Are you creating social content for the people that engage, or the people that purchase?
The biggest mistake we see businesses making on social media is getting stuck in a negative engagement loop and costing themselves conversions.
Especially in the sustainability and impact space.
Social media algorithms are designed to show you the most relevant, interesting and entertaining content – to keep you on the platforms longer, so you see more ads and earn them more money.
They determine what that content is by measuring the amount of engagement it gets – likes, comments, video view length, shares, reposts, carousel swipes, link clicks – it all signals to the platforms that you like what you’re seeing, and they use that to show you more of it.
As a business putting out content, your posts that get the highest engagement get shown to more people.
The more reach the better, right?
From a ‘top of sales funnel’ perspective, that’s a good thing.
But only if those people are the right people: the ones most likely to convert at the bottom of the sales funnel.
Over time, the platforms learn what your account is about and build a profile of who is most likely to engage with you to show that content to.
And that can actually be bad news for your business.
Because it’s not the responsibility of the social platforms to work out who is most likely to buy from you and bring them in. That’s your job.
Storytelling harms sales
If your reach and engagement is high but your conversion rate is low, you’re stuck in a negative engagement loop – talking too much to people who like your mission, and not enough to people who need your product.
Impact-focused brands typically spend a lot of time telling their impact story. Borrowing messaging and communications styles from the charity sector, and focusing heavily on the social or environmental problem they set out to solve.
This gets a lot of engagement from people who share their values and care about their cause.
But because they don’t put their product – or the benefits it brings to the customer – front and centre, this impact storytelling harms their conversion.
While your mission is an important part of your business, you don’t want to train the social platforms to think that your account is about fighting poverty when actually it should be about selling fashion, because you can only fight poverty if people actually buy your clothes!
Supporters aren’t purchasers
Of course, there will always be some overlap between people who share your values and people who need your product.
But that segment is going to be relatively small.
Instead, you’ll find that your impact story drives engagement from service providers who want to sign you as a client, fellow impact founders, and people in the same communities as you (especially when they’re values-aligned communities like B Corp).
And the purchasing journey from supporter to loyal customer isn’t as linear as it could be (complex journeys have lower ROI – so converting them will cost you more).
You would need to reach a lot more of them than if you were simply talking about your product to people who need it.
And even with good engagement, organic reach is down to about 5% of your Instagram audience on a high performing post.
This can be a hard message to hear
Reach and engagement feel good. Social platforms are designed to make our brains release happy hormones when we get new notifications and social approval from our peers – again, because it increases our time on site and their ad revenue.
The idea of sacrificing engagement (and the praise that comes when people love your social mission) in favour of talking more about your product can be an uncomfortable idea for many founders.
But there’s a reason why the marketing world coined the term ‘vanity metrics’.
The only metrics that matter
“People don’t want to be sold to on social media” – right?
Wrong.
Consumers are treating social media more and more like a search engine.
It plays an important part in their discovery and consideration stages of the purchase journey – which means they don’t mind being sold to, as long as the product is relevant to their needs.
Building an audience is worthless to you (and expensive to do) unless that audience converts. So you can’t be afraid to sell.
If you’re running a business, success on social media boils down to how many sales you’re making.
Conversion rate and a healthy ROI are the only metrics that really matter.
What to do if you’re in a negative feedback loop
- Look at who is engaging – do they match your target customer profile? Have they ever purchased from you? Are they actually trying to sell to you?
- Refocus on your product benefits – not to people and planet, but to the people who buy and use it. Pair this with beautiful imagery (preferably of people who match your target customer profile using your product) and bring this back to your feed in a significant way – it should be obvious at first glance what you sell, who it’s for, and what it does for them.
- Expect an engagement dip – when you first start getting more commercial, you’ll likely lose a few followers and see your engagement dip. That’s natural, and it doesn’t matter – those people were never going to buy from you anyway.
- Use video as much as possible – it’s harder to get likes, comments and shares on product-focused posts, because they’re just not as interactive. But for video content, the platforms take into account the % of the video watched as a sign of engagement. The closer people get to the end, the more engaging it must be. To train the platforms to see your commercial content as highly engaging, post short videos to keep people viewing to the end.
- Boost posts to engage the right audience for your products – once you’ve run your commercial messaging out for long enough to get some organic data on what’s performing well, put some budget behind your best commercial posts and boost them to a targeted audience that matches your customer profile. Run this regularly with different commercial posts to reinvigorate a commercial audience and attract new customers.
The proof
We recently worked with a sustainability-focused FMCG brand. Prior to working with us, they’d reduced their posting on Instagram down to 3-4 times per month because it wasn’t performing for them and they were struggling to convert their audience.
Despite having over 20,000 followers, their inconsistency and low level of activity was significantly harming reach and engagement, and they had definitely fallen into a negative engagement loop – focusing heavily on their impact and values when they were posting, and speaking to the wrong audience demographic for their product.
We created an evergreen library of product-focused video content in our in-house photography studio, reframed their messaging hierarchy to focus on the benefits of the product and reasons to buy, and upped their posting schedule to 2x per day.
We then ran boosted posts to their target customers using the most successful commercially-focused content.
Within 1 month of implementing this strategy:
- Reach was up by 133%
- Engagement was up by 241%
- Non-follower reach was up by 160%
- Non-follower engagement was up by 210%
- Profile visits were up by 85.5%
- Visits to website were up by 636%
And most importantly we were delivering a ROAS (return on advertising spend) of 589%.
Implementing this strategy got them out of the negative engagement loop and turned Instagram into a viable and high converting sales channel for them.
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