She’s no stranger to taking a small business and blowing it up. She’s written two books, of which she’s sold 100,000 copies, and speaks about business growth, marketing, and much more. AND, she’s a ManyChat expert: Rachel Miller.
This week on Meet the Speakers, Rachel Miller geeks out with Molly Mahoney about how her Facebook eco-system builds an engaging audience and her strategies for having the right conversations with her audience, including driving traffic to Messenger and capturing email with Facebook Live.
“You need more than Messenger to make money. You need a Facebook page because you have to run ads from somewhere. But you need more than an ad. That doesn’t have a relationship. You need to ask your audience, ‘What do you want?’ And then build the relationship from there.”
During this episode, you’ll learn Rachel’s Facebook eco-system for building an engaging audience, and how she uses Facebook Live to drive traffic to Messenger, capture email, and a whole lot more.
Warning, you may want to create a Messenger bot flow and start growing your community immediately after watching this episode.
Wanting more tips and advice to grow your business? Come to Conversations 2019!
How did you get started with ManyChat?
Rachel Miller: ManyChat makes you money, but you need more than just Messenger. You need a Facebook page to run ads. But you need more than a flat ad that does nothing, [you need one that builds] a relationship. Because if you have your page, and you have an audience on it, you can use Messenger chat to ask your audience, “What do you want?” ou can’t make your product until you know what your audience [needs].
I’m going to tell a story about my mom: I love my mom dearly, she’s an entrepreneur, and she’s taught me so many skills, but I got to see her failures, too.
I grew up in an Amish Mennonite community. And they don’t allow pictures of people, which is hilarious now because I’m on Facebook Live all the time, saying, “Sell for you, Lady? Oh, I’ll get the camera out, I’ll be up there.”
My mom had this idea: Mennonites don’t want pictures taken of them, so [she thought]to make faceless statues of their families to sell to them.
Everyone else looks at this and thinks, “That’s a horrible idea.” But my mom seriously thought it was great.
Everyone has a lot of great ideas. But this one wasn’t one of them. And she has made it in her own right, her businesses have earned money that blew me away as a kid.
And she set the foundation of my life: I became an entrepreneur while I was raising children because I saw my mom doing it.
It’s a huge thing, and I’m not trying to discount it. But, mom, faceless statues? I don’t think that’s going to work. We have to talk to our audience. So my mom made about 20 of these statues and tried to sell them, and it wasn’t really working until she talked to her audience—and she found out what they actually wanted was someone to buy their quilts.
You’re going to find that out by having an audience, and that’s what you have your page for. Then, you grow that list and engage with them. You have to have a conversation with them to see what’s going to work, and what will sell.
Your big take away from your mom’s entrepreneurship is to have conversations?
RM: Absolutely. Before Messenger chat, we had to have that conversation kind of publicly, conversations on our pages, back and forth. Or even in groups where they’re dialoguing with each other, and that’s still extremely valuable. You still want to have this conversation on your page. You still want to have [an audience] in your groups. But take it farther. Go from your page to the video, from the video to Messenger.
We want to bring that into a private conversation. And Facebook has literally said in the last Community Summit Meeting that they had that those private conversations, they’re really valuable at this time.
So we have noticed, personally, when we bring those conversations off of our page into a private space, our page gets more reach. We’ve done this time and time again, tested and seen that your page, your videos will get more reach when you add a conversation to them.
So even if you’re just saying, “Hey, howdy, hi dee, hoe, how are you doing today?” — you’re not actually even asking them questions — that’s still going to build your audience, still going to build your business, while you’re thinking of what kind of product am I going to make for these people?
What are some key pieces people may overlook, but really should do?
RM: Basically guys, do you actually love your audience? Or do you love yourself?
A lot of times the problem is that you love yourself so much that you’re not actually serving your audience anymore.
Most of the time we’re saying, “Buy this, buy this! I’m here, I’m here! My product is awesome!”
We’re here to show ourselves off on Facebook. That’s why we’re on Facebook. We’re bored and we want something to entertain us, or we want to portray who we appear, want to appear to the world what we are to everybody else.
So we need, as marketers, to come alongside our audience and help them become their perfect selves on the platform. [We need to] talk [less] about us, we need to listen more.
And honestly, that’s why I love ManyChat. And I love this event. Because you’re going to literally give us strategies where we can listen to our people and have a conversation with them that’s not a spammy, buy-my-product-right-now way.
What are some of the best tips to get started right away?
RM: First, you need to start a page. You have to have a cover, you have to have a profile, you have to have some content on there. But after you’ve got those up and running, you have to actually learn how to post content and all that.
So, we have a page that drives people to the video and drives people to chat. Because I do coaching, I have lots of human interaction between my customers so that they trust me. If you have a low ticket product, you may not need a lot of trust factors. But if you need trust factors, the next thing we encourage you to do is have a group. So, here it is. Here’s my group, and I am going to drive traffic from Messenger into my group and from my group back to Messenger, and from my video into my group, and from my group back to my videos.
This way I’m able to capture people with video views. I’m able to capture people on email leads because I have quick replies set up on my Messenger. I’m able to capture people into groups. Because sometimes people don’t read their emails, and I don’t want to pay for them to see my ads. I want them to engage with me.
This is how I see the Facebook ecosystem. And we’ve actually used this with several of our students. One of our students told me that he makes $7,000 now every time he goes live. And what he does is he goes live on his page, but he sends a Messenger out to the group members, not to everybody, but his segmented group members to tell them to go watch the video. While they’re on the video, he has Messenger set up to tell them, “Come buy my products.” And then they go buy.
How can we build relationships and convert?
RM: It’s amazing how you can build those relationships and conversations convert. If you can always just remember that if a person has had a conversation with you, they’re going to trust you a lot more because you’ve had that interaction. And they’re going to be prime to be your perfect customer.
What’s your favorite ManyChat tool?
RM: My favorite tool in Messenger is the growth tool. I could just camp out on growth tools and live in growth tool land forever. Basically, that means (kind of like this Live) I’m Live, you comment, you get on my list.
What I then do with that list is tag you, and put you into a segment or sequence. Now I re-target you later, and it drives you to that group. Once you’re in my group, I have a collection of people.
It is so stinking powerful and so stinking cool. And here’s the thing, I know about those tools, but so often I forget to go back and do those taggings. Here’s the thing, you can still make multi-millions with ManyChat without doing all of the things. Do those things help you get there faster? Yes. But if you’re one of those people who’s overwhelmed, ManyChat makes it super dang easy. Okay? You’re there, build those conversations, and then from those conversations send out a broadcast that then drives them to that soft sell, which then sells to them.
Are you using ManyChat to confirm an event reminder?
RM: I’m using it. If they’ve opted in to get my events, I tell them, “I’m going to tell you next time I go live, is that cool with you?” That’s part of my sequence when they come in.
We’ll go more into all this detail at Conversations 2019. So, make sure to come see me speak so you can dig more into this eco-system and more.
About Our Facebook Live Meet the Speakers Series
Each week Molly Mahoney hosts a LIVE interview with one of our Conversations 2019 speakers to give you the opportunity to meet them and learn their secrets to successful Messenger marketing. It’s a way to ask questions that you might not be able to ask at the conference and discover more about what will be discussed at Conversations 2019.
Here are the details.
When: Thursday, 9 am PDT.
- Go to our Facebook page: ManyChat.
- Click on the Live announcement.
- Watch, learn and ask questions.
And, if you haven’t registered for Conversations 2019, do so before prices go up! Reserve your spot.
We’ll see you LIVE! #Conversations2019
Learn more about our other Conversations 2019 Speakers:
