← Making It with Jon Davids
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If you wanna make a lot of money selling stuff on social media, this is how it's done. And I'm not guessing or giving you theory. I've got 250,000 followers on Facebook, 80,000 on LinkedIn, 120,000 on Instagram, 96,000 on TikTok. But forget about that. Those are just numbers. I use these channels to drive many millions in revenue for my businesses. And I'm gonna show you exactly how it's done. My name's Jon Davids, and if you like videos and podcasts like this, make sure to leave a, like a comment, a share. So I know to keep making this stuff, let's do it foreign. You're listening to Making it with John Davids. So there are basically seven things that you need to understand if you want to sell on social media without looking desperate, without looking like you're trying too hard, sweating, because we don't like that. You don't want to be awkward, you don't want to be annoying, and frankly, you don't want people to even know that you're selling. And most people get the very, very first thing wrong. So listen up from the start, because you have probably been taught incorrectly how to do the very beginning. So we always hear about making a hook, and the hook is your first two to three seconds of a video, depending on a platform. So if you're talking about a reel, it might be one to two seconds. On TikTok, it might be like a half a second. YouTube, it's a little bit longer. That first few seconds is your chance to make an impression, and you're either gonna keep the or lose them at the very beginning. And most people, when they hear about the hook, the lesson they get is you want to introduce yourself and deliver some value as quickly as possible. It's the wrong advice because most people, what they end up doing is they try to put the thing they're selling first, product first. And really you want to be doing the marketing first. The whole purpose of the first few seconds is to keep people's attention long enough so they'll stay 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 12 seconds, if you're lucky, maybe even 20 seconds. So you've got to hook them first with the marketing, not the product. So rule number one is marketing before product. Now, what do I mean when I say marketing before product? Think about what people are taught to do at the beginning of an Instagram reel. Hey, I'm John Davids, and if you're someone who's interested in baking, then I've got the Perfect. Like, ugh, you have lost me for. First of all, no one cares what your name is. No one wants to hear that you're calling them out. Right? We always hear, oh, call out who you're talking to. No, no, no. People are smarter than that. You want to engage them in a fraction of a second to get them interested enough to give you the time of day to move forward. So you've got to think about that first. Second, about the marketing. What is the pure entertainment factor that has nothing to do with your product, that has nothing to do with how you monetize, that has nothing to do with your business, but is just earning the right to be in the con. I'll give you a great example. So when I started influicity years ago, the very first clients we had were actually really big companies, Fortune 500 companies. Since I was working with big marketing departments who had hundreds of thousands of dollars to throw around on a single piece of content on a single video shoot. And I remember being in a strategy session with a big consumer packaged goods company. You guys all know this brand. And one of the funny things that we were arguing about, I was doing influencer market. So we were a very early player in influencer marketing. YouTubers mostly in that day. So we're making YouTube content with these beauty influencers back in 2015, 2016. And what these marketing professionals would always insist on was that we opened up with their brand, their logo brought to you by, presented by this first thing is brought to you by brand X. And what they didn't realize was that when you open with that on YouTube, you lose people immediately because you're basically broadcasting that this is a commercial, even if the stuff that comes after is actually kind of fun to watch. We're doing makeovers, we're doing beauty tutorials. But you want to start off in the first 1 to 2 to 3 seconds by admitting that we're trying to sell you something. And I had the hardest time trying to say, guys, we're going to keep people hooked up so that we can show your logo. Maybe 35 seconds in, maybe a minute and a half in, we're going to keep them engaged for that long. And we just couldn't get past this arm wrestle. They were terrified that people would leave and that they would lose the chance to express their brand, to talk about who they are and what they want to sell. And the same thing happens today when people do it on Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube. I'm not talking about big brands. I'm Talking about everybody. Because people have it in their mind that the first thing they have to do is talk about what they sell. Uh, that is a big mistake. Always remember, marketing before product. This episode is brought to you by my Playbook website selling machine, available right now@johndavids.com Playbook. Here's the truth. Your website is either making you money or it's costing you sales every single day. And most businesses just aren't optimizing their websites as they should be. This leads to fewer meetings booked, lower average order value, and just a whole lot of people clicking away as fast as they arrived. That's revenue you're losing. You can change all that right now with the insights in my Playbook website selling machine. Grab your free copy@johndavids.com playbook always marketing