As more and more people are getting into full swing in their business for 2025, I thought this was a great opportunity to discuss your social media strategy.
If you’ve got plans and goals related to social media for the year ahead, I want you to be honest: Are you confident that the time and energy you invest in those strategies will generate sales?
In today’s episode, I’m sharing the missing link between socials and sales. It’s a link that far too many business owners are missing.
If you’re starting to feel like social media takes up too much time, or you want to ensure that you net results from your social media efforts, this will be a powerful and practical episode for you.
Let’s dive in and connect that missing link between socials and sales!
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In order to explain and help you connect that missing link between socials and sales, we need to start by outlining how someone goes from seeing your social media content to actually buying from you.
This is the buyer journey. It’s something that has been oversimplified in a lot of cases.
The buyer journey is often oversimplified because so-called “experts” don’t have the depth of understanding of buyer psychology.
Plus, social media creators want you to believe that if you grow your following, you’ll naturally make more sales. That way, all they need to do is help you grow your social media following, trick the algorithm into showing your content to more people, find ways to reach more people, stay on trend, and do all of the things that love up on the algorithm and get more people seeing your stuff.
But unfortunately, 0% of 150 people in your audience is exactly the same as 0% of 50,000 people in your audience.
I’ve had a Facebook reel reach over 7 million people, and yet that had zero impact on the sales I made in my business. The truth of the matter is that my social media generates a lot of sales for me – NOT because I reach bigger and bigger audiences over time. Instead, I know how to connect that social audience into buying from me.
That’s because I deeply understand the buyer journey and buyer psychology, and I can fill those missing links between people seeing my content on social media and making the decision to buy from me.
Rather than just oversimplifying it and getting you fixated on audience growth and reach, I want to take a minute to break it down.
Let’s start by looking at it from the buyer’s perspective.
The hard truth is that it is very rare for someone to see an ad for something on social media and just purchase it straight away. Unless it is an adorable pencil case shaped like a panda (and yes, I did get sucked into buying one of those very recently), the chances that someone sees an ad for your VIP package, online course, or membership, and then instantly purchases it based on one post alone are very slim to nil.
It’s the exception. It’s not the rule.
Yet, so many people build their social media strategy based on this exception.
They build their social media strategy in the belief that someone’s just going to see their post and then make a purchase, or that someone’s going to see their post and sign up to their mailing list, and with three simple emails, they’re going to buy a VIP package for $2,500.
The truth of the matter is that that is the exception, it’s not the rule.
To break the numbers down for you a little deeper, let’s say you have a post on social media that promotes a free opt-in – something that people can grab for free from you that has that lovely email sequence at the end of it to upsell them into working with you.
Let’s say that through all of these magical strategies, you get that post in front of 10,000 people. And out of the 10,000 people who see that post, 1% of them sign up for your free resource (because in most cases, a 1% sign-up rate is higher than industry leaders are achieving).
1% of the people who see that promo end up signing up for your free resource. You’ve got 100 new people on your mailing list going through that funnel.
With funnels converting on average well below 1%, the highest outcome that you could expect is one sale.
To make one sale from your post on social media, you need to reach 10,000 people.
I want you to be honest with yourself: do you have the capacity to reach 10,000 people on your social media right now?
Out of all the strategies you’ve tried on social media over the last three months, have any of your posts that promote freebies reached 10,000 people?
In most cases, to reach that many people, you need to pay for ads. To get 100 people signed up to your mailing list through ads will generally cost around $300-$500.
You need to spend $300-$500 on ads to get 100 people to sign up to your mailing list in order for one of those 100 people to make a purchase from you.
If you’re selling your VIP packages at $5,000, that is actually a very good deal. But how many of you have confidence that for every 100 people who join your mailing list, one of them will buy a VIP package from you?
In most cases, it’s a post-and-hope strategy.
In most cases, you don’t have the budget, or you’re not willing to risk the budget on that kind of ad spend, because you have not yet validated that the strategies you’ve got in place are going to result in income.
If we take these very generous conversion rates and think about the number of people who see your content versus the number of people who buy from you, you can see that you’re building a strategy based on the exception, not the rule.
Can you see that 99.9% of the people who see your content are not going to buy from you with that strategy? Yet, how many people build their entire business around this kind of buyer journey?
If we break the buyer journey down into more concrete steps and assess what is going on at each step of that process, we can increase the number of people who move through that process each step of the way.
Not only does that mean you need to reach fewer people on social media, it means that for every person you reach on social media, you are far more likely to make a sale.
