Social selling is a process in which brands use various social media channels to connect and engage with their audiences and build a positive relationship with prospects and leads. It focuses on practicing meaningful social interactions to position your brand and its offers as a solution to address your customer’s various needs. Instead of hard selling, social selling nurtures potential customers throughout the sales pipelines. A social media marketing agency can help run effective social selling campaigns for your business.
How Is Social Selling Different From Social Media Marketing?
Social selling is not the same as social media marketing. There lie certain differences.
Social media marketing promotes your brand across various social media channels through sharing content, such as images, videos, etc. Social advertising involves creating ads and clickable links and promoting them through paid advertising. On the other hand, social selling focuses on building connections and awareness between leads, customers and the salesperson with the goal of revenue generation.
4 benefits of social selling
Social selling offers the following benefits to businesses. Let’s discuss them further.
Build trust
You need to earn the trust of your audiences and prospects to convert them into paying customers. Delivering valuable content, sharing insights, and engaging with audiences consistently can help you build your brand as credible and authoritative in your industry. Social selling allows you to build long-term relationships by providing your audiences with prompt responses, addressing their concerns, etc.
Shorten the sales cycle
A prolonged sales cycle can be challenging for a salesperson, as it would imply a long period involving constant checking in and nurturing the leads to close the sale. Social selling, on the contrary, can help shorten the sales cycle. The reason is it involves interacting with the prospects during their research. Since it allows you to address your prospect’s concerns when they have them, it aids them in making an informed decision faster.
Reach more buyers
Social selling lets you engage with your prospects at crucial points in their sales journey and helps you identify more prospects and leads. For instance, you may find a forum where people might discuss their common problems that you can address through your products and services. Engaging in a meaningful way with these prospects can help you generate leads and sell your brand offerings faster than traditional methods.
Outsell the competition
Sooner or later, your competitors will start social selling as well. With the rising popularity of digital platforms, including social media for brand promotion, marketing, advertising, and selling, it is hard not to take advantage of them. As a result, if you have started social selling, there is no reason to believe that your competitors will soon follow if they haven’t already started it. Therefore, building trust in your network is all the more important for your brand. It will help you generate leads and increase sales faster within a shorter sales cycle. Continuing to nurture relationships with your leads will likely give you an edge over your competitors who have not started social selling.
Steps to Start Your Social Selling Campaign
Now that you know the benefits of social selling, it’s time to begin your campaign. The following steps can help you start your social selling campaign.
Identify your target audience
Regardless of the digital marketing strategies you implement, it is critical to understand your audience. The success of your digital campaigns depends on how effectively you reach the right audience at the right time on the right platform. Therefore, you need to identify your prospects and potential customers to connect with your audiences and build long-term relationships with them as a part of your social selling campaign. In this regard, identify their likes and interests, demographics, and preferred social media platforms.
Optimise social media profiles
Once you identified the social media channels your audiences spend most of their time on, you need to optimise your profiles on those platforms. Ensure to include all essential business information in your profile to help audiences connect with you easily.
Join the appropriate social media groups
In the next stage, you must join the appropriate social media groups to connect with your leads and prospects. Discussion forums, groups, and pages are ideal places where your leads and prospects will likely ask their doubts and concerns. It allows you to present your brand and its offerings as a solution to their issues. You can also join location-specific pages or industries to engage with prospective customers.
Be indirect in your approach
Instead of hard sales, you should be indirect in your approach. For instance, avoid spamming prospects’ DMs with product information. Also, avoid promoting your products and services directly on a discussion page or group.
The following tips can help build better relationships with your leads and prospects and earn their trust.
- Sharing links to relevant resources when responding to a lead’s query
- Sharing your opinion during discussions
- Sharing your expertise and knowledge in your industry if an opportunity opens up
- Liking other’s comments on various relevant posts and discussions
Social alerts
You can set up alerts for specific keywords using tools such as Google AlertAlert or other social tools. It can include your industry, business name, products, services, or anything else you want to track.
Be consistent
Consistent social selling is critical to ensure optimal results from your campaign. It implies you must consistently share content, engage with audiences, and stay active on various social groups or discussion forums. A social media marketing agency can help create posts and share them on relevant groups. However, as a brand, you need to play your role to support their efforts. It involves answering specific or technical queries to your prospects that only you can answer. Working together with your social media marketing team can help improve the success of your social selling campaign.
Elevan August Media is a social media agency in Singapore. They can help optimise your social media profiles, join appropriate groups, develop effective strategies and implement them to promote your brand on relevant social media channels. When the situation demands, you need to respond promptly to your leads’ specific questions, concerns, doubts, etc., to earn their trust and build positive relationships to help them convert to paying customers.
