Four ways to grow your audience and convert your prospects. 🔓
Discover more from VIEWS ARE MY OWN
Four ways to grow your audience and convert your prospects. 🔓
See what the private community have been doing over the last 4 weeks.
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Over the last 4 weeks we’ve covered: 👇
💭 Growing a Twitter following
💭 Hashtags and using them to build your own community
💭 The email we used to close sales
💭 Why your landing pages aren’t converting
📺 And episode 4 is here. On it, Mike, Dan, and several guests give their views on all the above subjects we’ve spoken about in the last month.
As we always say, you don’t need to put into action every newsletter. But, if you do, over the course of a year you’ll have tried 52 extra things to improve your sales and marketing and make your business less shit.
This week’s newsletter is going out to everyone in the community, both free and paid.
Paid, if you want to head on over to watch the latest episode then click here. 👇
Twitter for business – final thoughts.
👇 What our community said.
I added 53 new followers yday so it's definitely working.
My latest Tweet series getting crazy engagement. A few hundred followers came in off the back of this engagement, which is big for me, I'm not really a Twitter guy.
👉 Over the last month, Mike and a handful of people in the private community have been following a proven process to grow their Twitter followings.
All organic with no spend behind it.
Mike for the reason that he lost his LinkedIn profile (which after a long year is now back, cheers everyone 🍻) and it seemed like the next best platform for relatively honest and uncensored conversations about business.
Platform risk is something that anyone who relies on one or more channels for the leads will face, but there will hopefully always be another route you can jump on quickly.
What we do at VAMO works on Twitter, it’s where most of the top Substacks have grown and it makes sense for us to be on there, that said, personal pages are almost always easier to grow than a business one when the business has little awareness. So we use the brand page for daily updates, and Mike’s to drive people to it.
You trust people a lot quicker when you can see who you’re talking to, so it makes sense.
Some businesses may consider it out of their niche, but with almost 400 million users, you’re probably just not sure where to find them on there or how to talk to them properly. 👀
What you want to use your Twitter for and how you target your customers depends on where you’re at with your marketing strategy.
There’s no denying it’s a great place to build brand awareness, but some people still need a push on why that’s necessary and struggle to see past instant ROI.
💰 Mike is way more centred around VAMO on his profile but speaks occasionally about IAM, his video and animation business. He’s closed a couple of deals this month on Twitter and made several thousand in revenue for that business, and we get regular new sign-ups too for VIEWS, so it’s not a bad return.
If you’re a relatively new business or start-up, your end goal should probably be to build a niche community for your brand. It’ll work as a good foundation for creating an engaged audience and a way for new people to trust what you do.
It’ll take time to get going and like we mentioned earlier, time isn’t usually an investment people want to make when they’re looking for a quick ROI.
Often, the problem with businesses on Twitter is first that they struggle to ditch the professional jargon and speak to people how they engage with, and second, they’re limited to sharing things that have been checked off by 5 layers of management and are all very surface level – stuff like, ‘This is us and this is our product, it’s great, buy it” or poor attempts at jumping on a trend from two weeks ago.
Then they see no attributed ROI and write it off.
The good thing for you guys is that you’re probably either a one-person band or a small business, so you don’t have the hoops to jump through and can crack out anything you think will work.
Organic Twitter works. You’ve just got to be interesting and give value.
Ah, give value, one of those really boring and overly pushed messages in marketing. But it’s true.
The basic principle.
1/ A touch base tweet each AM
2/ An educational tweet each PM
3/ A step-by-step thread once weekly
4/ Engage with 5 people in my niche each day
If you want to see, in detail, the format we followed and examples of how Mike put it into practice then you can by clicking the green button below.
There’s been a lot of chat in the Slack about it and how everyone’s getting on, so you might get some ideas.👇
You’ll also be able to go over and watch the full episode 📺 to hear our opinions on the whole process, plus see the last 3 months of content that we’ve shared.
Hashtags for growth - final thoughts.
👇 What our community said.
Love the newsletter this week - I have never understood the use of hashtags on LinkedIn. So many people say "don't use more than three hashtags in a post". I've very rarely used any of them unless I'm doing it ironically like Vic Edwards and his ninety character ones. #whatsthepointofhashtagstheydontworkonlinkedin style.
I like the idea of using them to build a community off the back of an event or campaign though. Will keep that in mind for future marketing campaigns!
Newsletters great! I've read so many different things around hashtags online.. good to know, i defo am that person that just uses them as extra words or to hashtag how I feel. Thanks guys.
👉 Are hashtags any use at all in 2022?
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Only if you’re smart with them.
Dan’s answer in the episode: They’re an excuse to make lazy content.
An even longer answer: So as long as you’re not just using the most popular hashtags (they’re oversaturated and you’ll drown in them), and platform dependant, they’re still a pretty good way to engage new people and an even better way to cultivate a community.