Isn’t that the smarter strategy? I think it absolutely is.
Let’s look at the more involved customer journey…
They don’t just see something from you and then magically buy. Instead, a customer might see some social content of yours and then decide that they want to follow your content, or because they interact or engage with that content, your social media platform puts more of your content in front of them.
They might eventually join your mailing list. What they are doing in that next step is connecting with you, and they’re building a sense of trust that you are a worthy provider, that you have something that they need, and that you have something that could help them.
You’re building a relationship.
That person is starting to trust that not only will you have content that’s going to be helpful for them, but also that you’re going to stick around because they’re seeing and hearing from you more consistently.
People go from seeing you to feeling connected to you in some way. They’re starting to build that trust. They’re starting to know who you are and what you stand for.
Then at some point in that relationship building, they start to have that seed of an idea that it might be useful for them to buy your support – buy your package or something that you offer that can help them achieve their goals.
They start to consider how they might buy something from you, and how they might access the support, resources and advice that they need to achieve their goal.
They’re leaning into this idea that they might be interested in buying something from you.
And then they start to look at the options.
They start to look at what it is that you offer through that lens of feeling like you might be able to help them.
Once they’ve got the information that they need to make an informed decision, they can then make a decision whether or not to make that purchase.
You can see there’s more to it than just see content, buy product.
Your audience and your ideal clients are not brainless bots that just scroll the internet and buy stuff that they don’t want or need.
Especially if you are a service provider or you have a business that facilitates transformation. If you’ve got a business that facilitates a deeper, more involved transformation, then there is more depth to that buyer journey than just see something on the internet and purchase it.
That’s the exception, it’s not the rule.
We’ve now looked at that journey from the buyer perspective.
They see something and they start to connect with you, your brand and what you stand for. Then they lean in to this idea of possibly buying something from you, so they start to explore what their options might be, and then they make a purchase decision.
The great news is that if we then take that buyer journey and look at what your job is as the business owner, we can actually map out your side of that journey so that you can take an active role in encouraging them to move through those stages. We can ensure that you know how to effectively present the information and the opportunities to connect and explore your offers at a time when it’s relevant to that person.
That is what I refer to as the client attraction process, which I will map out in more detail…
Stage 1: Reach
In order for your potential client to see your content, you need to reach them.
The things that you do to get your content and your offers in front of more and more people are your reach strategies.
Things like:
- Posting consistently on social media
- Growing your mailing list
- Having a website
- SEOing your content
All of those things are reach strategies – the ways that you reach your audience, particularly with content and offers.
In that phase of the buyer journey where they’re trying to connect with your brand and you’re building trust, that is where you, as the business owner, are nurturing your relationship with your audience…
Stage 2: Nurture
The way that you nurture a relationship with your audience is they get to know you and you get to know them.
You build a two-way relationship by helping people, sharing advice and information that is valuable to them, and building that relationship in that they actually get to see the human side of you and what’s going on behind the scenes of your business.
Those pieces of the puzzle help to build that know, like and trust factor.
They help people to feel that they are connected to you.
Things like being able to send you a DM and you replying to them, or getting onto your mailing list and being invited to answer questions or reply.
They are getting to know you and build a relationship with you, but you are also getting to know them.
Stage 3: Invite
This is where we start to plant the seed and qualify whether people might be interested in considering a paid opportunity to work together.
This is where we start to ask questions and dive into what the person is hoping to achieve and what is getting in their way so that we can help to assess whether you have something that will help them achieve their goals and whether working with you is actually a good idea or not.
In marketing terms, this is qualifying leads. It is generating qualified leads for your business.
It’s things like having people sign up for a sales conversation with you or having people reach out to you and ask what times the calls are in your online course because they’re considering it.
It’s where your ideal clients and your audience are giving you an indication that they are considering making a purchase.
But as your side of that client attraction process, your job is to invite people to consider that.
Invite people to lean in and do that qualifying and question asking, so that you can help to discern and determine whether there is an offer that would be of value for them.
Stage 4: Convert
This is where you convert the sale. The person says that they’d like to take your offer and then they pay you money for it.
Of course, once they have purchased from you, we do want to ensure that you deliver on your promise and that your products and services live up to the expectations that you’ve set for your buyers in this client attraction process.
I don’t often need to have that conversation with people in my audience, because most people in my audience are very good at delivering on their promises, and they do have a high focus on delivering quality outcomes and quality services and products to their audience. But it’s always nice to just speak to that and say that the fastest way to dry up attracting new clients into your business is to under-deliver for the ones you already have.
