Successful social selling can lead to significant growth for your business. In fact, the right tactics can do more than sell products, but provide a foundation of credibility and confidence that will bolster your brand as a whole.
This all sounds very appealing, but how can you actually go about enhancing your own social selling efforts?
Let’s look at a few methods that separate the pros from the rest of the pack.
1. Optimize Your Profile
2. Say Something Interesting
3. Demonstrate Your Value
4. Keep Conversations Natural
5. Use Data to Your Advantage
6. Resist the Urge for Instant Gratification
While you might be up to speed with the ins and outs of social selling already, it’s worth briefly exploring what it means in the modern market.
Simply put, social selling is a way of pinpointing prospects on social media and leveraging these platforms to establish a relationship with them that will ideally lead to a sale further down the line.
In the past, businesses were often reliant on cold calling to make these connections, but social media allows for more subtle, meaningful, and impactful strategies which don’t put prospects on the spot. Thus social selling is a preference for startups as well as larger companies, and it applies both for B2C and B2B relationship-building.
Before you rush ahead and start selecting prospects to target, it’s necessary to consider if your profile is up to par.
You need to put time and effort into tweaking your presence on the social platform you are planning to use to make connections with potential customers and clients, whether you are doing so via an official business account or your own profile.
Certain services, like LinkedIn, let you go into more detail here, so carefully crafting the copy in the assumption that it will be read by prospects who engage with any message you send them is wise.
LinkedIn also allows skills and endorsements to be showcased separately, so don’t neglect these, especially when you are looking to forge B2B relationships.
Another point to make in this context is that you have to be consistent if you run more than one account for your business. Using the same display name, profile picture, and tone of voice is vital, and avoid your presence seeming fragmented or poorly orchestrated.
A finely tuned profile is all well and good, but unless there are also signs of regular activity on it, casual viewers will find it a little bare, and thus transparently sales-focused in nature.
For personal accounts and branded accounts, having a regular schedule so that your feeds are populated with content is best. Striking a balance between overly incessant posting and being too sparing with your publishing is key here.
And of course, make sure the content you share is relevant to your audience. Whether you are writing or commissioning articles about your industry, sharing clips that have been put together with testimonial video editing solutions to showcase what existing customers think of your brand, or posting updates on products and projects you are involved with, this is all about showing you understand your niche.
Modern social media users are a savvy bunch, and one thing that they won’t tolerate is an outright, unsolicited sales pitch.
Whether you have sought them out directly, or they have followed your social accounts organically, cutting to the chase and trying to convert them into a paying customer straight away will more than likely put them off your business for good.
Instead, you have to offer something to prospects. That could be the solution to a problem they are facing. It could be a valuable insight or piece of content which is related to their interests. It could be an asset that is useful to a broad group, not just individuals.
Whatever the case, saving the selling until later and instead of kicking off your relationship with the offer of something of value will let you get your foot in the door and enable you to follow the conventions of social media while still building bridges that will eventually lead to revenue generation.
When messaging prospects as part of a social selling initiative, you don’t want your communications to come across as anything other than conversational.
While your intent may be to sell, your interactions should be sculpted to feel like any other chain of messages between social media users. Be friendly, professional, and helpful, but also know when to stand back and give the prospect breathing space.
When a conversation has run its course, don’t keep bombarding would-be customers with messages that stray off-topic, or are generally a nuisance.
Likewise remember to circle back and reconnect with contacts regularly, so that relationships can grow organically. Indeed the term ‘organic’ is probably one of the most useful when thinking about social selling; find ways to avoid sounding phony and your conversion rates will be far better.
You can read about social selling and analyze the efforts of competitors as much as you like, but that still won’t prevent you from making errors when you kick start your own campaigns of this kind.
The solution to this is to use the integrated analytics found on all good social platforms to your advantage.
Delving into the data will show you which of your approaches is finding the most success, and which is falling short. From there, you can change things up and move towards a better, brighter future.
Testing, revising, and revamping all of your sales and marketing strategies must be an ongoing part of running a business. Even the biggest brands in the world cannot afford to rest on their laurels or revel in their past successes; evolution is better than stagnation.
It’s easy to get frustrated with social selling if the first techniques you try don’t immediately lead to lucrative relationships.
Anyone looking for a quick win has come to the wrong place. You need patience and perseverance to prevail in the ever-shifting social sphere.
It’s also somewhat of a balancing act because while you’ll need to acquire new prospects, you also have to counterpoint this by keeping existing customers engaged and onboard.
The road to the reward of social selling may be long, but it will be all the sweeter when you reach the end and your hard graft pays off.
As with social media marketing more broadly, social selling strategies need to be honed for the unique requirements of each business that uses them.
There is no boilerplate approach that works in every scenario since different prospects and audiences want different things from the brands they connect with.
That said, the lessons and tips we’ve discussed will point you down the right path and give you the impetus to start your journey to effective social selling. And for businesses of all sizes, there is no excuse to overlook this avenue.