I know some of you are reading this title and are thinking “blasphemy” lol…But, there is a lot of truth in the headline. Many people in the business community are struggling to grow their presence online and believe (because many “experts” say this) that all they need to do to increase sales and engagement online, is to beautify their IG feeds. The reality is, manyyyyy of you are wasting money on pretty IG feeds.

In the age of online business and social selling, we know that we need to have a proper online presence in order to build an engaging community around our products and services. The best businesses know that they can generate awareness and sell online if they build their digital footprint on top of having a great business and systems that allows them to serve their clients.

The issue comes down to those who are just starting out and only see the top level of the funnel. Being able to sell online and build a following goes far deeper than just having a pretty, picture-perfect like curated social feed. Many of you are actually forgetting that, in order to part anyone from their money, you actually need to solve a problem, do it well and have a proper business backing everything up.

Social media has allowed people to believe that, as long as your feeds look great and you are gaining followers, sales will come. Well, I am sure you have heard by now of the story of Arianna Renee (@Arii), who has amassed a following of over 2.6 million people. She made headlines earlier this year when she decided to launch her t-shirt line and her sales bombed…and by bombed, I mean, she only managed to sell 36 t-shirts (Read More Here).

Having the followers does not matter if you don’t have a proper business or don’t solve a problem for your audience. Hell, even if you do have a business, are you outworking your competition?

Branding & Marketing coaches will tell you all about how to monetize your social media by creating content, taking the best pictures, how to use the proper keywords in your bio…etc…and while all of that is important, it is tertiary to actually having a proper business that people even want to patronize in the first place.

Many of you do not have a social media problem, you have other problems that need to be addressed before you should think about upping your social media marketing game and attracting more customers, to a bad business.

This is what the Social Media/Branding/Marketing coaches will refuse to tell you because, at the end of the day, their job is to help you build your social media and not fix your business. They make their money on telling you how to build your social profiles and also even creating the content needed for your social media, but they don’t actually help you sort out the issues in your business.

They aren’t going to tell you your product isn’t good or that you picked the wrong field, your prices are borderline delusional or that your business has no differentiating factors from the competition. They are here to tell you how to beautify your social feeds.

What you need to be focusing on is making a great business! Whether that is a service business or a product-based business…this needs to be at the core of great marketing. You also need to get better at closing the deals that social media can generate for you. Many of you are getting the additional traffic but are struggling to convert…again, this is a bigger issue than your marketing can fix.

So ask yourself…since you started to pretty your IG and gain more followers or more people asking you about your business…has this turned into sales for you? Are you attracting those ideal clients your coach keeps telling you about? Are you seeing any tangible results from either working with your coach or hiring that agency to run your social media?

Or are you another person who has fallen into the sales funnel of a Social Media Coach with a beautiful IG feed, who is promising that ever so elusive ROI? Hey…I can’t knock them…their pretty social feeds have managed to part you from your money…so I guess the pretty IG feeds do work.