If you needed that little nudge, there you go. You’ve been given it.
But it is really nice to remember that everything that comes before convert is getting someone to start a relationship with you as a client.
That’s not the end of the journey.
What does this client attraction process have to do with that missing link between socials and making actual sales?
Unfortunately for most people, their entire business strategy is based on this idea of short-cutting people from reach to convert. Get your content and your offers in front of as many people as possible, and when they see those offers, they’ll buy them.
When I talk about this in some of my more in-depth programs and live trainings, a lot of people realise that that’s what they’ve been doing.
They’re caught in what I call the reach-convert trap.
They’re trying to use social media to reach as many people as possible and shove as many of their offers down the faces of as many people as possible to try and convert them into paying clients.
They might have really helpful content. Perhaps they do Facebook lives that are valuable, or they’re making reels that have got really good hints and tips. But ultimately, what they are trying to do is just reach as many people as possible, get their offers in front of as many people as possible, and hope that as many people as possible buy their offers.
Instead, what we need to do is bridge the gap between reach and convert.
Not by trying to trick people, not by misleading people, not by dialling up the pressure and agitating people’s pain points, but by facilitating that client attraction process so that your audience can go through the buyer journey in a supported, considered and strategic way.
If we look at it from the buyer journey side, are you expecting people to see your content and then purchase your product?
Instead, we want to fill the missing link. The missing link is building connection, a relationship and trust, and then leaning in with curiosity to consider whether they want to buy something from you or not, and whether you are the right fit to help them achieve their goals.
If we look at where that falls in your client attraction process, it’s nurture and invite.
Nurture a relationship with your audience. Get to know them and let them get to know you. Invite people who are keen to access support, resources or your services to lean in and self-identify as being interested and potentially being a lead.
This is why the nurture and invite parts of your client attraction process are where lead generation happens.
It’s where you can start to identify who’s actively considering your products and services, who’s actively working on the exact thing you help with, and who is actively open to having a conversation about working together.
Nurture and invite in your client attraction process are the missing links.
But how do we fill that missing link in a way that maximises conversion and maximises the number of leads you’re generating from your social media strategies?
It’s not about crafting better posts that nurture your audience. Or crafting better posts that invite people into a sales conversation.
The things that you post on social media play a very small and minor role in your conversion rates.
What plays a much larger role in your conversion rates (ie. the percentage of people who move from one stage of the client attraction process to the next) is that level of connection.
If you want to fill that missing link between your social media strategy and making actual sales in your business, your best, highest-converting and smartest strategy is to incorporate one-on-one nurture and one-on-one invite strategies into your client attraction process.
I’m going to use a completely fictional example so that we can see what that means on a tangible strategy basis.
How does this change what you do in your marketing and sales strategies?
Because I love Golden Girls, I’m going to say Dorothy has a decluttering business.
For the last two years, Dorothy has been working really hard to try and get a following of people who are interested in decluttering. Dorothy is really narrowly niched and focuses on helping business owners who want to not just declutter their homes, but organise and optimise their homes so that life is easier and their homes feel like they are a beautiful reflection of their personality.
Dorothy has the decluttering angle and also the optimising their homes for living a really seamless, lovely, stress free life. (I’m of course totally making this up.)
For two years, Dorothy has been posting on social media every single day.
When Facebook started to integrate reels, Dorothy, of course, followed all of those social media experts and created reels.
Dorothy has a Facebook page, and in two years of posting every single day on Facebook, playing with some boosted posts and some Facebook ads, Dorothy now has 1,000 followers on her Facebook page.
Not only that, Dorothy has been very active in a range of different Facebook groups, consistently promoting her Facebook page and her special free resources. She’s been doing all of the things that the experts have told her to do, to grow her mailing list, build her following and reach on social media, and try to get some clients.
But unfortunately, after two years of consistently posting on social media, consistently recording podcast episodes, consistently emailing her list, and consistently trying to grow her mailing list with social media strategies and her podcast, Dorothy still only has 250 people on her mailing list and has not had a steady stream of leads and clients in the whole two years of her business.
She’s made a sale here and there.
In fact, most of her sales have come from friends of friends or referrals from the people she has had relationships with.
Yet, two years later, Dorothy still spends more than 10 hours a week creating content for her podcast and her mailing list, content for socials, and trying to find ways to reach more and more people online.
She has been told that if she can just get her offer of her VIP decluttering package in front of as many people as possible, that she is going to make sales.
