Have you felt it too? Sales aren’t hitting like they used to, even when your offer is good and your content should be working. That’s because buyer behavior has changed — again. People aren’t just scrolling, seeing your post, and buying. They’re skeptical, cautious, and craving real connection before they trust anyone with their money.

In this episode, I’m breaking down the two types of posts your business needs right now if you want your Black Friday (or Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, etc.) sale to actually convert.

These posts build the trust and connection your audience needs before you start selling — so when your offer drops, they’re already primed to buy. If you’ve been wondering why your content isn’t landing like it used to, this will show you exactly what’s missing.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Grab the Holiday Helper Content Plan → www.sydneyobrien.com/holiday-helper-content-plan

Follow me on Instagram → @sydneyobrien.co

Send me your connection or trust post, I’d love to see what you come up with

 Buyer behavior has changed. You've heard me talk about this a lot. People aren't just scrolling, seeing your offer and buying. They need more touch points. They need way more trust and more reason to believe that you specifically are the person to help them with their problems.

If you plan on having any kind of sale for Black Friday, small Business Saturday, cyber Monday, any of those things let's make sure that we get you to the point where you're actually getting sales from that with these two types of posts that'll get you what you need with these two types of posts.

📍 Okay?

All right, if you're not new here, you have been hearing me scream about this for months. Trust you have to have it with any followers, subscribers, listeners, anyone in your general audience. They have to trust you before they're gonna buy from you. Right? Like I said, buyer behavior has changed and it's not that, you know.

People are tired of being sold to. Like, honestly, we all need things. We pay for things, products, services, help, coaching, consulting, all the time in business and in real life. Like that's the way of life. But like people are way more skeptical than ever because. I don't know a single business owner that has not been burned by any kind of like offer or coach or even just like general content online, because we are so caught up in this hustle culture, capitalism, scaling stuff. We've lost the freaking plot.

Honestly, when. And if, if I'm saying this and you're feeling like, wait, I use these tactics, but like people are getting results, that's totally fine. This isn't directed at you,

but there are people out there who are making really big promises in their content, in their offers and not delivering on it. And it's, it's making lots of people very skeptical. There's people out there who are doing nothing but mean grow marketing on the internet, and it's making people very skeptical when they're going to buy or going to hire people for help.

Plus, in this economy, people are way more hesitant to spend money anyway. It just makes sense that at this point in this current landscape, people want more information. They want more trust. They want to know you more, your values, your mission, how you work to make sure that you are not gonna. Ghost them or like not make these big promises and then not deliver them.

And not help them in the way that they need to be helped.

So that is where your buyers are at right now. And at any point in marketing, I feel like the foundation of marketing is messaging and a lot of that comes down to understanding where your potential buyers and clients are.

And I wanna say, it's obviously not a bad thing to make money. We need it, right? Like it's kind of inevitable. But when we focus so much on like scaling and hitting six figures or. Whatever. With that being the ultimate end goal, we can lose a lot in the process. And again, I'm not saying this is absolutely everyone, every business, every coach, everyone in the online space, but I feel like it's a lot of the bigger names, and that kind of trickles down to both people, hiring them for help and assistance in their own businesses, and also the people that are kind of emulating and imitating them in their own marketing and offers.

Right. We see a lot of that too. There's a lot of different, like trends in the online business world when we went from, you know, one-on-one coaching and freelancing into group coaching, into memberships. Like it's very, it's a very trendy space. Remember when everyone had a VIP day? Yes, we're definitely following trends here, but make sure both in business and in marketing, the trends are not the strategy.

The strategy is. Fit for your business, not just following along with everyone else.

So if you are planning on having some kind of sale to end the year on a good note.

Whether it's like a Black Friday offer or a holiday offer, small business Saturday, cyber Monday, whatever it might be,

knowing that people need more touch points, more connection and trust than ever, you gotta start planning ahead if you haven't already, and start making sure that you are getting that trust and connection before you go to promote your actual offer. Right? You want to seed it, you want to show you are the right person to help your audience with this.

You want to show that your offer is the right fit for them. Give a taste of how it works, what's different about it. So they know that yes, this is, this is the thing I need.

And there are two posts that are really gonna help you do that, the connection posts and trust posts. So when we talk about connection, I don't just mean, you know, oh, you like books and coffee. So do I. Because that describes a whole fuck ton of people. To be perfectly honest. That doesn't really narrow it down.

I want you to think about. Two things. Okay? I want you to think about your big why for your business, why you do the thing you do, why you help, the people you help, and why you help them in the way you do, and create content around that, explaining that.

That is gonna create connection. Draw on the things you've seen, the things you've experienced that your audience will relate to, and how you got through them and how you worked through it and what life is like after you worked through it. Show that transformation. Throw the show the next step, the goal that people want after they get past their own problem, whatever it is that your service helps them with.

And that will help cover the connection piece. This can be done in any number of posts that you want. Break it down into smaller bite-sized pieces so you get more content out of it. Write a couple blog posts about it. Do a podcast episode about each of those three things. You know send an email about each one.

Share different stories about each one. You can drag this out as much as you want to or as much as you're able to, to get those touch points and don't ever. Feel bad about repeating yourself if you are saying it enough. So you're wondering if you're repeating yourself and worrying that you are starting to annoy people.

You're not. You need to do it at least five more times at that point. Honestly. Not everyone is paying attention. Not everyone remembers every single post. Not everyone sees every single post. And like I said, we need more touch points than ever with our audience before they're ready to invest in our businesses, in our products and services.

So keep talking, keep yapping, keep it up. Pretend it's like you know, when you ask your kid to clean their room, you gotta do it a lot before they actually listen. But maybe one day it'll get through. To your kids. It maybe your audience, definitely your kids listening on cleaning up is always a maybe leaning towards no, if I'm being honest.

