You’re a direct sales boss babe, which means you already know how critical consistent sales are for your business. You also know that more and more people are shopping online and you want to do whatever it takes to make sure they do their shopping with you. Does that sound about right?
One of the key components to ensuring that you make the most of the entire year is to be able to sell, without exhausting your leads, all year long. You can’t afford to only sell well for only some months. You have to be able to sell in all of them!
People buy from people they know, like, and trust. They also refer their friends to people they know, like, and trust, and that is how you expand your client base and grow your business. Keeping enough variety in your business to keep your customers engaged for 3 whole months might sound a little overwhelming. And how the heck are you going to come up with enough content for that?
The strategy we’re about to share with you will not only work for the last quarter of the year but for every quarter too. The people who are the most successful in direct sales are the people who keep their customers engaged all year long.
In a nutshell, variety is all about creating themes. You can have your entire year planned into themes in just a few minutes. We’re serious! In fact, we’ll help you right now with themes for the last 3 months of the year.
Step 1 – Grab a piece of paper and a pen.
Step 2 – Write down the next 3 months and leave some space under each one.
Step 3 – Go month by month and write down any holidays you can think of under each one.
Step 4 – Think of other topics that apply to the months you have listed. For example, Autumn and Winter and write those under the corresponding month(s).
Step 5 – What months have other important dates, like your birthday or anniversary with your company? List those under the corresponding month(s) as well.
Step 6 – Use a website like National Day Calendar to find some fun and wacky “holidays” that you think your customer base would like. Jot them down too.
Our example looks something like this:
October – Halloween, Autumn, National Taco Day, Birthday
November – Remembrance Day, Thanksgiving, Company Anniversary, National Jersey Friday
December – Christmas, Winter, National Cookie Day.
Now take a look at your own list. Just like that, you’ve come up with themes for every month of the year! You may even have a theme for every single week. Using these themes that you’ve come up with, you can now easily find and create content for all of your social channels.
As a general rule you want only about 20% of your content to be promotional (shop, host, join), the remaining 80% should be content of value (entertaining and informative) to your customers. Let’s take a look at what that would look like in practice. For our example, let’s say our theme is Halloween and our plan is to have a virtual Halloween Party.
Pro Tip: Define your promotional objective first and work backward.
In our example, our promotional objective is a virtual sale (aka a Facebook party) on Friday. Using the 80% – 20% rule, we know that 4 out of 5 posts need to be informative and/or entertaining. If you need ideas for content, Pinterest and Google are your best friends! Our posts for the week would look something like this:
Monday – Yay or Nay for Candy Corn (Entertaining)
Tuesday – Halloween Tip: How to Store Candy So It Lasts Longer (Informative)
Wednesday – Do You Dress Up for Halloween? What are you going to be this year? (Entertaining)
Thursday – Share info about how one of your products can be used for Halloween – Ex: Makeup remover for taking off Facepaint. (Informative)
Friday – Halloween Theme Virtual Party
Not every theme needs to have a promotional component because the main objective is to keep your customers engaging with you week after week. Choose the themes that best suit your group or products when deciding which ones to use in your sales.
By keeping your customers regularly engaged, they will already be there, ready to participate in the themes you do use to sell. If you’re still a little unsure of how to bring it all together, start with a theme that seems the easiest to you. Usually, a holiday like Christmas is a good place to start because it’s easy to find content on the web. Once you’ve created a couple of post sets, it gets much easier to see what you can do with trickier themes. Trust us, you’ll be a pro in no time!
Which themes are you going to try for your business this month? We’d love to hear your ideas in the comments. Looking for a virtual party to go with your theme? Come and take a look at the scripts page on our website to see what we have available!