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5 Ways To Have A Better Social Selling Campaign

Social selling is one of the most effective marketing options available through social media apps. In the past few years, it has been gaining massive ground as a sales management method as in-person events and meetings have been disrupted.

Without an effective social selling campaign, your business will be losing out to your more social media management savvy competitors. Once you lose a prospect or existing customer, it’s challenging to bring them back.

Social selling is an effective tool that allows you to create genuine relationships that will ensure businesses and consumers think of you first when they need a partner in solving their problems.

Listed below are 5 ways to have a better social selling campaign to implement a step-by-step approach that increases your leads and sales through social media apps.

Provide Value

One of the critical components of social selling is not to throw advertisements or traditional marketing at social media users. Instead, your goal is to curate a relationship with users through genuine interaction on each platform you want to use for social selling.

If you’re new to social media apps, then don’t dive straight into social selling, you may be keen to get started marketing, but social selling is about being genuine. You should start by building relationships, connections, and becoming a thought leader or expert in your industry by producing content. 

Determine what problems people face in your industry or niche, and start writing content that provides solutions or further thought around the issue. While this is marketing material, it should come across that way; your content should be produced purely as a way to solve problems. 

This generates engagement on the platform and sets you up as an expert or authoritative source in your industry.

People should be turning to you to ask questions, get informed, and figure out our to solve their problems. Once you become more authoritative, start incorporating small sections that indicate you offer a product that can help with the problem, but this should never be the focal point of your marketing content.

Listen To Your Industry

You should be listening to your industry to determine what people are saying about you, your products, your competitors, and any pain points or problems being faced in the industry. 

You need to perform research to understand exactly what problems, complaints, and other types of information people are looking for related to what you do as a business so that you can address them.

You’ll need to set up or use a service that provides the ability to scan social media for phrases or words so that you can be alerted and create fresh content quickly, answer questions in other businesses or articles comments, and ensure that there are no problems being discussed about your business.

Being slow to answer questions or jump onto problems isn’t going to do you any favours and may actually harm your standing on the social media platform. Once users get the information they need, further articles will be ignored or laughed at for how late you responded to something that your competitors dealt with weeks or months ago.

Keep Communication Genuine

Part of social selling is management creating a step-by-step approach for marketing teams to follow when connecting to contacts. 

At some point, you stop being passive and start approaching connections through the various apps for a chance at a sale or lead. This provides better opportunities than cold calls but can still be a touchy subject depending on how you approach and how quickly you do it.

Instead of the standard cold call or email marketing approach, your step-by-step approach should include a genuine way to connect or reach out to the person. For example, if they post articles themselves, you can comment and interact or comment on their comments to gain familiarity.

Otherwise, you should include a personalised message when reaching out to people that have perhaps liked, shared, or made basic comments on your articles. Include in your genuine introduction, something like:

  • Comment on your shared connections if there are any
  • Reference an article they liked or commented on that perhaps was or wasn’t yours, especially if you’re going to offer some direct solutions.
  • Indicate something shared, similar cities, universities, previous jobs, anything that connects the two of you.

Pretend you’re meeting a new friend for the first time and interacting like a real person and not a marketing professional.

Stay Consistent And Don’t Give Up

While you may want instant results from your social selling management and campaigns, your marketing efforts will take some time before they show big results. It’s critical to stay consistent in what you’re doing.

  • Follow up on alerts you’ve set up on specific keywords
  • Keep posting informative and value-driven content on all the apps
  • Keep commenting and interacting with people in your industry
  • Listen to your industry as things change and adjust your step-by-step approach
  • Stay genuine with your communication, and don’t spam

Once you reach the levels of being a thought leader or expert in your industry, the results will be compounded, and things will become much easier. Your social selling approach will likely change as well because people will start to reach out to you based on your value-driven content that you’ve been posting all this time.

Don’t Be Afraid To Use Social Selling Apps

While you’re trying to be genuine and interact with people one on one to make real connections, that doesn’t mean you can’t automate and make your life easier through social selling and your marketing management initiatives.

  • Use a combined inbox. Unless you’ve dedicated yourself to a single social media platform, you will be communicating broadly or directly with a range of people. If you need to log in to all the different platforms, it can be confusing, or messages can be lost.

Find a good combined management inbox that allows you to see and respond to all of your social media platform comments and direct messages.

  • Make it easy for employees to get involved. Make sure that employees outside of the marketing teams have a way to engage and help share company posts so that you can tap into their networks and gain a broader audience.

A tool like Amplify is effective at helping management get the whole company involved in marketing on social media apps, and it provides step-by-step guidance on how to do everything.

  • Integrate your CRM with your sales and marketing tools. If you don’t have a CRM, then you need to start with that and then get into social selling.

Integrating your CRM with your social selling apps and marketing management tools will allow you to have a centralised place to capture and review lead information. It also allows you to check into your interactions with people historically so that you don’t keep repeating mistakes or sending the same information repeatedly when it isn’t working.

How Do You Build A Better Social Selling Campaign?

When building a social selling campaign, it’s essential to plan out your approach, set your goals, and determine when goals should be realistically reached. 

It will take some time to build your social selling campaign up, and as you’re building, you should be adjusting your step-by-step guide for marketing teams to better leverage social selling, based on what you find works and what is failing to convert to engagement or leads for you.

Remember that your plan should include the 5 critical components discussed above and listed below.

  • Provide value in every article, comment, and message you send
  • Listen to your industry for problems and changes happening
  • Communicate genuinely and personalise all messages, don’t spam.
  • Stay consistent and build your brand authority
  • Use tools to automate and combine your efforts

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