Followers Don't Matter and Customers Mean Everything

End Hype with Callye Keen

Welcome back to the End Hype podcast. In episode 112 Callye Keen welcomes back Julie Traxler, co-founder of SB PACE to dispel the myths around followers. There is a misconception that there is a direct correlation between followers and customers. That correlation doesn't exist. 10,000 followers does not equate to 10,000 paying customers. And at the end of the day, that’s what you need, paying customers.

Paying customers means everything in business. Followers don’t matter. Listen in as Callye and Julie talk about alternative methods to social media marketing, and why someone who is watching you on social media platforms is more likely to buy from you than someone who is actually following and engaging with you on social media and social networks.

And you’re more likely to make a purchase during a product launch from someone and then start following them to support a product or service you like than you are to follow someone and then make a purchase. It’s not a straight line from follower to sale.

[10:03] Get out of your head

You've created some kind of crazy obstacle and you say if I do these things, then I'm going to be ready to offer something to my audience. I can tell you that you're just adding risk. And you're also building up an audience that doesn't know you're about to offer this thing. It's all in your head. You're complicating the product development process.

[10:57] What are you afraid of

How many people do you think are afraid to move off of social media as the marketing tool for their company because they're uncertain. Either they're afraid of the work effort to go someplace else. Or because they are afraid that maybe they don't actually have something that people want to buy? What if the fear is they will never make revenue, so they don't try?

[12:34] Who already has the attention of your audience

If he wanted to do this through social media, he'd have to create a Facebook page or start polling people, find all the Facebook groups created and start messaging. He'd have to do the whole social media thing from scratch. Now using the simple techniques that I use, we just went to the bike shop. Get in front of where the traffic already is. People in a bike shop, what do you know about them? Right off the bat. They like biking. They have a high intent ratio of purchasing like products.

[17:00] Know your customer

You have to go where your actual customer is. I think a lot of people don't know where their customer is though, because they don't know who their customer is. Yes. So we dial it all the way back. And that's why I shared a new benchmarking tool that we're working on.

[18:03] Partnerships

Then I show them what you could do with B2B, what you can do with partnership deals. And it’s this lightbulb moment, “I'm missing this whole other side of my brain”.

[19:52] Ideal customer

That is not how things went, it was tons of networking to get in front of people, talk and figure out who our customer is and how we talk to them. How do we get specifically in front of that person and talk to that ideal customer versus everybody in the universe and hope that what we're saying resonates with the person we want to work with.

“People don't care enough about you to get offended at something that you do. And if they do, if you're living so rent free inside of somebody's head that they're obsessed with stuff that you do, they weren't going to be a customer in the first place there. You're not going to convert the unconvertible.”