Algorithms will continuously change and really, none of us will ever understand them beyond the obvious, but the basics of finding content through hashtags probably won’t stop any time soon. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
The way Instagram shows you content now means that what they serve you on both your home and explore page is more relevant and targeted than ever. Unfortunately for people relying on hashtags, fewer people use them to go and seek out content they’re interested in - why would you when you are shown it anyway?
Great for the user, shit for someone hoping for an easy win.
On Twitter, the OG hashtag platform, hashtags still play a massive part in the way people engage with one another, but now it’s more to keep tabs on UGC (user-generated content) and brand campaigns than anything else.
Twitter hashtags are a great way to bring a community together and keep content in one place, and by default, grow your audience.
Vicki Ross has grown a strong community using her hashtag #CopywritersUnite, it’s a great example of a niche community with a regular and engaged audience who share tips, thoughts and ask questions through the tag. She gave us a little more insight in episode 4.
We go over IG, Twitter, and Linkedin in more detail with some examples in our full newsletter here.
Close the file - final thoughts.
👇 What our community said.
Used it yday. Had a call just now. Signing off £13k of work next week with another £16k to follow.
Used the email at the end of last week, got two immediate replies. Meetings booked for next week, thanks guys!
So I emailed 4 prospects yesterday morning using the email letter prod and two signed off yesterday. Seems so simple but hadn't thought of being that direct. Thanks VAMO team - I owe you all a 🍺 for that tip!
Just used it. Will definitely post how it went…. Only went at worked. Closed on a years worth of work today.
👉 There’s a huge amount of research that shows when you attempt to cut ties with your prospect and focus your energy on the ones who are invested in what you do, it can significantly improve your conversion rates.
High-performing organisations that focus on prioritisation generally add half as many prospects to their pipeline but win at least twice as many.
There’s no point getting hung up on one who has, after a couple of promising conversations, decided they’re going to drop off the face of the earth.
Breaking up means you can move on.
⌛️ You’ll save wasted time. By disqualifying a prospect, you can focus on the leads that are more likely to close in a sale.
🙌 You’ll clear your pipeline: We all want a realistic view of our pipelines, this way you’ll get rid of any loose ends.
📧 You’ll improve your response rate: In an ideal world, the close the file email will trigger a response. They’ll see you’re off to help someone else and know you’re not going to keep trying.
We had Benjamin D (The UK’s most hated sales trainer) do a bit for our community this month.
In episode 4 he speaks through how he words his close the file email and why his clients find it works so well.
We gave his version of the email and some extra info to the community in this tagged newsletter, and it got great results. Either financial, or some responses saying they weren’t interested so you could give up the ghost and instead focus on bringing in new business. 💰
A good salesperson knows when to walk away.
If you want to see the full thing, you’ll see what’s worked so well for our community and you’ll be able to join the Slack and ask any questions about it if you have any. 👇
Landing page improvements - final thoughts.
The private community got a clip last week from the unreleased episode to watch with this newsletter, and if you missed it, you can see it at the end of ep 4 alongside other questions you all asked in our Slack.
What are the team’s thoughts on good landing pages?
I feel like what we have with pain at the top, testimonials, and CTA with offer is kind of dull and like everyone else.
👆 We had this question thrown into the ask Mike and Dan channel in our slack this month.
There are only so many variables you can change on a landing page. A landing page is designed for you to capture info or make a sale quickly. If you’re bombarding them with a load of information you’re probably not articulating the benefits well enough in a way that sells.
If you think it’s dull, it’s likely that the copy and campaign are dull.
A good landing page will make you complete the CTA without scrolling.
In short, the big reasons we gave that you’re probably finding it difficult to convert:
👉 It’s not clear.
👉 You’re giving them too much to do.
👉 The copy is boring and doesn’t match the content.
In the words of Dan Kelsall, ❝Less is more. Stop fucking giving them 15 things to download.
It’s less about trying to be smart and trying to stand out, you’ve got their attention on the ad or content to get them on the landing page, and more about the words you use to convert them and not wasting their time.
*All the copywriters reading nod in unison*
The landing page needs as much effort put into the copy as the content and creative that sends people to it.
Don’t think that because you’ve got them there that you’ve done the hard work. It’s easier for someone to click off than it is to follow through with the CTA if it’s not giving what it needs to.
Here was a thread we found that had some examples of decent landing pages that we put in the community last week 👇
Again, you can read the full newsletter here.
As always, if you’re in it, please chuck any of your questions in our Slack, and let us know what your views on episode four are.
If you’ve not joined it yet, the link is in your paid subscription welcome email. 🔗
And if you’re not in the private community and want a bit more info on it, you can head over and read our welcome newsletter here.
Anyone who wants to head over and watch ep 4, you can find it in the new episodes section on the nav bar at the top of the website. It looks like that. 👇
VAMO_ 📺