If you own or work with a business that sells online, you must have heard of the term “social selling.” However, you might not be entirely sure what it means or how to execute it. Is it the same as digital marketing? No! Social media marketing? No! How about online advertising? No!
So what is social selling? Below we got all the details about it and also 5 key strategies of how to nail social selling right.
So, social selling is the process of using social media platforms to build a network of current and prospective customers. It helps find, connect with, understand, and nurture prospective customers (aka leads) within the social media ecosystem. The idea is to establish the business as a trusted advisor, such that whenever the leads are ready to purchase, they turn to you.
Why is social selling important? Simple answer—social selling helps increase sales by enabling you to better understand and qualify prospective customers. Now that we understand the importance of social selling, let us dive into creating a social selling strategy that will help bring in more leads.
1. Choose the Right Social Media Platforms
When choosing social media platforms it is important to keep in mind the target demography and the look-and-feel of the platform.When it comes to the look-and-feel, each social media platform brings something unique. For instance, Instagram and Pinterest are a lot more visual in their nature than LinkedIn or Twitter. Twitter, on the other hand, is optimized for a quick series of conversations and Facebook for mixed browsing between text, images, and video content.
Don’t get distracted by the idea of being on every social media space. Limit to a couple of platforms that align your product/service to the prospective customers and provide the appropriate modes to convey your message.
2. Designate Someone to Lead Social Selling Initiatives
To implement any strategy successfully, it is important to designate an expert for responsibility and accountability. Without that, initiatives can quickly devolve into a mess, with too many conflicting ideas and constant indecisions. Once you have identified the right person to lead social selling initiatives, let him/her figure out what kind of collaboration is required and how to go about it.
Our survey finds that social selling initiatives at 36% of the businesses are a collaborative effort between the sales and the marketing teams. In 9% of the businesses, the owner takes primary responsibility for social selling initiatives.
3. Know How Much You’re Willing to Invest
In B2C businesses, social media platforms often require sponsoring each post to increase the audience-reach and make it visible to the leads that fit the criteria. In B2B businesses, social media platforms often require a premium or business account to access leads’ information and send them messages. Similarly, you would need to spare human resources who would plan and execute the social selling strategy. In B2C businesses, these could include people to prepare content and design campaigns, as well as people to analyze the audience’s response. In B2B businesses, these could include people to research a lead’s history and behavior and run outreach campaigns.
To further your social selling journey, take stock of your resources and ascertain what amount of financial or human resources you can invest. Accordingly, set out a budget for social selling initiatives and look at sparing or hiring the necessary personnel.
4. Listen and Engage with Your Customers
A key component of social selling is leveraging the fact that people on social media platforms are already talking about your industry or your business. They could be sharing positive things, posting negative feedback, or talking about unaddressed challenges and market opportunities.
Depending on the social media platform, you can find appropriate tools to listen to these conversations, get strategic insights out of them, and identify and engage with leads.There are many social media monitoring tools to listen to and analyze what people are saying and generate actionable insights
Explore these tools and prepare to “listen” to your network, identify leads, and engage with them.
5. Don’t Spam Your Customers
The bridge to convert a lead into a customer is the value provided through your interactions. Be it a B2C or B2B business, it boils down to using the right tone and type of content. B2C businesses can focus on providing relevant call-to-action (CTA) or keeping an eye on the comments section to ensure all positive and negative views are addressed appropriately. While it’s okay to mention a product/service on social media posts, do play around a little with creative campaigns.
The line between meaningful interaction and spam is quite thin and without relevant expertise, it can be easy to falter on the latter end.
So, what are the next steps? Now that you know all about social selling, let us do the work for you. We can help expand your outreach with a higher level of an analytical overview than social media marketing tools and help track social trends.Contact us now for more details.