Welcome to The Social Smarty Show, your weekly podcast for social media marketing tips, tactics, and practical digital marketing advice. Let's get you taking real action to grow your online audience, build connections, and your business. I'm your host, Jodine McIntyre. Think of me as your digital marketing coach, cheerleader, and wing woman all rolled into one. Grab some of my social media marketing know-how for free at www.socialsmarty.co/freebies. Now, before we dive in, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss any future episodes.
Welcome back to The Social Smarty Show. This is episode number 29 and part two in selling your products on social media. Now, as we know, Meta has made some big changes to Instagram and Facebook Shops and product tagging, and it feels like it's just getting harder and harder to sell your products through social media. In the last episode, I gave you some tips on how to optimise your social media channels for sales. Now, in this week's episode, I'm going to be diving into social media content to help you sell your products. Before we kick off, though, if you did miss last week's episode, go back and have a listen. It is episode number 28, because I think it's really important that you have your social media channels optimized. So that means that they're set up in the optimal way for sales. So when we are creating content and we are trying to get as many as possible onto that content, what we're going to do is drive them through our profiles to our online store or wherever it is that we sell our product. So really important we have that optimization first, and then we have the content.
Right, now let's get into it. The first type of content I want to suggest you create for your business is probably the type of content you're already creating. It is generally the easiest or the most obvious content to create, and that is your product demos. So with product demos, as I mentioned, it is usually content that you're already creating. But I want you to really lean into the idea of creating almost like a first-hand experience for your potential customer. So what we want to do is we want them to feel like they really know about their product. It's almost like they have a physical chance to have a look at their product. But of course, they haven't because they're looking at it online. So what we need to do is we need to make sure that we create content showing the product in action. If it's jewelry, we want to see it being worn. If it's clothing, again, we want to be seeing... Sorry, we want to see it being worn. If it's makeup, we want to see people applying it. We want to see all the features. If it's something like a gadget, we want to see how it works.
So we need to really think about how can we basically show someone everything they need to know about that product so that they can purchase it with confidence. They feel like they've already touched it, or seen it, or been in its presence, if that makes sense. So we need to create really good content here. We need to drill down into textures, features, zoom in if we need to. Video, of course, is going to be key here, but it really is taking it that one step further. Now, a little tip for creating content or finding ideas for what to include in your content is to have a look at the types of questions that you get. So if you get emails or DMs, or even if you have a feature on your website where people can ask questions about products, have a look at those questions because if one person has reached out and asked that question, chances are there's probably other people wondering the same thing. And that can be a great way to get some ideas for content to create. You basically want to answer that question through your content. Okay, let's move on to content type number two, and that is testimonials.
Now, again, customer testimonials or reviews are probably content that you are already creating. But again, we want to take it one step further. So rather than just taking a screenshot of a lovely Facebook review or a Google review, video testimonials are really powerful. And I know they're tricky. We often don't have connections with our customers in real life. We can't just pop next door and take a video of them. We're often asking them to do it for us and send through that video footage, but it is really powerful and it's worth putting in the effort to figure out how you can get some customer testimonials that are video-based and you can use those in your social media content. So what we want to do here is we want to lean into real stories. So we need to see how real people feel about your product. So we need them to talk about, journey is probably a bit of a funny word, but how did they find your product? What problem did they have that made them reach out and buy that product? And then how does that fit into their lives? How do they use it?
What were they surprised about? What benefits have they had from using that product? So if they can really tell a story, that is really powerful. Of course, before and after's are great. If there's some visible transformation that we can see whether it's makeup, or skincare, or some home improvement product, if there is a before and after, that is really great. But customer testimonials. Humans, we want to know that other people have used these products that we can trust them. If that person has had a good experience, then it makes us feel much more like we're going to have a good experience as well. So customer testimonials are absolutely key. Okay, onto the next type of content, and that is behind the scenes. Now, this is often the most uncomfortable content for business owners to create because it means we need to pull back the curtain on what happens behind the brand. We want to see behind the scenes raw, unedited. We want to see the nitty gritty of how this product comes to be, how it is created, or who is creating it. And what we can do then is form a connection with the people behind the business.
It is much easier to connect with a person than it is with a brand or a product, an anonymous thing. Whereas if I can see the owner or the founder or the team that works behind the brand, I can connect a lot easier. It's about humanizing your brand. So we want to introduce the people behind it. We want to introduce that human element. So there could be things like a day in the life, it could be chatting to a video we're chatting with one of your team members, or it could be an intro post where you talk about how you developed the product or your founder story, how you got started in that business. You could take us through your product development. You could share a teaser of a new release that's coming, or maybe a sneak peek of something you're working on. You could film a... What else could you do? You could do a packing of an order. It sounds really boring, but I love that content. I love to see people packaging up orders ready to ship out. And again, it's almost like that social proof as well, because if you're packaging up those orders, that means someone's buying from you.