before product. So how do you do it? Well, marketing is the entertainment. Marketing is the inspiration. Marketing is the hook that you're using to keep people's attention. So let's just say, for instance, you sell lawn mowing services. So you're not going to start with, hey, my name's Peter. I do lawn mowing. Uh, you start with maybe a before and after of a lawn and show that transformation in the first two to three seconds. Perfect stripes, luxury backyard setups, beautiful landscaping. You sell the dream first. If you're selling real estate, you don't start with, hey, I'm a realtor in Dallas. Are you looking for a new home? Uh, that's terrible. You start with stunning homes, crazy kitchens, insane backyards, house tours that people can't stop watching. You know it when you see it. And the kind of stuff that makes you actually want to watch is when you don't feel like you're being sold anything. You let people consume value before you ask for anything in return. The product should be a reveal that almost happens, like a bonus, like, hey, guess what, guys? I've just got you all revved up with this. If you want to get this for yourself, if you want to keep going forward, here's a way that I can help you do that. Here's the key. You never want to come off as desperate, and it just reeks of desperation. When you shove a product out in the first 10 seconds, you kill watch time, you kill engagement, you kill distribution. Oh, my Lord. There's no point in even doing social media if you're going to kill engagement that early on. All right, let's go macro. With rule number two zooming even further out. Number two is consumption, then conversion. So we talk to a lot of clients at influicity who ask us, how long will it be before we start seeing sales coming from social media? And my response to that is, that is the wrong question to ask. What you really want to be thinking about is how long is it before people give a damn that I exist? Especially in a crowded marketplace like Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or why should they even give you the time of day, let alone buying your stuff, Right? The right question to ask is how long is it before people are going to be consuming what I'm putting out there? If your account is cold, no one knows you. When I say cold, I mean you're starting from zero followers and zero traction. You're immediately trying to sell something. You're delusional, forget about it. You're not going to try selling anything on day one. And you're not going to measure success of that channel on day one based on how many sales you made. First, you've got to earn trust. Trust starts with consumption. You need likes, comments, shares, saves. Some followers would be nice. Watch time. Those are the signals that say, this person is worth listening to. You become a familiar face in the feed so early on, you don't want to optimize for sales. Absolutely not. You want to optimize for engagement because engagement creates momentum and momentum gives you distribution. So if you start every post with, hey, download my guide, book a call, join my webinar, buy this thing, you're asking for a marriage on the first date. No one's going to be interested. You got to warm that audience up. You got to put them in the microwave. That's what we call it. Build consistency, build authority, build familiarity. Then once people recognize your name, they recognize your face, they recognize your style. Once they've seen you 10 times and they're still not bored of you, they've agreed with you publicly in the comments, right? They've given you their validation on social. Now you can move to some sort of a conversion. Not a sale. Not a sale. I'm gonna get to that in a second. A conversion is not necessarily a sale. It is a next step. Conversions work when the audience is warm and you warm the audience up with consumption. If your content isn't getting consumed, it won't convert. Consumption and then conversion always. All right, now we're going to get a little dangerous because number three is kind of a secret weapon. You want to make content about your avatar. So your avatar is your icp, your ideal customer profile. Who are you trying to sell to? And then make content about Them. Let me tell you what I'm talking about. Who are you trying to attract? Are you trying to attract musicians? Make content about musicians. Moms. Make content about moms or content that moms can relate to. Entrepreneurs talk about struggles and wins of entrepreneurs. Talk about entrepreneur success stories, entrepreneurial lessons. Don't try to teach on day ones. Very important. Everyone wants to jump straight to teaching. You have no authority most of the time, but you do have authority when it comes to at least relating to people. If you're selling to fitness coaches, tell stories about coaches who went from 10 clients to 100. They could be your clients if you want to do testimonial style, but you don't even need to do that. You could just talk about general stories of coaches succeeding and make those stories interesting. Talk about burnout, talk about real life. Make them feel seen and make something they're interested in so they feel like they're getting in on something. That's kind of a cool secret club, you know? People wonder why I tell so many business stories on social media. Like, where do I find these stories? Why am I sharing them? I tell business stories because my audience is entrepreneurs and marketers. When I break down companies and founders, I'm not randomly just telling stories. I'm turning business people into the heroes of the story, into the protagonists, and I'm speaking directly to the ambitions of my target customer. You attract who you talk about, so make content about your avatar. When they follow