How to use Facebook to drive sales to your training business

Facebook is a powerful tool for marketing your training business

For some, Facebook can feel like a conundrum when it comes to selling. Between the pictures of people’s dinner, ranting status updates and meme sharing, how on earth can you grow your business on social media?

Well, Facebook is one of the most powerful tools for marketing your training business and, most importantly, driving sales. We’ve put together some top tips to help you make the most of the most popular social networking site out there to grow your business.

Know your target audience

There are billions of people using Facebook every day. That’s a whole load of potential right there, but it’s also important to be realistic and concede that not every single one of them will want to buy your training course.

To make the most of advertising and marketing your training business through Facebook, you need to know who your target audience is.

To do this, it is imperative to come up with a buyer persona. This persona is your dream customer. Through research into your target market you should be able to pinpoint demographic information such as age, location, income, hopes, fears, dreams and interests.

Two of the most important questions you need to answer are:

1.      Who are your buyers and why do they use your training courses?

2.      What expectations do they have from your training courses?

Facebook offers a degree of segmentation when it comes to advertising, with custom audiences. This means, that through using the data Facebook collects about its users you can target your dream customer.

That way, when your ad hits their feed, you’ll be speaking to their deepest desires, needs and wants and creating opportunities for them to hit ‘Buy’.

Engage and Interact

 Interacting with your audience on social media is one of the key ways to drive sales through it. This inevitably starts with customer service.

When new potential customers come your way, they will be checking out your Facebook profile to see how you interact with customers and to hear what your customers are saying about you.

Ensure that any queries through Facebook are responded to in a timely manner (this can be automated, too) and that you are posting regular, relevant content that your audience can engage with. This can be testimonials, news, promotions, discounts…whatever is relevant to your business.

Make a Video

 Facebook prioritises video content, so a video advert is more likely to show up on your audience’s feed than a traditional text/image advert. Not only that, but your potential customers eyes will be drawn to a video due to the fact that it will start to play instantly as they scroll through their feed.

Videos are a great way to showcase your brands personality and what you do. For your training business, it is a great way to show your audience the benefits of taking one of your customers and to really sell the dream of what your courses offer them.

Boost Popular Posts

You may have found that there is an element of trial and error to what posts do well on Facebook and those that fall flat on their face. The social network offers a great insight into how well certain posts have done, from clicks through to engagement – and this offers you a great opportunity to pick and choose the ones that do well to broadcast to a wider audience.

Posts that have performed well can be ‘boosted’ to reach either those who have already liked your page or new potential customers. This is a great way to reach people as you already know the post has had a lot of engagement, so by boosting it you’re almost guaranteed more sales and attention.

Stop selling, define your brand instead

We have become conditioned to tune out adverts, so posts that are blatantly selling something are tuned out by a whole chunk of your audience. Because of this you need to get clever and look for other opportunities to post that sell your business without…well, selling anything.

One of the ways to do this is to use Facebook to strengthen your brands identity. This means posting content that engages your audience and connects with your brands core beliefs and values. This could be sharing a story relevant to your industry or a case study on one of your students and how successful they have been. It could even be promoting an event you are holding.

Whatever it is, turn down the cheesy sales patter and really let your brand and passion shine.

Don’t neglect your Facebook page any longer. With so many people engaging with the platform everyday, you are missing out on a huge chunk of your market by ignoring it. Get your page up to date and start posting regular, relevant content to boost traffic to your website and drive sales.