But and then the second type of posts that you need are trust building posts. This is where we want to share client wins. We want to share any kind of social proof that shows what you do. The specific way that you do it helps. Your audience and how.

Case studies are a really great way to do this. Sharing testimonials and screenshots is okay, but it's not as helpful as like a good case study or a good storytelling piece of content where people can really put them, show, put themselves. Put themselves in the shoes of you or a past client that you've worked with, where you can walk them through the whole PO process of, you know, what they were feeling when they, before they hired you, what problems they were experiencing, what secondary like symptoms they had because of that problem.

And then working with you what that looked like, what the exact steps were that you did, like the general framework, and then. And how it's different from what they tried before and why it worked, and then how they reached their goal. You know, what did that feel like? What were they able to do because they reached that goal, because that problem was solved.

Walking them, them through the whole process like that is really gonna paint this picture of, oh wow. She gets me because. She sees like these problems, these feelings, because I have these problems and she can help me get to that end goal so that I can do X, Y, z, you know, so that I can stress less about finances so that I can have a website that sells so I can have an entire month of content done.

Whatever that next step might be, depending on whatever your business is, but showing that whole beginning, middle end of the process. Builds an insane amount of trust. And again, that's a lot for like social media content. You can break it down into multiple posts for social media. You could do a big email about it.

You could do a podcast episode or a blog about it if you do a podcast episode or a blog about it. I mean, if you do a podcast episode about. Bring that person on. Do like an on-air coaching session or alongside your interview and talk about it, because hearing it from the person themselves is going to be so much more powerful than just reading words on a screen, right?

Hearing their voice, hearing their own story is like an amazing source of trust. I mentioned it in a couple episodes ago, maybe, I don't know. I've lost track of all time. But. I was looking at a sales page and there were some really cool testimonials listed, but they weren't actual people. Like I looked them up, I looked up their, tried to look for them on Google, Instagram, Facebook threads, wherever, LinkedIn that the person giving the so-called testimonial did not exist.

So anytime you can really build more trust by being like, Hey, this is a real person, maybe tagging them on Instagram, when you share the client story. Adds just so much more trust and social proof,

and it doesn't have to be like a full on case study like that. Like I said, you can break it up. Into multiple posts, the same, the same story, the same client story. But you could do one big long case study about it. You could do how I helped so and so get from point A to point B and then do like a very general overview.

And then, you know, promote your offer. That way you could do three steps to get to whatever. Transformation or goal. And then briefly share an outline of the client story. And that would also be a good way to promote if you do have a long form piece of content about it, like a podcast interview or a blog post to promote that as well. But the more you talk about it and share this information, even like little bits of the same story or repeating the same story, the more trust you're gonna build.

It builds consistency, it builds that subconscious trust with the consistency and messaging that you have probably already been talking about in your marketing. And, and also trust in you and your, your offers, right? Showing like, Hey, this actually does get results. And not even just for me, but for other people.

When you're able to show how you help other people with maybe slightly different circumstances than you different, situations, different context. It builds a whole lot more trust than just saying, Hey, this one I was able to do this thing for myself. That doesn't necessarily mean that, that, that you can replicate it for other people in different, with different audiences, different businesses that kind of thing.

So case studies, client stories are gonna be super powerful. You can share your own wins, absolutely. But it's. Even more trustworthy if you do have client stories to share. So those are the two posts, two types of posts I want you to try to create and not just for social media. Like I said, you can get multiple posts for each of those form from social media, send it in emails, long form content.

All over. You wanna be sharing this information all over. So you get all of those touch points, like I said, and build that consistency and that trust and that connection. And that way when you are ready to promote for Black Friday, cyber Monday, what have you, the trust and connection is there. They know what you're selling.

They know how you work. They know you get results. They know who you help. And that could, it could be them. And they're gonna be that much more eager and ready to buy when you share your amazing sale information. If you are someone who is already juggling.

Unplanned sick days and you know, forgotten early release days from school and all this stuff, and you just don't think you have time to map out your own content or maybe you're just not a plan out kind of person. I have a pre-holiday sale. On what I am calling the holiday helper content plan where I will do it all for you, I will plan four weeks of posts and emails.

All you have to do is add your own graphics or video for social posts schedule, and, you know, wipe your hands of it. It's pretty, pretty easy for you.

It's a way to have the plan that gets the sales without having to do the planning or strategy yourself. I do all of that for you. And then again, you just have to add your own graphics or video if you're doing reels, your own graphics and video and then schedule very easy. You can get the information on that at.

The link in the show notes, it's called the Holiday Helper Content Plan. I had a lot of fun making the sales page, so even if you aren't interested, please check out the sales page because it's worth it. It's on theme.

But yes, whether you're planning or creating your own content or you're working with someone to do it, make sure that a lot of it, it revolves around trust and connection. Specifically related to the pain points and transformation of the offer you plan on promoting for your holiday sale. So that it's all connected, right?

But you're gonna need a lot more of it this year as opposed to previous years. So start planning ahead and working that in now. And again, if it's not something you're interested in doing, if it's not something you have time or the brain space for, check out the holiday help or content plan because, trust and connection can just, it can't be an afterthought if we really want our marketing efforts to lead to sales, but with the content plan, they're built right into the plan. I am, and that's what make, because that's what makes your content convert during the holidays without burning you out when you have a million bajillion.

Other things going on as a mom.

So check that out in the show notes, and I can't wait to see what kind of trust and connection posts you share.

Feel free to send them to me on Instagram. I am at sydney O'Brien dot co.