And if they're buying, then maybe I want to buy too. So it's a double whammy with that type of content. Okay, next type of content is user-generated content or UGC. Now, this is a little bit different to the testimonials I spoke about earlier. This is about creating content that almost is like a showcase of your products, but it's from different perspectives. Now, at the moment, it's really popular for businesses to pay a creator, a UGC creator, to create content for them. There are lots and lots of people out there who will do that for you. Different budgets. There are some creators that don't charge as much as others. And so obviously, if you have some budget there, you can pay for someone to create their content for you. Or what you can do is use your existing audience and your existing customers and incentivize or encourage them to create some content. So it could be things around a competition. That's probably the most obvious one. So submitting a video or a photo and being in the draw to win, you could reward them, you could offer them bonus points. If you have some loyalty program, you could offer them a discount or a freebie or the first option to get their hands on your new product that's going to be a sellout.
All those sorts of things are an incentive to encourage customers or users to create their content for you. Yeah, but I think paying for it, there is huge value in it. But what you need to do is make sure that the creator aligns with what you're wanting them to create. So what does the content look like? What type of content do they create? Does it align with your brand? Is it going to be a good fit? We don't want the content to just seamlessly blend in with the rest of your content because that doesn't really add to the authenticity. But we want it to, of course, still carry on those values that are important to your business or your brand. Now, quick little side note here, if you do work with a UGC creator and they post the content to their own channel, so more of an influencer, we need to make sure that that is disclosed. So it needs to be branded as an ad and that could be a hashtag ad. Each country, I suspect, has different rules around this. Here in New Zealand, hashtag ad is suitable, but it is really important that it's obvious that there is a paid collaboration or a paid ad.
The last type of content that I want to recommend you create for your product-based business is about driving engagement. It's interactive content. Now, this is really great for building connections, but it's also great for the algorithm. So the thing that works behind the scenes in different social media platforms, and some have more than one algorithm. But basically what we want to do is we want to drive that engagement, get more interactions on your content, because what that will do is it will help us reach more people. So when a platform sees that lots of people are engaging with content, it is going to push that content out to more people. And it's also going to show future content that you create to people who have engaged with you in the past. So not only do we need to focus on really great product content, but we also need to think about how can we engage our audience, how can we have that two-way conversation happening on social media? We can do things like polls, quizzes, getting feedback, asking people to give their thoughts on different products that you're developing, maybe coming up with a new name.
I don't know, I'm releasing a new pair of shoes, maybe they could come up with a name for them. There's lots and lots of ways you can engage your audience in your product process. And it's almost like a real subtle type of marketing because if they get to have some input into that product or that product's creation, they feel like they have a little bit of ownership there, so they're probably more likely to purchase it. A really common way to get engagement on your post is to run regular competitions. Now, of course, you're going to be a little bit hit and miss with your engagement. You're going to have some people who are only in it for the prize. They don't really fit within your target audience or they might never purchase from you. But it is a pretty quick and easy way to create some buzz on your content. But just think about it strategically. Think about what are you giving away and is it relevant just to your target audience? Now, I want to tell you about two places that you can go to have a look at content that the big brands are creating.
The two places are the Facebook Ads Library and the TikTok Creative Center. Now, I'll link both of those in the show notes. But the reason that I love these places for inspiration is that we can see the paid ads that are being run on social media. So if someone is running a paid ad, chances are it is a type of content that is converting for them. So the content itself is generating sales. So by using it in a paid ad, it means that that content is going to obviously reach more people. They know that it converts to sales, so they're going to sell more products. So what I generally do is think of who is in my industry or my niche, and who are the big, big players that I look up to? And then I go and search out that business. So on the Facebook ads library, for example, I'll go in there, I'll type in that business name, and I'll have a look at what type of paid ads they're running. Now, if an ad has been running for a longer period, so in the ads library, you can see when the ad was started.
But if the ad has been running for a long period of time, again, that tells me that it's working because they wouldn't keep that ad running if it wasn't converting for them. And what you'll see is a lot of the paid ads are user-generated content, they're testimonials, they're that real product showcase-type content, the product demos that take it that one step further than just here are our features, and that is going to tell you what works. It's going to give you some really good examples as well of different types of content or different ways you can create within those different types of content and some really great examples. Now, of course, we don't want to go copying anyone, but we can get inspiration, particularly from those big brands that have big budgets and you know that they're doing it well. How can we infuse some of that or draw from that, draw some inspiration from that into our own content? I think that's a really good idea. Right, so there we have it, some ideas for creating content for your product-based business. Let's have a quick recap. First up, we spoke about product demos and how we're going to take those to the next level.
Then we talked about customer testimonials. Again, it's more than just a Google review or a Facebook review. Then we want to humanise your brand with our awesome behind-the-scenes content, let people connect with you. Then we talked about UGC or user-generated content. And lastly, don't forget, we need to be driving engagement. We need that interactive content and getting our audience engaging with us. Now, I hope that has helped to spark some ideas for content creation for your product business. If you have questions, come and find me over on Instagram. I'm @socialsmarty.co. And until next week, stay social.