Not only that, Dorothy, over the last two years, has updated and refined her VIP package based on doing courses on how to be a good copywriter, how to improve her messaging, how to improve the quality of what she is going to deliver and how she pitches her package to her ideal clients.
She is working so hard and doing all of the right things as far as she can see.
Yet she’s not getting a consistent stream of leads.
Whenever she asks a question on social media, she has a few people answer her questions, but none of them turn into paying clients.
Not only that, her podcast is built based on the questions people ask her. Every now and then on her socials and to her mailing list, she asks for questions for her to answer on her podcast. People send her questions, and she creates podcasts out of those questions. She creates reels out of those questions. She creates content that helps people to solve those problems.
But it’s not getting her any leads.
The big problem when I look at a strategy like Dorothy’s is:
1. It’s a very common experience for business owners, and that makes it very frustrating for me because I can see exactly what’s going on, and I desperately want to get my hands in there and help
2. There isn’t any one-to-one nurture or one-to-one invite in her strategy.
Part of that is because online, everyone is talking about leveraging your time.
Everyone is talking about how your business should be set up on autopilot. You should be making sales in your sleep. You should let your social media do the work for you.
This means whenever Dorothy thinks about what she needs to do, she’s trying to think about how to create content to reach as many people as possible, and how to write her offer posts so that it reaches as many people as possible.
Dorothy is caught in the reach-convert trap.
If I was going to be working with Dorothy, all we would need to do is actually bridge that missing link.
Look at how she can incorporate one-to-one nurture and one-to-one convert into her client attraction process.
For example, when she asks people what they want to hear on her podcast and what questions they have for her to answer in her content, instead of only answering those questions with more broadcast content, every single one of those people who submit a question get a personalised one-to-one outreach from Dorothy.
They aren’t just thanked for their question…
Dorothy offers to help them with the problem they’ve identified.
Someone comes to Dorothy and says that they understand the power of decluttering, but they have so many special gifts that people have given them over the years that they feel guilty throwing away.
Instead of just creating a podcast episode on how to declutter gifts from other people, Dorothy says to that person, “I totally understand there can be so much emotional attachment to some of those items! And to be honest, I don’t necessarily think throwing out every personal gift that you’ve ever received is the answer either. Why don’t we jump on a quick call and we can talk through some of the things you’re really struggling to declutter, and I can help you make a plan for some of those things. Would that be helpful?”
If you were to buy in to this mass belief that talking to people one at a time is a waste of your time and that everything needs to be broadcast and leveraged, you’d probably think that helping someone for free is going to then cost you time and it’s not going to result in anything.
But ultimately, if your one-to-many broadcast strategies are not working, chances are that you’re not hitting the mark with your messaging, and you don’t hit the mark more effectively by just throwing more spaghetti at the wall.
Think about now jumping on a call with that person and helping them generously.
Let’s say Dorothy books them a free 20-minute session, and at the end of that 20-minute session, she asks that person some qualifying questions to see if there’s anything else that they’re struggling with in their decluttering.
Now Dorothy has the opportunity to invite that person to potentially lean into working together further.
Can you see how we’ve taken that reach to convert strategy, and we’ve just nudged some one-to-one nurture in there, and now that has far more potential to actually turn into a paying client?
Not only that, the person who Dorothy gave that lovely session to is now going to be a raving fan of Dorothy’s, and is likely to send referrals or be more engaged on Dorothy’s social content. They’re more likely to open every future email that they get from Dorothy.
And that’s just one tiny change to the strategy.
The number one objection I get when I talk about this in tangible terms is people will say that they post questions on social media and no one answers, or they ask their list what content they want to receive and hardly anyone ever answers.
That absolutely may be true. But the reality is that often the reason why people don’t reply is that you’ve not made it overtly clear that you love helping and supporting people and you actually want them to reply.
Not only that, if you are asking questions and you’re not getting replies from your audience, it may be that you’re not asking the questions in a way that is easy for people to answer, or that people are incentivised to answer.
Sometimes it takes practice and finessing.
But the last time I had this kind of conversation with someone, she said to me that she sent an email to her mailing list and asked them a question, but she hardly got a single response.
I told her that we’d look at the responses that she did get together.
She sent a question in an email to a list of 2,000 people, and she got six replies.
The six replies that she got were from people who were asking her for advice on things, and in response to them asking her for advice, she’d pushed them to a sales page.
Someone replied and asked what she’d recommend for writing better opt-in pages, and she just sent them straight to the sales page of her copywriting course.
Again, that was reach-convert.
