think about as you build out, or at least build a strategy for attracting your ideal people to become raving fans. There's a couple things that need to be absolutely in place before you can get any momentum at all. Number one is, do you know who your customer is? Meaning do you have a specific type of person that you are targeting? Now, this is difficult if you are selling white label product or you are selling products that are the same as everybody else. If you're selling spatulas and you're just hoping to sell more silicon spatulas, it's going to be really hard to create a brand out of that product. Whereas if you know exactly who your target market is, let's just actually go for a walk with me. So if we check this out for a second, look at this. So this is the difference. This is a water boiler, unmarked. And if you're in the business of selling water boilers, you're probably going to have a hard time. And this is a French press, right? You can sell a lot of French presses, but it's hard to build a raving fan base for French presses. Right now next to it is this is a KitchenAid called Coffee Grinder. Now KitchenAid is a huge, well respected brand and you know, they're known for the customer and the product type that they are releasing. So if KitchenAid comes out with a water boiler and or a French press, that would make total sense, right? Because they're a brand, they're speaking to a very specific demographic and target market. It's a lot easier to advertise KitchenAid as a brand new than it is to sell more French presses, because who buys French presses? It's hard to identify that person. But the person who follows a specific brand, they buy all kinds of things. So the number one question is, do you know exactly who that target customer is? And if so, that makes your life a whole lot easier. So that's item number one. Do you know who the ideal person is that you're targeting? And if you're already selling white labeled products, then it might make sense for us to zoom out a bit and say, who is the person who's already buying this? Who are our happiest customers versus the people that aren't so happy about this? Let's get more of the really happy customers because that's going to allow us to charge higher prices, that's going to allow us to more predictably release future products and it's going to have an easier time getting raving fans and customers as well. So that's, number one, do you know who your person is? And number two, is your product adequately serving that person? Marketing is a lot easier when you've got a great frickin product. Marketing is really hard. Marketing becomes damage control when your product sucks. I have had both. I have had businesses where I was really proud of the product and businesses where I was like, ooh, the marketplace told me something that I need to address. So if your product adequately serves them and you put it in front of the right people, now we have something that we can scale. Now we have something that we can go drop our bait in front of the ideal person. So the next question to ask is, all right, if we were fishing here and we had a perfect bait, where's the best pool of buyers? Where does our person already hang out? And how are we most effective at communicating with them? For some of you, the obvious answer is, well, we got to run Facebook ads because we know exactly who our target customer is, so we want to be on Facebook communicating to them. Well, if that's the case, my argument to you is how do it's absolutely necessary for Us to take the conversation away from Facebook and get them into some sort of a locus of control. Now that could be a Facebook group, it could be an email list, it could be subscribers on a YouTube channel, for goodness sake. The responsibility that you have at this point is to go drop your bait and go catch those customers and bring them into a place where you control the conversation. You control the conversation so that as you warm up this audience, you're able to send them to Amazon or send them to a funnel or whatever it is. Now the mistake that most people make is they think, alright, if I run the right Facebook ad, then I can send them to Shopify and I can collect the order and I'll make money. Sometimes that happens. It's my opinion that a much more effective long term strategy is, is for you to target them on Facebook, get them into a place where you control the conversation and then send them to Shopify, then send them to Amazon, then send them to Kickstarter or wherever it is that you're collecting the order. The missing piece for a lot of entrepreneurs is they don't have control over that conversation. And if you don't have control over the conversation, meaning you can't communicate to them on Facebook, you can't communicate to them in Facebook messenger, you can't communicate to them on social media, it becomes really hard to make that a long term asset over time. So if your only business is, I'm going to spend $100 to send them to Shopify and I need to make $200, that can work in the short term. And if your strategy is to do that so that you can have customers and email addresses that you can warm up to build raving fans over time, you have my blessing to do so. I've just seen more entrepreneurs have success when they are distributing something and contributing something to the marketplace, to the conversation where the customers are already hanging out and doing it in a way that builds up leads that you can then sell to. For example, one of the ways that I encourage brands and physical product sellers to start to exercise this muscle is to say, what pain point does your product solve? 80% of your messaging can be around the pain point versus what your product even does. If you look at really any. Actually a good example of this. I've said this before in speeches and keynotes, but a great example of this would be Crest Whitestripps. Crest Whitestrips had this commercial. I think it was the best ad I've ever seen. It was two attractive women, our ideal customer. They're kind of bougie, you know, upper class. And they're sitting at a table and they said.

I have a question for you. Are my teeth yellow? And the one girl says, have you taken the tissue test? She says, what's the tissue test? And she says, hold a tissue up to your teeth. And the girl says, oh, my teeth are yellow. Why do you keep your teeth so white? I use crest white strips. 80% of the ad was, my teeth are yellow. Ugh. My teeth are yellow. What else did that do? Every girl in the world went up and took a tissue and smiled in the mirror. Whose teeth are that? Are that white? No one's Crest white strips created a problem. They created a pain point that was basically universal, beautiful advertising. You don't need to be as good as Crest. They have multi million dollar advertising departments. But you do need to think about the pain point, the challenge that your product solves versus all the features and benefits about your product. Now, the beauty of this is if you have the pain point and you have your ideal customer and you communicate it in a way that your ideal customer is used to consuming, that has been the easiest conversion point to get somebody to become a superfan or to start following you. So. So, for example, there's a clothing company that I really like called Mizzen in Main and Mizzen in Maine sells.

