If you’re an expert at sales and marketing, then you probably have a tried and true practice for nurturing your leads from initial contact to closing the deal. Well, we’ve got one more item to help you narrow that timeline: Social selling.
Nearly every business has a digital marketing strategy in place and recognizes the power of social media. It closes the distance between you and your buyer, but there’s significantly more to it than just posting images of the thing you want to sell. You need to discover — and articulate in a catchy way — the reasons why people make purchases.
This blog post is designed to help you dive into and hone the science-gone-artform of social selling. Here are the top tips and techniques for social selling and how to meet your clients where they’re at, so they can help you reach your goals.
1. Build Relationships
In sales, there’s a lot of talk about building rapport with your clients. Digital marketing and social selling is no different. You’re not just here to build a sales pipeline and get the client from A to B, your social media presence and marketing will also involve building a longstanding relationship with your audience. Especially because potential clients are bombarded with a large number of ads through their social media, they don’t want to feel used. Instead, make them feel seen and let them know that they’re dealing with a real person, too.
Relationships don’t just apply to new connections, also. Make sure your existing clients also have a relationship with you and know that they’re an important addition to your network.
2. Add Value
Expanding on building relationships is making sure your posts add value to your clients. Is the information you post helpful or relevant? Does it give your audience something in return or are you simply just asking for their money? Adding value to the information you provide to your audience builds trust and confidence in you as a business. It shows them that you can solve that pain point they’re looking to fix, and that you care about them.
GHOST-TIP: Adding value can also look like boosting up other businesses by sharing their content, giving credit, and creating cross-promotion strategies.
3. Invest in Your Profile
Investing in your profiles doesn’t mean spending a ton of money, but it does mean spending some time. Come up with a strategy, a brand identity, and think about the messages you want to put out to the world. Create a content strategy so that your posts are consistent, valuable, and timely. Each platform is different, you need to build a foundation and following for each one. Starting from ground-zero isn’t easy, but if you do it right from the get-go, you’ll be creating a long-lasting following of return clients who will expand your network.
Another way that’s important to invest in your profile is to keep it up to date. One of the biggest mistakes social sellers make is setting up a profile and then having it slowly but surely become irrelevant and obsolete. Take the time to keep things fresh.
4. Know What Works
Some of the time you’ll spend on social selling includes researching algorithms and keeping up with the swift-moving nature of the social media world. What makes a successful campaign? What kind of content and hashtags are resonating with my target audience right now? When is the best time to post? How often? Ask yourself these questions for each of your platforms and ask them regularly.
5. Track Your Progress
For the above, how can you know what works if you don’t track your results? Once you’ve done your research, set some KPIs and goals for your content. Like with any marketing and sales strategy, you want to constantly be checking in and making adjustments to your tactics to ensure you are reaching your goals.
GHOST-TIP: If you’re stuck with the analytics part, Ghostit could be the right solution for you. Our expert writers stay on top of what works in your industry and do content analysis to ensure what we provide is hitting those KPIs.
6. Engage Regularly
Lastly and most importantly, you need to engage regularly with your connections — old and new. Add value, reach out, have important conversations, share success stories, and make sure you don’t leave people hanging. Do so in a genuine way and across multiple platforms. Don’t make the sale and disappear.
Social selling is a lot about what you already know as an expert in sales and marketing. However, the focus isn’t necessarily around that sales pipeline — It’s about that one thing that makes us all human: connection. We have so much quick, easy access to our clientele these days, so make those connections count and build long-lasting relationships that are value-driven and benefit everyone in your network.
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