you because they can relate to you, it becomes much easier to sell to them because you're part of the same community. Don't convince, attract. Big difference. Okay, we're rolling here, guys. But something that really bugs me, like, kind of drives me crazy, is this idea that people think they're going to come onto social media and just create better content. Ugh. It's just crazy to think that you could get anywhere by being better. You've got to be so much better. It's really kind of unbelievable how much better you need to be to overtake the top spot. But that's okay. You know why? Because as I always say, new beats better every time. The best positioning is counter positioning. You guys have heard me say that before. The way I would describe positioning is you walk into a grocery store and you look at a shelf, any shelf. You can look at the snack food, you can look at the cola aisle, you can look at the cereal aisle, and you can see on the shelf how brands position themselves, almost like a grid. So let's just say I'm going to Draw a hypothetical product chart here. And I'm going to say on the x axis and the Y axis, we've got, let's say healthy over here on the top left. And then we've got, I'll just say junk food over here. If we're talking about a food product and we've got, let's say expensive over here, and we've got cheap over here. So healthy at the top left, junk food at the top right, expensive at the bottom left, cheap on the bottom right. That's my little cent sign. That's cheap. It's just pennies. So if I wanted to position myself as a junk food that was cheap, I could position myself right over here. And if I want it to be a health food that was more on the expensive side, maybe I'm right over here. You guys get the idea. Positioning is where you are in the mind of the consumer, and it varies by product category. So if you think about a brand like, so if you think about a brand like Chomps, which I've talked about before, versus a brand like Slim Jim, they're both a very similar product. They're both meat sticks technically. But one is a healthy treat, it's a little more expensive. And one is a cheap gas station treat that you'd buy with a can of Coke and a bag of Doritos. They're very different. Positioning in the market. Now, when you're a new product on the market, you always want to think about counter positioning. And the same is true when you're a new social media account. When you're trying to break into a market, new beats better. So if everyone in your niche is loud, be calm. If everyone is serious, be funny. If everyone's polished, be raw. If everyone is surface level, then go deep. If there's suit and tie, your hoodie and sneakers, look at your space and ask, what is everyone else doing? And then just do the opposite. Now, in reality, you've also gotta be authentic and true to yourself, so you're not just gonna randomly pick the opposite thing. But a lot of the time, leaning into your own personality naturally makes you counter position because you're probably unique versus everybody else out there right now. And if you're not, maybe you should try to be a little more authentic with yourself. You can see this at a macro level, too. If you look at the pendulum and what was popular on social media, say three, four years ago, very polished content, a certain kind of look, and the pendulum swings. And then it's about raw content and the kind of instagram story style that's really picking up. People don't want polished content right now. They want more raw content. And so imagine being the first in your category to jump on something like that. That's really a great place to be because it lets you get in front of the crowd. And you don't need to be the best and you don't need to have totally different and unique advice. You just present it in a new way because new beats better. I want to talk now about how you actually get people to go down the purchase journey. So now let's get back to this idea of selling on social media. We've gotten into a lot of strategy around how to make content, but how do you actually get people down the purchase funnel? Well, you do that with what I call micro purchase commitments. Social media is not about closing sales. You're not thinking about that every single minute. It's about moving people one inch at a time. And you can literally look at it like this. If this is the starting point, if this is where they begin with you and they go down this path and let's say that's a sale, so that's start and that's sale. You're not going to get them to just leapfrog all the way across. That's not going to happen. More realistically, their path is gonna look something like this. And then it's up to you to figure out how do you actually get them to move down that path to the sail. And everyone's gonna be moving at a different speed, but you've gotta be greasing that road so they can move along. So let's think about what this looks like. First. They watch the hook, just the first few seconds of something you put out there, your TikTok, your Instagram reel. Then they give you the time of day, they watch that full video. Cool. Maybe they like it. Maybe they even leave a comment. Heck, maybe they follow you. Then they click your bio. Then maybe they move down to your link and they and they download something, your free guide, your free book, whatever it is. Then they might join you on a webinar and then maybe they book a sales call. If you're selling a high ticket item now you got them on the phone, every single one of these steps is a tiny micro commitment. Right guys? So we're just moving them along piece by piece by piece down this road. If people aren't moving down your funnel, it's usually just because you're asking too much too soon. It's too big of a commitment. Book