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The Power of Social Media
The global social media population has reached an impressive 4.62 billion — over 58% of the world’s population. Consumers and businesses use various platforms for communication, education, and entertainment purposes.
One of the best advantages of social media content marketing techniques is that they have become an equalizer over the years. With the right tactics, small businesses and megacorporations alike can succeed in their campaign efforts because of hyper-targeting capabilities.
Below are some goal that pages like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram can help with:
- Perform research through social listening: We recommend tracking brand-related mentions and conversations to discover valuable consumer insights.
- Improve niche market reach: Professional service firms can create target personas to focus their efforts on quality leads.
- Engage with audiences: Providing prospects with high-quality content across social media sites is one of the most cost-effective engagement strategies brands can use.
- Encourage brand loyalty: Turning customers into advocates requires constant engagement, exceptional customer service, and creating a sense of community, and social media can achieve all these.
- Boost website traffic: When social media content captivates audiences, they often visit websites to learn more about companies, products, and services.
There is, however, one social media strategy that businesses often overlook: social selling.
What Is Social Selling?
Social selling is a lead-generation technique where firms directly interact with potential clients via social media platforms. Contrary to widespread belief, random posts and stories are not enough to achieve desired goals. Instead, we recommend creating strategies to capture, engage, and convert prospects through well-timed content.
This approach considers the buyer’s journey of every potential client. With group segments in mind, brands can develop personalized tactics to enhance their efforts.
Think of it as a digital approach to relationship-building. Once firms earn customer trust they become top-of-mind solutions when prospects need comparable products or services. If performed correctly, they can replace tedious activities like cold calling, generic email campaigns or other activities that lack strategy.
What Social Selling Is Not
Allow us to tell you what social selling is not – It is not about bombarding potential clients with unsolicited messages. We call this approach spamming. Do not attempt it.
Instead, social selling should provide value to prospects during every step of their buyer’s journey. It is about offering solutions, answering questions, and educating audiences.
Benefits of Social Selling
When people think about selling on social platforms, they immediately think of ads or mass messaging activities. However, going for a sale too soon is not as effective as nurturing prospects.
Below are some reasons why professional service firms should use this technique:
Speed Up Sales Cycles
The marketing Rule of 7 states that it takes seven interactions with a brand before a consumer decides on buying products or booking services. Without the ideal techniques and tools, this process could take anywhere between a few weeks to several years.
Social selling enables marketing and sales teams to shorten this process and hit their targets. Today, tech-savvy consumers research their preferred brands before speaking to sales representatives. In fact, a 2019 study shares that 81% of consumers research brands online before closing a deal.
Therefore, businesses that use Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn for sales should use these platforms to share valuable information and interact with prospects. After all, most consumers and decision-makers will believe what they read about brands online — whether the data comes from a reliable source or not. For this reason, brands should proactively update websites and social sites.
Identify New Revenue Opportunities
COVID-19 changed the way companies run businesses, propelling digital transformation and technologies by several years. Until now, there are also still limitations on pre-pandemic lead generation strategies like trade shows, branded events, and activations. For this reason, it is now more crucial than ever to use digital techniques.
Social selling enables representatives to delve deeper into what consumers want and need. For instance, they can practice social selling with LinkedIn and monitor what prospects say about their products or services.
These conversations can open up possibilities for modern firms, like online consulting or employee advocacy software. As long as there is a demand, companies can allocate resources toward such initiatives.
Boost Online Authority
One of the best advantages of social selling is that it provides companies with avenues to boost their online authority. This concept refers to the trust consumers grant brands. Ultimately, the goal is to become an industry thought leader — an entity with unmatched knowledge about a particular subject.
Imagine brands like Baker McKenzie, Deloitte, or WSP. Apart from earning massive profits because of their reputation, they also have the power to influence industry trends and spending behaviors.
Firms with this level of influence can enjoy countless benefits, including trust, loyalty, and enhanced search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
How To Create a Social Selling Strategy
It should be clear by now that organizations should use developments in social media for various business efforts, including B2B prospecting, client engagement, and conversion.
Below is a step-by-step guide designed to help companies of all sizes and industries leverage the power of social media.
Step 1: Know Your Target Market
First, determine who you want to target with your social selling efforts. Do you want to target consumers, small businesses, or megacorporations? Remember, you do not have to focus on only one customer group.
If you prefer, you can create different buyer personas. Doing so lets you develop distinct campaign strategies and social media content marketing plans for each one. Knowing your clientele is crucial if you want to personalize your social selling efforts.
