Today, about 72% of adults use at least one social media platform. So for businesses, it makes sense to meet customers where they already spend time. It’s reported that 81% of Instagram users are already using the platform to research products and services. By using social platforms as a sales channel, brands have an all-in-one platform to easily focus on the entire customer journey. Today let’s talk about social selling.
A lot of salespeople get the wrong idea about what social selling actually looks like. It’s not as simple as making a profile on LinkedIn or Facebook and waiting for the sales to roll in.
Social selling can be done via any social media platform. Twitter, Linked In, and Facebook are preferred platforms for it due to the large number of professionals using these platforms, but the scope is not limited. The type of target audience has a huge influence when choosing a platform. Gaining visibility within the target market, providing content that shows your value and establishing your brand’s credibility. All of these will help make sales more achievable. Social selling can apply to both business to business and business to consumer marketing.
As with every relationship, building a strong bond takes time, but the more engaging and positive it is the stronger it becomes. Social Selling provides an opportunity to build a real relationship that creates future sales leads. This relationship makes selling natural and easy. Customers who trust brands are not only more likely to buy but are also more likely to come back and spend more in the future. This maximises the lifetime customer value – one of the key KPIs in sales.
Social sellers use a complex combination of strategies and tools that enables them to leverage the power of their social networks to learn targeted information about their customers’ pain points. This information, in turn, helps the company tailor their social media marketing efforts around those pain points.
Social selling leaders create 45% more opportunities than peers with a lower social selling index. Creating pages that represent your business on different social media platforms is a way to advertise for free. Getting your employees, partners and investors to repost and share your social content in private messages lets more and more people get acquainted with your products and services. If you include your logo and brand colors in your posts, they will become more recognizable.
Social Selling is a strategy that brings online marketing, branding and sales closer. This mix is a great recipe for increasing your bottom line. That is, of course, if you decide to do it in a consistent and customer-oriented way.