The 4-Step Formula For Attracting Social Media Traffic To Your Business

Imagine if you could attract followers to your business like bees to honey. Naturally, consistently, and without begging for attention.

That’s what this 4-step process is built to do. And if you give me 3 minutes, then you’ll know how to pull in followers like gravity for your business.

Let’s dive straight in.

Step 1 - Do Your Homework

Not trying to sound like a teacher, but before you use any of the next 3 methods, you must do some homework about your audience first.

Namely, what they think about your industry.

The easiest way to do this is by talking with your customers. If you know your customers well, then you’ll be able to find similarities between them in what most of them think.

The market research term for this is a psychographic analysis. It’s simply how your customers think and feel about different things.

This part is especially easy if you run a local business, because you know your customers more personally than an online store that sells dog chew toys.

What you want to find out from satisfied customers is this:

What did they think of your industry before they worked with you?

The reason why this is a great question is that it gets you in the mind of potential customers before they buy from you. 

If you can remove any reasons they have for not buying, then they’re more likely to work with you.

This lets you address common customer concerns on social media. The next 3 methods will tell you how you can do that in a way that easily gets their attention.

Step 2 - Controversy

Eminem wasn’t wrong when he said, “We need a little… controversy, ‘Cause it feels so empty without me!” 

However, don’t get the wrong idea - I’m not saying you should post political views on social media to get attention. That’s how Kanye lost $2 billion. We don’t want to do that.

What I mean is challenging common beliefs about your industry.

With the last step, we learned what potential customers are thinking before they buy. If you can challenge their views in your social media posts, they’ll stop scrolling and listen to you.

I have an example of how I’ve done this myself.

On LinkedIn and Instagram, I made a post about marketing where the first thing readers saw was this:

“Quality > Quantity In Ads Is Wrong. Here’s Why:”

This post ended up sparking quite a bit of industry discussion, bringing in new followers who wanted to hear our opinions more.

You can do the same by challenging common beliefs in your industry.

For example, some homeowners think that roofers are untrustworthy. If you can share your view about that belief on social media, potential customers who think exactly that will be interested. And you might get some new roofing clients!

That’s just one potential method of getting these people’s attention. There are 2 more you can use, so we’ll jump straight to the next one.

Step 3 - Absurdity

With this one, you can use comparisons that might sound funny but actually link very well to a point.

Our #1 best-performing LinkedIn post in the last year used absurdity in the title like this:

“Stop Marketing Like A 3-Year-Old With A Paintbrush.”

It worked because it compared 2 completely different things, but then made a valid point about how some marketers do too many things at once and end up making a mess in their ads.

This also slightly uses controversy, as it tells people to ‘stop marketing’ in a specific way.

All of these 4 steps link together, so you can use several to attract followers.

When you want to make a point (potentially using the advice from Step 2), consider making a strange comparison to make people want to hear you explain. This works very well on social media.

So we’ve got controversy and absurdity as potential weapons in the arsenal; now let’s add the final one.

Step 4 - Humour

This one works well if you know your customers inside and out, and if you can find out what they find funny.

Humour works because it stands out. If you can share something that makes customers laugh, then they’ll remember you positively.

This not only attracts new followers, but also makes them keep up with you because they know your account has some personality. And if followers keep up with you for a long enough time, there’s a bigger chance you catch them at the right moment when they do need to use your services.

You don’t want to end up having a comedy account, so only use this now and then. However, it’s a powerful method to attract followers and potentially convert them into clients.

If you want to know more about using humour in marketing, then this 3-minute article will help you decide how you should use humour for your business.