- April 18, 2022
- by Last expert
- Blogs, Non Voice Support, Social Media Management
- 0 Comments
Although social selling may appear to be a trendy buzzword today, it is an essential and long-lasting skill that all salespeople should incorporate into their toolkits.
The concept behind social selling is straightforward: you use social media’s power and popularity to interact with prospects through content and engagement. To put it another way, social selling is all about involvement, which necessitates a different strategy than traditional sales methods. Effective social selling, on the other hand, takes time, dedication, and practice, so getting started might be intimidating, especially if you don’t have a good strategy in place to incorporate the practice into your daily routine.
Only 8% of salespeople prioritise social selling, according to HubSpot, despite the fact that over 60% of people follow businesses on social media. Furthermore, between 43 and 48 percent of 18 to 34-year-olds follow brands on social media because they want to buy things or get coupons.
As a result, for many firms, social media is an unexplored sales platform, and staying ahead of the competition and relevant in today’s market needs a robust social selling routine.
Create and Curate: It All Starts with Great Content
In the realm of digital marketing, content still reigns supreme because it has the ability to engage. A content strategy, on the other hand, isn’t just about finding any old blog and promoting it extensively on social media.
Imagine being assaulted everyday with posts about taxes, woodworking, unhappy pets, and other non-food related topics if you followed your favourite restaurant on social media. You’d cease paying attention to that brand, and maybe even quit following it, right? Relevance is crucial when it comes to content, which means finding content that will resonate with your audience, generate dialogues, and educate prospects.
You can utilise a variety of content kinds to catch your audience’s attention, including blogs, essays, whitepapers, videos, photographs, infographics, and more. Start by thinking ideas and topics that would be of interest to your target audience if you want to move forward with your own content creation approach.
You can also curate material by repurposing or resharing other people’s work (including user-generated content), and there are a number of fantastic services available, including
- News.me.
- The New York Times is a newspaper published in New York City.
- Moz’s Top 10
- Medium Websites
- Panda
- Contently
- BuzzSumo
- LinkedIn Pulse
Working content creation/curation into your routine: Spend 10 to 15 minutes a day combing over content, assessing its relevance to your target audience, and selecting appropriate pieces to publish.
Share: Publish Content Widely to Reach Your Audience
You can’t get anywhere with content unless you spread it widely across social networks. However, it’s not enough to just visit every social media site—there are thousands, and doing so would take too much time and yield little results—the key is to target the sites where your audience spends the most time, and where you’ll have the highest chances of attracting their attention.
It’s probably ideal to confine your concentration to between two and four networks, depending on how much time you have to devote to social selling. Here are some pointers for selecting the best platforms for your business:
Because the majority of users use Pinterest to plan future purchases, it is the best choice for generating sales.
LinkedIn is particularly useful for B2B firms, lead generating, and authority building.
Facebook is the most popular social media platform (which means there’s a lot of opportunity and competition), and it’s great for creating relationships.
Instagram is the go-to social media platform for creating a brand, especially if your target demographic is under 30.
When dealing with time-sensitive topics and sharing communications such as breaking news and other in-the-moment content, Twitter is the network to use.
Working distribution into your routine: It doesn’t have to take a long time to publish material to social media sites, and there are various scheduling and automation solutions available to help. Iconosquare, Hubspot, MeetEdgar, HootSuite, TweetDeck, and Buffer are some of the most popular tools.
Engage: Use Content to Start Conversations
Because social sales is all about leveraging information to promote engagement among prospects, one of the biggest differences between a conventional content marketing plan and social selling is what happens after publication.
Starting and participating in conversations, asking and answering questions, commenting on posts, reacting to comments, taking care of customer service issues, resolving complaints, and otherwise connecting with your audience are all examples of how you might do this. The main goal is to establish your brand, demonstrate your personality, develop relationships with specific prospects, and convert audience members and prospects into devoted customers.
At this point, it’s critical to collect data and assess your efforts using metrics to discover who has been connecting with your content, which pieces have been the most successful, and where you can improve. Looking at likes, shares, comments, and other social signals is another technique to gauge involvement.
Incorporate engagement into your daily routine: Spend at least 20 minutes per day on the aforementioned activities, noting the names that come up repeatedly.
Leverage: Develop Relationships with Influencers and Key Audience Members
Tracking interaction is critical not only for determining the effectiveness of your social selling strategy, but also for identifying qualified leads, new connections, and potential influencers.
When you find followers who are consistently engaging with your posts, reach out to them, connect with them, and start a dialogue with them. This will not only help you create relationships with some of your most promising prospects, but it will also motivate them to share your content and spread the news to their own social circles. Simply asking for it (“share this with a friend you think might enjoy it,” for example), including share buttons and “click to tweet” links on all your content (including emails), and focusing on hot and trending topics that people will want to share and talk about are all ways to encourage social sharing.
There are a few things you can do to identify influencers in your sector when it comes to locating them. For one thing, you may use LinkedIn to connect with experts and people in positions of influence in your field. Similarly, you can utilise Twitter’s sophisticated search tools to locate people who are already speaking to your target demographic.
Last but not least, BuzzSumo is a fantastic platform for connecting marketers with influencers. You may use their voices to promote engagement through guest articles and blogs, affiliate relationships, product reviews, interviews or debates, and even partnering on events once you’ve found these folks.
Sell: Use Social Media Engagement to Increase the Impact of Promotions
Because the emergence of the public internet has forever transformed the way customers shop and act, sales have evolved dramatically over the last few decades. Rather than waiting for companies to come to them (in the form of television, print, and other advertisements), customers now use the internet to find the businesses they want to support.
Social selling is an excellent example of this shift because it is a practise that focuses on creating relationships rather than active selling. However, this isn’t to suggest that aggressive selling has no role in social selling; the key is nuance. Many clothing firms excel at this by including photographs with their articles that allow readers to purchase specific goods by clicking on them. Making unique and customised offers to your best prospects and converting pitches into tales are two more approaches.
Working sales into your routine: You may include the sales element of your profession into your content by incorporating subtle sales strategies and calls to action into your content to increase traffic, conversions, and sales.
Social selling should be a part of every modern sales plan, but because it’s still relatively new, implementing it into your daily routine now will offer you an immediate advantage over the competition and help you develop brand recognition and engagement with your social media audience.
Even if incorporating social selling into your daily routine appears difficult or unachievable, keep in mind that it is possible and well worth the effort. In fact, once you’ve got the pattern down, you’ll usually only need to devote 30 to 60 minutes each day to these chores, and you’ll be rewarded with more prospects, better conversions, greater traffic, more consistent engagement, and more revenues in the end.
Finding the correct content, publishing it in the proper locations, following up with interaction, using your top prospects, and delicately giving sales clues are the crucial elements to remember.