A strategy call is a huge ask. Especially if somebody hasn't even seen your website. Watch this 30 second video or just stick around long enough to watch my hook. That is a more reasonable ask. The reason we focus on consumption first, going back to the earlier step is because conversion is too big of a jump. That's the whole thing. If they start and they convert to a sale, that's the whole process, right? We need to get them to convert almost at every single step they're converting to the next step. Right? Until they actually download something and give you their email address, which is really important, or their phone number, you're just kind of moving them along there with micro commitments. And here's something really important. You can actually strategize every single piece here by just looking at each micro commitment across the path. So I want you to really think about this. If your watch time sucks, you can actually look at each thing that you're asking for as one micro commitment. And then you can strategize how you get people through those commitments faster. So watch this. If I go and I say the very first thing I want people to do is watch my hook. Okay, cool. That's the first thing I'm going to ask you to do. The next thing I want you to do is watch the rest of the video and the next thing I want you to do is hit the link in my bio. Maybe I'll ask for that and someone will do that after they see three or four videos. Now let's just say as an example, the conversion from here to here from watching the rest of the video and hitting my link in bio. And that's broken, right? That's not working. Okay, if that's not working, then that's where you focus. You need to get people to at least watch a bit of your video so that they can get to the point where you tell them about your link in bio. And so if you're not even getting past that, don't worry about download, don't worry about buy my low ticket item, don't worry about joining my webinar. There are people who want to jump from here all the way to here and they haven't even solved this problem. So that's what I'm talking about, guys. It's all about looking at the constraint, at that part in the process and figuring out how to get past it. And you do that with micro commitments. Fix the step that's broken. Don't just scream louder. This episode is brought to you by my one minute marketing roadmap available at john davidson.com roadmap in 60 seconds, you'll get a custom report showing you how people are finding your brand, where you're losing them and how to fix it. We used a decade of data from Influicity and layered in AI to give you a real action plan. It's fast, it's free, and it might just change your business. Go to johndavids.com roadmap and get yours right now. All right, now I mentioned number six. I hinted at number six a minute ago, but let me just write it out here in case you missed it at all. You've got to get the email or phone number, get those digits, get that email, otherwise you have nothing. This is probably even more important than getting them to buy something. I'd rather have somebody give me their email address or phone number than just jump straight to a purchase, assuming I don't get it in the purchase. Because here's how you have to think about it. Once they like you, once they trust you, once they're engaged by you, you've warmed them up. You need to get off the rented land and get onto own land. So social media is rented, email or sms, phone number is owned. And to do this you need to have a lead magnet. A lead magnet is a fancy way of saying something valuable, something specific, something useful, something for free that you give away. It can be a guide, it can be a checklist, but it's gotta be something actually valuable. So here's another mistake people make. Their lead magnets are crap. They think they can just go to ChatGPT and whip up a lead magnet in five minutes. If your lead magnet is crap, you're actually killing the future sale. Your lead magnet needs to be as good or better than the thing you sell. Think about it as a paid product that you're giving away for free. The way I think about my lead magnets is when I make something that I think is so good that I feel a little bit weird giving it away, like people probably should pay for it. That's when you know you have something that's worthy of being a lead magnet. So if you're a real estate agent, maybe you create a really good first time home buyer guide. If you sell pools, maybe you create a guide. Five reasons Pools Destroy home Value and how to avoid it. Really valuable stuff. It doesn't need to be fancy, it doesn't need to be beautiful. It just needs to be useful. It has to solve a real problem. Another way to think about creating really good lead magnets is just explaining the why, not the how. So the how, especially if you're selling a service or something where the thing you sell gets people from point A to point B, right, you're providing a service to them, the how is going to be the service that you provide, but the why is going to be how you educate them on all the things that they should be thinking about. So the why goes into your lead magnet and the how becomes the thing you sell. And of course, if it's a physical product that you sell, right, if you're selling gym clothes or you're selling a trip to Paris, then you don't have to worry as much about that because of course they have to buy the thing. Once you have their email address or phone number, you get them into a sequence, you get them into a follow up rhythm because sometimes you have to nurture people for weeks and months and years before they buy. There's a reason I send out two emails a week on my list because I have people that have been following me on my email list since