Social Selling starts with socializing and connecting — not selling. Did you know that sales teams that incorporate Social Selling on average outperform traditional sales teams by over 30%? However, there are a few rules you may want to incorporate to help your sales team reap the benefits of social selling success.
Determine Your Starting Point
Start by determining what you want to accomplish using social media before you plan your strategy. Here are a few options:
- Meet and connect
- Establish your expertise and/or set out to be a thought leader
- Engage other thought leaders
- Expand your contacts list
- Share content like how-to videos or product applications
- Provide the public or a target market with your FAQs
- Get new sign-ups for your content
- Encourage others to share your brands and/or testimonials
- Overcome hurdles to a sale with content that demonstrates your niche in the market
Identify the Prospects
Start by determining your target market: those folks that are most likely to purchase or require your business or nonprofit. Work with your team to identify the typical customer profile along with any other players who contribute to growing your business. Review your customer and lead list and consider any other important players in growing your business, such as vendors, distributers, referral sites and more.
Expand Your List
The object here is to create a large list of contacts that can help grow your brand awareness and support your sales referrals. Remember to join groups and connect with more people similar to those who purchase your product and services. Consider creating social media filters using keywords and phrases to identify who is discussing products like your products or services. Seek prospects who have negatively reviewed your competitors’ products or services, and those who take the time to provide a positive review about yours.
Profile Your Leads
After casting a wide net, you need to separate the qualified from the unqualified list. Simply getting a social media handle or profile is only the beginning of the process. The next step is to create an extended profile for each lead, wherever possible, and tag them in your CRM (Contact Relationship Management) system. The more information you can attribute to a contact, the better you can segment and target your leads. Social media provides lots of information about your leads, including what interests they share, to help you further profile your best customers and identify more people like them.
Track Your Contacts and Their Concerns
By being able to connect with prospects on social media, you can better track lead behavior patterns. What do they talk about? What hashtags do they use most? Focus on understanding the segmentation and targeting, so your content can address their common concerns. Providing content that matters is key to connecting and moving on to the sales funnel.
Identify the Best Prospects and Follow Through
Once you have identified and analyzed the targets, how do you identify and follow up with your best prospects? Start by providing content they are interested in and use it as a landing page with that content. Drip email marketing systems can help you score your lead’s highest interest when they click (or don’t click) on your content. It is also key to note the attributes on your lead’s profiles (demographic and behavioral attributes by measuring their posts, tweets and hashtags). Don’t forget that if you can add a chatbot to your social platform, you can encourage sign-ups to get more information or to post their opinions and suggestions.
Engage Authentically and Be Helpful (But Not Predatory)
Keep in mind that people can sniff out any sales driven content so make sure that your team accessing your social media are focused on being helpful to each contact. Instead of jumping into conversations with selling, make sure to ask questions about their concerns and top priorities. For example, if someone posts that they are remodeling their home, ask questions about their design choices and styles instead of moving right into suggesting products or services you provide. Consider developing and providing a downloadable checklist or estimating spreadsheet for remodeling projects that they can fill in or use, before providing them with an estimate for your part in the project.
Nurturing Prospects on Social Platforms and Email Marketing Tools
Step 1
Similar to traditional drip marketing campaigns, you should set up drip campaigns on social channels to nurture the leads once you have started conversations or identified potential prospects. Manually or through a social relationship intelligence platform (chatbot and other apps), personalize the context to the furthest extent possible.
Step 2
Once you have responded and connected, move leads to your social sales team to nurture and qualify for the next steps. This is where you can use past emails or landing page content to help support the sales funnel. Track insights gathered over the entire journey, including segments and tags to help your sales team understand the contact’s past concerns to develop a helpful and more successful follow-up.
Analyze Revenue and Results
Social selling has replaced some in-person methods of meet-and-greet and follow-up. The goal of social selling is to provide your sales team with another platform to drive sales and results. However, the process is similar. Once you create sales leads through social connections, leads should be captured and followed on social channels and then tagged on your Contact Relationship Management system to track their progress through the entire sales funnel. This will help identify revenue success from your social efforts as well as tweaking your social selling strategies to attract more qualified leads.
If you need help designing or improving your marketing efforts, contact Liz Harsch by email or call Tailor-Made Advertising at 310-791-6300 to keep your organization thriving in 2022.
Liz Harsch is the owner of Tailor-Made Advertising in Torrance, CA. Her firm provides marketing, training and consulting to identify marketing and media alternatives for business owners. As an experienced Marketing Director, Media Planner, Liz has trained small business owners for Constant Contact, SCORE, SBDC, SBA, Cities, MWD and County outreach partners plus many Chambers of Commerce for over 25 years. She can be reached at her Torrance, CA, office at 310-791-6300 or by email at liz@adteamla.com. You can also see her upcoming training workshops calendar at http://bit.ly/workshopscal .