Fancy clothes like dress clothes that are made for active lifestyle, so travel, sports, and they're sweat wicking. So it's basically like eliminates, you know, you eliminate the sweat look when you're on the go, right? So that's the pain point that is regularly communicated to me who spends time on Facebook. So I get ads all the time. I get video ads and retargeting ads that are specifically about that pain point and that I'm more likely to resonate with something like that. So if you have your pain point dialed in for your ideal person and you communicate that through a Facebook video, you communicate that through a blog post or wherever your ideal customer hangs out, that's a good way to start your getting those fans and followers. Now if your goal is to do this at scale from day one, this, this is, this is, this will take some time. However, if your goal is like, I gotta get those first thousand raving fans, then all we have to do is take a couple pain points, advertise them to our ideal person, and interact with every single person who comments, likes, shares. If you are responding to those people and building up customer goodwill, just like you're building a personal brand like you are Building a.

Your business has a soul to it, it has a personality to it. So if you are communicating with those customers and interacting with them, that creates raving fans. If you're taking your customer reviews and your customer testimonials and you're running them as ads to other people who are just like them and then responding to every comment, messaging those people, this is a relationship, these are people, not just products. And so often we forget that there are people behind every purchase and instead we just start selling more product. And I would argue to you that those who focus on the people side of it will have more long term growth. You will be able to weather the changes on Amazon a lot easier and faster or changes anywhere. Changes on Facebook, changes on Kickstarter. You'll be in that position that is.

Is both safe and profitable no matter what the marketplace does. We have a test group going right now that is specifically about profitable product launches. And we just had this amazing lesson with a peer and a colleague of mine. His name is George Bryant. He has been behind the multi million dollar ad campaigns of some of the really, really big brands that you've seen. There's a brand that he advised, actually they're in my pantry back there. They're a collagen protein company that grew. I'm gonna mess up the numbers. But they're, you know, they, they grew into the eight figures and they just raised tens of millions of dollars in funding to basically increase their distribution worldwide and release new products. And they were built off the back of good social media marketing that connected with people. Connected with people. Not just hawking product, but connecting with people. And he just did a lesson for our test group and it went so well that we've invited him to speak at our Brand Builder Summit which is this August here in Austin, Texas. So if you run a physical products brand, if you are dependent on.

Any one specific channel and you're noticing changes in the marketplace and you know you need to get up to speed on what's working right now because there are big brands coming in and taking up market share and Amazon is changing and the marketplace is adapting and it's becoming more about audience than it is about just being a first mover. We just added George to the lineup for Brand Builder Summit. If you're watching this after August 2018, I would still encourage you to go to brand buildersummit.com and register for or put your email in for the next time that we do an event. Because our mission or our aim in these events is to bring in the best in the world who are leading the movements that are creating all that change so the entrepreneurs in our community can come and participate and be on the leading edge of all that. Because where I make my money is I invest in brands who are doing this well. And so I'm incentivized to help physical products brands succeed in a fast changing environment. So this is how you can get started. Take your best bait, put it in front of your ideal person where they already consume content, communicate with those customers, interact with them.

If you do just that until you've got 500 or 1,000 fans, while also reaching out to those medium sized influencers that have a few thousand followers, those medium sized people who represent your brand, those people who represent the ideal person that you're already targeting. If you are reaching out to the people on Instagram, on Facebook, on Pinterest, bloggers, emailers, the YouTube channels that represent not just have a big following but they personally represent that ideal customer. If you do those two things in tandem, working with those type of influencers, and you don't just do it by saying like hey hawk my stuff, you put deposits into that bank account like you put deposits into that relationship account, while also putting deposits into your customer's relationship account asking for nothing in return than to provide value. If you do that for long enough, you will have a raving fan base that believes in you, that is a voice for you, that represents you well and that shares your products without you asking for anything in return. And that is how you will succeed now and that's how you will succeed through the coming changes that are happening so rapidly in this space. That's how big brands win. It is not just about the short term transactions on every sale. It is about the long term customer value. That is that when one person is served, they bring in three people to support your brand as well. That's how long term brands win and that's how they'll continue to win for the next few years. Hope you found this video valuable. If you're a physical product seller, a brand builder, an Amazon seller, I would encourage you to come to Austin this August 24th and 25th, 2018 for our brand Builder Summit. If you're watching this after that time that I would encourage you to go to brandbuildersummit.com and sign up for notifications for our next event when we do the next one. So thanks for watching this video. Share this with an entrepreneur who you think would find value in it and I will talk to you soon.