Social Selling: From Tweet to Sale
The multiplication of social media and the cost and time it takes to develop an audience and build relationships have forced marketers to beef up their social strategies. Does this mean that the time of exploration, testing, and communication angles is over? Nothing is less certain...
The multiplication of social media and the cost and time it takes to develop an audience and build relationships have forced marketers to beef up their social strategies. Does this mean that the time of exploration, testing, and communication angles is over? Nothing is less certain...
But still, marketers now have to execute strategies structured on the social media, defend a voluntarily business-oriented approach (ROI is king!), without forgetting the brand, or meaning or authenticity.
Social content relays are what build a brand’s legitimacy and social authenticity.
In order to gain enough resonance on the social media, it’s essential to have efficient relays. Since real people have more social legitimacy than an entity, employees have become prime relays for spreading the company’s social content, also because social channels are becoming an indispensable source of leads for sales teams. Ever since tracking tools and marketing automation have made it possible to perfectly identify a lead source, marketers can perfectly measure social media’s contribution to their business funnel.
For some companies, the contribution from social channels accounts for over 15% of their income.
Social Selling: employees are all salespeople!
The key to social selling is therefore employee involvement in the company’s social strategy. Here are a few rules on the topic to keep in mind:
- Map your presence on the social media by identifying active employees, as well as the groups they belong to. For example, imagine that your company has big needs in recruiting engineers. You may decide to create content that is specific to your research and development activities and ask just your engineers to disseminate and promote your content among their alumni associations, the groups they belong to, etc.
- Clearly define your objectives: with whom do you want to build relationships and what kind of involvement? Which community do you want to support?
- Clarify your plans: What will happen with the people who have engaged with your content on the social media? What will your next action be towards them?
- Never involve employees in promoting or distributing your content on a ‘transactional’ basis (ex.: Here is the new content. Thank you for sharing it.). Recall the objectives of the content (what the content was designed for, why it is useful, who it addresses, why it is important for the company or brand, etc.).
- Educate on the issues at stake for your company in social media in order to anticipate often erroneous counter-arguments like: "It’s an intrusion into my private life", "our customers are not on the social media " (98% use at least one social medium), "It’s my personal network".
- Give your social content promotion and distribution tools. Tools like GaggleAMP, or limber.io make this easier for you by including a series of editorial and distribution features. The idea is simple: employees give the tool temporary authorization to publish on their timelines. Ultimately, they authorize the tool to publish a given piece of content. Amplification can really be considerable in terms of distribution as well as in terms of image and engagement. If you or your employees are hesitant, remember that this is truly a win-win situation.
Conclusion
When we see the importance of content in sales strategies, we realise that social selling will undeniably take on more and more importance in corporate strategies. This makes it especially important to document, structure and formalize your social selling strategy. But it’s important to bear in mind the following:
- It’s more about dynamics than initiating and maintaining
- Of course, social selling cannot occur without the active participation of your employees
- Consistency and a gardener’s mindset rule social selling. Not the hunter’s mindset!
Happy Marketing !
This post was originally published on Theoryglobal.co.uk