Present-day consumers need a solid reason to trust a brand before putting money on the table. This calls for building deeper connections with them so they can easily move down your sales funnels.
And what better place to establish healthy relationships than social media?
Social media is not just used for recreational purposes anymore. Its nuanced state is a breeding ground for prospect engagement. It’s also a go-to place for consumers to find and interact with brands.
Social media’s popularity has given rise to the powerful sales tactic of today – social selling. Here’s what we’ll cover in this article:
Contents
The benefits of employing social selling seriously in your sales strategies
Social selling is a powerful lead generation strategy where salespeople, marketers, and business owners interact with potential customers on social media platforms. No wonder 4 in 10 consumers say they use social media to discover brands. Eventually, these interactions over social media lead them to develop deep connections with prospects and nurture leads.
However, note that social media selling is not a fresh concept. If you’re already using social media to turn visitors into customers or have a business page on LinkedIn or Facebook, you may be mimicking social selling to a certain extent.
1. High-quality leads are qualified and generated effortlessly through social selling
Social media networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram have made it easy for sales and marketing teams to find their target audience, connect, and nurture them using healthy conversations until they are qualified as leads.
Therefore, social selling is a potent sales strategy to fill your pipeline with leads and drive consistent revenue. Moreover, since social media is a free platform, you can expect more return on investment using social selling than social media marketing strategies like paid ad campaigns.
2. Sales pitches become more customizable with increased opportunities on social media
Social media is the perfect platform to determine a prospect’s needs, expectations, and challenges. As you learn more about them, you can tailor your sales pitches and cold outreach messages to turn them into interested leads.
For example, you could enable social listening to know what your prospects say or comment on competitors’ pages, find what pain points they talk about in their LinkedIn posts, etc.
A personalized sales pitch delivers upfront value to a prospect and is more likely to help convert. TechTarget mentions how personalized sales pitches can produce higher open rates and longer fruitful conversations than generic pitches.
3. The sales cycle is shortened significantly by integrating social selling strategies
A slow sales cycle can make it harder to reach revenue targets. But with social selling in the mix, sales and marketing teams can drastically reduce the time taken to move prospects through various stages of the sales funnel through open interactions directly with a key decision maker.
This proves to show that social selling lets you solve top decision-maker questions on the spot without delays.
4. Your network experiences substantial growth
Social selling strategies where you share valuable content and join industry-specific conversations help spread the word about your company and products or services.
It’s the most organic way to expand your network while costing nothing.
5. Long-term trust is built effortlessly with social media selling methods
Trust is one of the most valuable assets in maintaining long-term client relationships. Social media selling aims to build trust and a community-like feel where potential consumers are comfortable moving ahead with the sale rather than one-time purchases.
How to calculate the social selling index?
The social selling index, or SSI, is a metric used to measure the impact of your social selling efforts.
LinkedIn was the first to introduce calculating SSI back in 2014. The LinkedIn SSI uses four components of social selling to score you between 0 and 100. Those four components are your ability to:
- Creating a professional brand by becoming an industry thought leader and having an optimized LinkedIn profile.
- Finding the right people quickly, such as high-value prospects, using proper tools.
- Engaging with valuable, conversation-worthy insights that are key to growing connections.
- Building relationships to inculcate prospect trust and expand your network.
To calculate your LinkedIn SSI score, sign in to your LinkedIn account and navigate to your Social Selling dashboard. You’re immediately provided a score based on the above components.
The above SSI report lets you know your current score, where you lack, and what your competitors in the industry are at. As per LinkedIn, brands and individuals must target an SSI score of 75 or higher to reap complete social selling benefits.
6 social selling best practices
Here are a few best practices to ace social selling in this overly competitive marketplace:
1. Optimize your social media profiles
Optimizing your social media profile should be your very first concern to build an effective social selling platform.
Prospects can easily spot an incomplete, outdated profile from miles away. So, think of your social media profile as your personal landing page.
Here are some tips to ensure your social profile does not repel prospects:
- Use a high-resolution headshot as a profile picture and have a relevant HD background image for LinkedIn.
- For LinkedIn, add a clear and brief headline.
- Have a brief summary with the right keywords on LinkedIn and a creative bio for Instagram, Facebook, or X (formerly Twitter).
- Add interests, relevant skills, and up-to-date work experience (for LinkedIn).
- Add updated links to your company’s website.
- Highlight (Featured section for LinkedIn) or pin top-performing posts for prospects to understand what you or your business does at a glance.
- Add customer reviews, testimonials, and client recommendations to build credibility.
Below’s an example of a well-optimized LinkedIn profile:
2. Share content to educate and train your target audience
Social selling is impossible without constant engagement from your target audience. And sharing valuable content makes it feasible.
Share industry-specific insights, customers’ pain points-driven suggestions, latest trends, best practices, etc. Add rich media like images, graphs, and videos to your content to make it more entertaining.
This way, your potential customers know you’re a thought leader in the field and are persuaded to interact with you and your brand without second thoughts.
Ensure you post consistently at least 1x a day, about 5x a week. Tip: set up a publishing queue by scheduling social media posts in advance.
Team collaboration plays a significant role in keeping the content creation frequency going. Encourage teams to pitch fresh ideas so there’s a unique take on your social media content.
A perfect example of a conversation-inviting post:
3. Join online conversations
Want to boost brand visibility for social selling outside content? Online groups and forums are your best bets.
Since building healthy connections is the foundation of a social selling strategy, joining online groups helps boost brand visibility and showcase expertise.
Search for a keyword on Facebook or LinkedIn to find a relevant group you could actively participate in. For example, here are a few active Facebook groups that come up for “SaaS founders”:
And not just groups, you could also engage in other people’s posts and share a thought leader’s post by adding additional insights. The biggest benefit? People tend to reciprocate your efforts and engage with your posts as well.
4. Use social media monitoring
Your target customers may be frustrated with a competitor’s service, or your current customers may be facing issues with your solution and using social media to vent their anger. Whatever the case may be, unnoticed social media mentions, and discussions can cause issues to escalate quickly.
The solution? Using social listening and social media monitoring to understand what customers and prospects need and expect.
For example, you could watch for particular brand-related hashtags on social posts, monitor likes, shares, and comments on your posts across social media profiles, or listen to competitors’ conversations on their posts and review sites.
Social media monitoring can thus help you find who your prospects are and what they need so you can personalize your cold outreach methods and boost response rates.
5. Pay attention to existing customers
Social selling is not limited to building new relationships with prospects. It’s also about nurturing customer connections so they don’t slip away to your competitors. So, it’s critical to pay equal attention to your existing customers and let them feel heard and appreciated.
You could do two things: try improving customer conversations by making it easy for them to reach you for advice and create a well-connected sales system where social insights are easily passed between customer success and support teams to learn what makes customers happy.
6. Monitor your performance
With social media, intuition alone is not going to improve your efforts. Back your results with data to know what worked, what didn’t, and what needs to be improved.
Monitor your social selling performance by keeping a close watch on numbers using analytics. Most social networks like Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube offer analytical insights so you can make data-backed decisions to optimize your social selling strategies.
For example, they offer insights to identify prospects who engage with your profiles or posts, the type of content they prefer the most, and how well you’ve optimized your profile vs. your competitors, response rate, engagement rate in the form of comments, shares, and likes, etc.
Conclusion
Social media is no longer a place just to consume entertaining content. Major social media companies are constantly releasing features to guide businesses and sales teams to promote their brand and solutions online by reaching their dream target audience.
So it’s now safe to say social selling is the future as platforms offer more and more ways for businesses to not just market or promote but also sell on them by making prospect interactions accessible.
