Social Selling is decisive in the process of generating awareness through social networks to give visibility to your brand. It is necessary to build a strategy with determined actions to achieve your company’s objectives. In fact, it has the potential to bring great advantages to a business as it is a modern way to connect with clients in the new digital world.
Training sales professionals in the boundless universe of social selling has proved to be a great investment. Marketing leaders and their teams must be able to identify a target audience, examine customers and competitors; connect and interact with an online community and generate credibility to foster relationships that will ultimately produce conversions.
Here below are some key elements for a successful social selling strategy:
Aligning Marketing and Sales Departments Efforts
Social selling promotes the alignment between marketing and sales throughout the whole inbound process. Constantly coaching staff will facilitate the proper use of tools that foster cooperation and symbiosis between departments. Coaching will allow a change in the mindset and behaviour, guiding sales professionals to leverage social selling strategies to establish a common ground towards content production, lead qualification, analytics, among others. Aligning can result in great advantages for both departments: for instance, the sales department obtains higher quality leads and closes sales with less effort, while the marketing department receives reliable and constant feedback from sales that will help optimize the marketing strategies.
Determine Objectives and Measure
It is important to set the objectives with all the team members, having in mind what the company intends to achieve, as well as the available budget to be invested in the social selling strategy. Objectives must be measurable, attainable, precise and relevant.
To coordinate teams and actions, there are useful tools that gather data and provide a constant flow of information that measures the efficiency of social selling and conversion rates. As a result, sales revenue is directly linked to marketing actions.
One must always make sure that the planned objectives are being met and that there is an appropriate return on investment (ROI). It is crucial to measure the awareness of the existing and potential clients, how people feel and think about the brand, the engagement and interaction of the audience, and the success of this interaction in terms of conversions.
Optimizing your Professional Brand
One of the most relevant steps to building a good social selling strategy is to optimize both the company’s and the team’s professional profiles on social platforms. Select those social networks in which your clients are most active.
LinkedIn is the main professional network. It is a strategic platform in which it is almost mandatory to have a continuous presence. By creating a meticulous customer-centric and strategic profile, the company can earn a digital reputation and, equally important, employees can develop their personal brand and approach followers by sharing useful content published on the LinkedIn Company Page.
LinkedIn profiles should be created based on potential customers and their needs and challenges. Your company’s profile should be easy to be found and prove that you have high added value to their businesses.
The brand image is essential to gain customers’ trust; hence you must position yourself and your company as an online authority perceived as professional, strong and valuable.
Leveraging Social Listening
Coaching marketing leaders in social listening skills is also a great investment. Social listening becomes the key element to manage communication in the digital environment as it is one of the most important sources of information for companies.
Marketing leaders who use social listening have the possibility of creating more appropriate content, improving their customer service and optimizing marketing campaigns.
By collecting data and analyzing information about the environment and the competition, you will be one step ahead of them, predicting their behaviour. Furthermore, you can detect your competitive advantage and enhance it. Finally, you will have a better overview of your industry. That will result in better decision-making and improvement of your own social media strategy.
Establish your Buyer Persona
Create an image of a generic client with specific characteristics that fit your target audience. Be clear on who your product or service is aimed at. The creation of content should be based on the buyer persona, anticipating their requirements and preferences, so they enjoy and share it.
Always think about followers and customers as real people and consider their needs, to have a better idea of what to offer them and what message should be sent to them. It is imperative to be familiar with the market situation. Draw upon digital tools like Social Listening to monitor social channels and discover trends patterns and changes that would give you powerful insight. Do not create campaigns based on assumptions about your audience. Instead, leverage the power of real data to find out consumer behaviour information, design data-based campaigns that attract new customers, retain existing ones and create a positive image online, saving time and money.
As has been noted, new technologies are evolving very fast and, with them, social networks, bringing new opportunities and selling advantages. Companies that use social selling report positive impacts in all departments, proving a high return on investment (ROI).
Investing in social selling technological tools, and above all, training and coaching your staff to make the most of these techniques, will result in numerous advantages for the company; from organizational alignment to efficiency and growth.
Thanks to the new vision that social selling grants, sales teams nowadays can reach unexplored sectors and contact the right segment of the public they need to attract. Additionally, they can stay connected with customers during the whole sales cycle, improving the quality of customer service and increasing sales.
Undoubtedly, it is considered not only profitable but necessary to keep updated and innovate in digital strategies, aiming to have a better sales performance by approaching clients in the most appropriate way.