Someone replied asking for help with something, and instead of nurturing a relationship with them and valuing that one-to-one connection, she tried to direct them to another broadcast page, and that person didn’t buy.
Does she know why that person didn’t buy? No. Did she follow up with that person to see if they’d checked out the sales page? No.
For most people, when they tell me no one replies, they DO get one or two replies, but they treat those replies so poorly that they’re training people to no longer reply.
They’re sending the message that if I ever reply to you:
- All I get is a sales pitch. Or,
- All I get is a thanks and I never hear from you again. Or,
- You don’t reply back to me and it doesn’t become a conversation
So many people are not taking responsibility for nurturing relationships with their audience one-on-one and for inviting people to consider their offers and qualifying leads one-on-one.
That is the missing link between socials and sales.
I am sure that some people are reading this, thinking to themselves that there is no way that they have time to add in a bunch of one-to-one conversations in their overall marketing and sales strategy.
That’s absolutely fair. But let’s say you are spending five hours a week working on your socials (which for most businesses, it’s far more than that), and in that five hours, you’re creating posts to go on your socials, you’re posting in a few Facebook groups, and you’re recording some videos. I would argue that by reducing that time by half (so turning it into half an hour a day, five days a week), and instead dedicating two and a half hours a week to one-to-one nurture and one-to-one invite strategies, you will increase the conversion rate from your social strategies so much more powerfully that you don’t need to reach as big of an audience.
The reach that you are currently achieving is more than enough to start generating consistent leads and consistent sales from your audience.
Let me be clear: there are hundreds and hundreds of different ways that you can incorporate one-to-one nurture and one-to-one invite strategies into your sales and marketing approach.
I’m not saying that just asking questions and then treating the people who answer as human beings and striking up a relationship with them is the be all and end all.
But for most people that I talk to, they’re not even doing that. They’re not even doing the very basics of one-to-one engagement.
I would recommend that you absolutely start there.
Look for all of the ways that when people reach out to you, comment on your content, DM you, or email you, you are actually ignoring or letting that conversation die off too soon, and instead, build your skills in crafting that into one-to-one relationship building. Whether that be helping people a little more freely, learning to ask better qualifying questions and keeping the conversation going a little more effectively, or whether that be getting some strategic guidance and advice on how to actually nurture that relationship and do it in a way that’s consent-based and it’s a win-win for both you and the other person.
Once you’ve got that sorted, I’ve got a beautiful fun resource for you that will help you to experiment with other strategies as well.
It’s my Lead Generation Bingo Sheet.
I really want you to have a little play and experiment here, and remember that because one-to-one nurture and one-to-one invite strategies are super high conversion, you’ll have to spend far less time on them to get far better results.
Make sure you grab that Lead Generation Bingo Sheet here: CLICK ME
Of course, the in-depth strategy for building out your client attraction process, refining your messaging and your core value proposition, and crafting offers that your audience absolutely love and are hungry to buy, is going to take more than just reading this one podcast episode.
The people that I work with in the Take Off program and in my VIP packages, we do go through and dissect in a lot more detail the effectiveness of each of their strategies and how we can start to refine and adapt those to be higher and higher conversion.
But for most people, even just making this shift has a significant impact on the results you get from all of that work you’ve been putting into growing your audience on social media and growing your mailing list.
A quick cheeky plug if you are reading this episode when it’s released in January 2025, in the coming few months, there are some spectacular events that I will be facilitating to help you with this in particular.
I’ve got two free workshops coming out in February.
AND inside the Take Off program starting on the 7th of April, I’m running a special event called Leads at Speed.
Over the course of two weeks starting on the 7th of April, I’m going to be supporting all of the participants to generate as many leads as they can in two weeks.
In order for the Take Off students to be able to get the most out of Leads at Speed, they’re going to need to ensure they’ve got their foundations nailed.
We do that in the first five modules of the Take Off program.
To ensure that everyone is up to module five ready for Leads at Speed, I’m going to be closing the doors to take off at the start of March.
If you want to get support to use high conversion, high connection strategies to attract leads and sales very consistently without having to burn yourself out doing social media that doesn’t convert into sales, I would recommend that you keep an eye on your inbox and your social feed for those two workshops I’m running in February.
But also, I would love for you to come and check out the Take Off program.
I definitely recommend you don’t miss out on all of the awesomeness that’s happening, and you don’t miss out on the opportunity to really bridge that missing link between your socials and making lots more sales.
You can find out more about the Take Off program at: tashcorbin.com/takeoff
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