Step 2: Define Your Goals
Before using a social media sales strategy, identify your goals first. Whether you want to boost conversions, increase sales, or improve brand awareness, social selling can help. Use specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound objectives for best results.
Once you establish clear goals, you can share key performance indicators (KPIs) with different departments. Doing so will give everyone in the firm a clear vision of what successful efforts look like.
Step 3: Choose Ideal Social Platforms
There are many social platforms available, but you do not have to be present on all of them. Think of which ones your ideal customers frequent and focus on those.
For instance, if you want to target seniors, we recommend using Facebook or YouTube. However, if you want to target professionals, it is best to practice social selling with LinkedIn.
Remember, different social platforms have distinct strengths, weaknesses, and best practices. Use social listening techniques to determine how to communicate with your target audience for optimum results.
Step 4: Practice Social Media Content Marketing
The online space is a highly congested one. In fact, a Forbes article shares that the average American sees anywhere between 4,000 to 10,000 digital ads per day. For this reason, consumers are often on autopilot, ignoring content types that don’t interest them.
If you want to stand out in a sea of competition, it is crucial to practice content marketing and provide prospects with valuable materials. Instead of bombarding them with disruptive ads, try creating content to inspire, educate, and entertain.
Step 5: Use Employee Advocacy Software to Your Advantage
Employee advocacy refers to the promotion of a firm by its workforce. Sometimes, companies don’t realize that each team member can become a reliable brand ambassador. After all, no one can question their knowledge and authority.
This strategy increases business leads because it opens conversations that would otherwise not have been possible. The warm referral leads from such efforts often prove to be high-quality business prospects.
In today’s modern world, companies can ask employees to actively promote products and services through social platforms. Naturally, these efforts work best with happy and satisfied employees. These individuals will not hesitate to support their organizations in any way they can.
Benefits of Employee Advocacy
Can employee advocacy enhance social selling efforts? The answer is a resounding yes! Below are some of the benefits of using employee advocacy software for social selling efforts.
- Enjoy a cost-effective approach: Activating your workforce to share valuable information about your products and services does not require hefty upfront payments. Instead, you can simply ask them to share links on their personal sites.
- Improve online visibility: With the help of your employees, you can amplify your digital reach. For instance, if you have a following of 1,000 people, your employees could exponentially increase it with their personal connections.
- Humanize the brand: Humanizing your brand encourages deeper connections with consumers. Doing so makes it easier for them to trust you and eventually try your products or services.
- Boosting employee engagement: Advocacy programs create better engagement with employees. Such efforts make them feel more involved with organizations, encouraging them to become advocates.
- Encourage brand loyalty: In marketing, the Pareto principle, or 80/20 rule, states that 80% of a firm’s revenue comes from only 20% of clients. Loyal clients spend more on your brand, tell their family and friends about you, and leave good online reviews. Employee advocacy can do wonders for your loyalty strategies.
The Clearview Social Advantage
If you’re ready to use sites like LinkedIn for sales, it’s time to work with standout employee advocacy software like Clearview Social. At Clearview Social, we have transformed the way businesses perform their employee advocacy tasks. We have simplified and elevated the sharing process so firms can achieve their desired results quickly and effectively.
Here’s a guide for using our software:
- Build link queues: First, list the sites that contain valuable information about your brand. You can copy and paste links to the queue builder.
- Send email requests to employees: Once a manager sends a request to share brand data, users will receive an email with the content they should share. Employees can share them one at a time manually or use our one-click functionality to forward all the attached links.
- Determine best times for sharing: Our artificial intelligence (AI) technology will help you determine when to share materials for maximum impact. Remember, various platforms may follow different best practices.
- Get robust analytics about your posts: Our work doesn’t end when we help you successfully disseminate valuable information. Instead, we will help you understand which content types work for you. Such insights can help you improve your content strategies.
Increase Your Social Media Traffic Today
Are you ready to attract audiences, educate them, and turn them into customers? You can use your social media platforms to achieve these goals. With Clearview Social on your side, social media planning won’t be so overwhelming.
Here’s what one satisfied client has to say about Clearview Social:
“You literally couldn’t make social media any easier” – Mike Montagna, Business Development & Marketing, Benesch, Friedlander, Coplan & Aronoff LLP
If you’re not making the most out of your social sites yet, it’s time to work with Clearview Social. You can share valuable content, boost employee confidence, discover the best upload times, and gain valuable information on consumer engagement. Yes, you can enjoy all these benefits from one exceptional software.
We’re a simple platform that helps your team share your content on their social media platforms, with easy prompts, email reminders and one-click activation.