literally 2022. And then all of a sudden one day they become clients of Influicity and I say, oh cool. I check them out on my email list and I see, oh my goodness, this person's been reading every single newsletter I've sent out for the last three and a half years. That's awesome. But that's how long it took to make that sale. You've got to have that email address in the meantime to keep that relationship warm. Social media is your top of funnel. Email is where the money gets made. Don't wait. The second someone shows intent, capture it, give them something of value. Get the email, get the digits, you'll be happy you did. And finally, let's bring it on home with the piece of advice that you're going to need as you scale, and that is your best organic content becomes your paid ads. Of course, because the way the social media feeds work these days is they just want you to be putting out your best stuff in the ad platform. So if you're on meta, if you're on TikTok, if you're on YouTube shorts, the stuff that performs really well organically is the stuff that performs the best when you pay for it. And that's when you get low CPLs, low CPAs, low CPCs. We spend so much money on marketing at my agency, both on the agency and a ton more on the clients, of course. But what we're always looking at is what performs good in the feed organically. If it doesn't perform organically. It's really not gonna perform in a paid environment, or you're going to wind up paying a ton of money. All the creativity, all the great stuff you do on your organic side is going to feed your paid advertising. All right, now, you're going to use your best organic content in paid ads. But I want to show you a trick to really get the most mileage out of every piece of winning content that you have. Because let's face it, winning content is hard to come by. So when you got it, you better use it wisely. So I want you to imagine for a second that this is your piece of winning content right there. Put a heart right there so you can see it. So think about this content for a second. We have this part over here, which is our hook, this is our body, and that pretty much makes up the organic content. Maybe you have a CTA at the end, like, download this or whatever, but you got your hook, your body and your cta. Now you can run that as organic content. Maybe you can change it up a little bit, frame it in something that says download my thing, because it's a paid ad. So you can do some more creative stuff on the platforms. But here's a really cool way to get more mileage out of this. Because ideally, if you have a winning piece of content and you want to run it as an ad, you want to get as most use out of it as you possibly can. So here's how we do it. So we have our piece of winning content over here, and then we'll chop it up and we'll say, okay, so this was the hook, this was the body, this was the cta. Now the body, we're gonna sort of keep the way it was, but maybe there are some other things that we can do with the hook. So we can do sort of hook version two and hook version three. And maybe what you can do is take from other pieces of content that you've run or just little tweaks. So, for example, I had one hook that does super well on meta, and it starts with this guy. And so I made another hook that was identical, but it started with the words this man. And I made another hook that was identical, and it started with the words this dude. So now I have three hooks, effectively, because I've just changed a word in there, and maybe I've changed the background, the green screen background. And I made a couple tiny tweaks. So now I have three versions, three opening hooks. I keep the same body and the same cta. And I can do that in all kinds of ways because the way I actually do it is I'll do hook, line one, hook line two. If you think about a hook as, let's say, multiple lines, you're saying one thing, then a second sentence, then a third sentence. You can make tiny tweaks and tiny different versions of each of those sentences and then just mix and match. So hook line 1A, hook line 1B, hook line 1C. And then mix and match all of them with all the others. Right? You got a big crisscross of all these different hook combinations and then the body and then your cta, which can change also. But now what you've done is you've taken one really high performing piece of content and you've made like 57 different versions of it because the hook is different in all of them. Change the visual slightly, keep everything else the same and the copy can stay the same also. So it's really important to remember that the video and the visuals need to be different, but the copy can be the same every single time. Because people are going to see the copy, but really they're going to be attracted, they're going to stop when they see that piece of content, that reel. So let's run through this one more time. We've got marketing before product check, consumption, then conversion. You know it. Make content about your avatar. They're gonna love it. New beats better. Always micro commitments. Don't get greedy. Don't ask for too much too soon. Get that email, get that number, and turn your best organic content into ads. Do it smart so you can take a lot of mileage out of every piece of winning content content you have. My name is John Davids. Get my best stuff to your inbox@john davids.com. If you're spending more than $50,000 a year on marketing, I've got something for you. It's a playbook I wrote called how to build a Social Media Selling machine. You can grab it now for free at johndavids.com playbook. This is the nine step formula we use for our clients at Influicity to turn their social media channels into reliable revenue engines. Grab it right now at johndavitz.com playbook.