5 Practical and Free Tips to Boost Your Social Selling
Is Social Selling (SS) losing its strength in an entire inbound marketing strategy? It’s not! This article will clarify some ideas or even myths regarding social selling, with a certainty. It alone is not enough to make a sale or feed the sales funnel, it is only a part, important, but only part of the sales plus marketing process.
Social media platforms and tools are valuable, but an isolated partner strategy alone does not sell!
It is not the only part to be executed in a social marketing plan, but it should be considered as an important part of the strategy (of the plan). Social networks are then a kind of equalizer that can make small businesses look great and give a small brand / organization an opportunity (a vehicle) to potentially reach millions. The incredible thing is, that is, an amplification power with relatively low investments. And access to markets, whether national or international, has never been so democratized and easy to access, with much lower investments than in the past where the solution was almost always to burn money in communication and fatten marketing budgets.
The basic thinking of the chief marketing officers is that more we invest the more visibility and opportunities we generate, but today this is totally obsolete as a strategy. The questions that need to be asked are these how much is actually invested and what ROI does it provide? And even today there are companies that do not measure this return or even a Cost of Customer Acquisition (CAC).
If a potential customer makes a large part of the purchase journey of products and services in an online mode, they will not have the sales teams, and the companies as a whole (employer branding), increasingly present online and on different platforms? But to show up and expose yourself is best if you do well. There are many stories of how social networks played, and play, an important role in the results of a team and sales or company. Social networks effectively allow for great amplification and are the “touchstone” of social selling.
Social networks do not lead prospects through the sales funnel for us!
The 5 very practical tips, accessible to anyone, that can help in the construction of the tribe mentioned above are, in my opinion, these:
1. The image and positioning are very important they must be coherent in the online with the offline never forget that the online is not a world apart, it is an extension of our offline.
2. Build your credibility (or your company) robustly and consistently credibility is what others think of us (as they come) and LinkedIn, as an example, is probably the best platform to leverage the reputation.
3. Find your prospects across platforms networks let you know more about them, how they behave and what their interests are.
4. Create consistent value in published posts and feed prospects content can be from our own blog or even content from other partners and insights related to our activity. It should be consistent.
5. Combining social selling with other prospecting tools an email-marketing or even a phone call, among others, help establish and strengthen relationships.
It is then obvious that visibility with value naturally generates opportunities
These same opportunities have to be aligned with a purpose and type of clients that we want to reach, and that in the limit only those who really interest us will reach us. This is the perfect pipeline model in an inbound strategy.
So, the way, in my opinion, in the use of social networks as a tool of social selling should be the use of them as a vehicle (as a means and not an end in itself), in which people with close interests mingle, connect and discuss, to the extent they collaborate further (as partners, as customers and as committed promoters of our business and solutions).
It is about “engagement”, of adding value and of making the difference, not of numbers, but of a collaborative ecosystem.
Then as managers of that community, distributed across different platforms, with a well-designed pipeline, based on a good model, we have to have a unique ability to read data and to know how to analyze / measure for the benefit of our business. It’s simple, but it’s not easy!
Sarah Feldman is a Marketing Manager and is currently working with Digital Express, a creative digital agency Dubai. She loves to learn and share about latest digital marketing updates and trends.