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Social selling – A complete guide
Statista shows that nearly half of the world’s population is active on social media, so incorporating social selling into your business can reach a massive pool of customers. Social selling is a key strategy for businesses to increase their sales and build long-term relationships. In today’s climate, social selling is important, with LinkedIn sharing a statistic that 81% of buyers are more likely to engage with a business that has a strong and cohesive social media presence. In this article, we will look at what social selling is, the benefits it will bring your business and how to social sell effectively.
Find out in this article:
- What is social selling?
- The benefits of social selling
- Enhance your social selling
- The challenges of social selling
What is social selling?
Social selling is a lead-generation method that involves a business communicating with its prospects through social media platforms. This tactic is used by organisations to help build relationships with their customers, keep them engaged and meet their sales targets. Social sales should be used as a lead nurturing tactic as opposed to a method to close deals. Many businesses choose this method to connect with their customers over other methods that are seen as outdated like cold calling. LinkedIn highlight that 76% of buyers are ready to have sales conversations with businesses on social media, suggesting that social selling is a very effective way in winning more deals.
The benefits of social selling
There are a lot of benefits that embracing social selling will bring your business that you should know. These benefits are:
- Increase your sales
- Build long-term relationship customer relationships
- Gain a competitive advantage
- Get real-time feedback from customers
This section will look into each of these benefits in detail.
Increase your sales
Firstly, social selling will increase your sales. This is because you are able to reach a wider range of your target market by embracing social media. LinkedIn states that businesses that are social selling leaders will create 45% more opportunities than businesses that are not. This statistic highlights how important it is for your business to embrace social selling as it will lead to you creating more opportunities, winning more sales, and generating more revenue.
Build long-term customer relationships
Social selling is a great method that businesses use to create long-term relationships with customers and improve their brand image. Social selling will give your business the opportunity to communicate with potential customers in a quick and easy fashion while learning more about their needs and requirements. As a result, you will be able to give customers a more personalised service and build long-term relationships with them, increasing the likelihood of your businesses having successful deals. Furthermore, your business’s brand image will be improved by this, helping customers trust your business and bring in new prospects.
Gain a competitive advantage
Social selling is a great way to gain a competitive advantage. By knowing more about your customers wants, and needs, you will be able to attract them to your business and away from your competitors with a personalised service for their problems. As well as this, you will be active on social media you will be able to monitor your competitor’s moves and strategies more effectively based on their social media presence and reception. This will help your business stay ahead of the competition in the market and increase your growth.
Get real-time feedback from customer
Taking on feedback from customers is a great way for your business to grow and expand as it will help your business offer a better service to clients. Social selling will allow your business to get real-time feedback from customers due to the quick communication that is possible with social media.
Enhance your social selling
There are many tips and tricks that you should know to enhance your social selling to make the most revenue possible. Here is what you need to know:
Develop your social media profiles – Make sure your fully develop your social media profiles on each platform that you choose to use. Whether it is LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook, you must make sure that you have a professional and engaging profile, that is easy to understand for your customers. Furthermore, you should add links to your website and include contact information for your customers to find you. This will create a better brand image for your business.
Be on the right platforms – You should be where your customers are, meaning you want to be on the right social media platforms. If you are a B2B business, it is likely that most of your customers will be on LinkedIn, so this platform should be a focus for you. A B2C business may want to focus on multiple platforms like Instagram and Facebook. It is important that you make sure you are on the same platforms as your target market.
Embrace different groups – On platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook you are able to find different groups and forums that are relevant to your product or service. By finding these groups and joining them, you will have access to people that have an interest in your industry that will want to learn more about your product or service. This results in your business gaining new customers, helping you grow and make more sales.
Share insightful information about your industry – A great way to gain trust with prospects on social media is by making sure that you provide useful and insightful information to the customers that engage with your content. By giving customers this information, you will be able to increase the value of your social media pages to grow your followers and increase your sales.
Share customer success stories – You should share customer success stories on your social media pages to create more desire for your products or services. When potential customer sees a success story about someone that was in a similar position to them, they will become much more interested in how your product and service can help them, as well as become more trustworthy of your brand as there is proof that you can help them.
Always engage with customers – Liking, sharing, and commenting on posts are great ways to engage with customers and keep customers fully engaged with your business. You will want to make sure the posts you engage with are relevant to your industry and personalised for your customers.
Be consistent with posts – One of the most important factors that dictate how well your social selling performs is how consistent you are with it. If you only occasionally post and interact with customers on your social media platforms, it can be very difficult for your business to get the most out of social selling. You should try to create a good schedule for your posts to keep customers engaged and interested in your products or services.
The challenges of social selling
Like anything, social selling can present challenges for your business. As long as you are aware of these challenges, you will be able to stay clear of them and get the full benefits out of social selling. These challenges are:
Fast-changing algorithms – Social media is constantly changing, meaning that something effective one day may not be as effective the next day. To overcome this challenge, you must stay aware of the latest trends and forecast factors that can impact your social selling so you can alter your strategy to maximise your sales.
Choosing the right platform – There are a number of different social media platforms that can be used for social selling, so choosing the one that is right for you can be difficult. B2B businesses tend to focus on platforms such as LinkedIn and Instagram, while B2C businesses can focus more heavily on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. To find the best platform for you, you must research your target market.
Targeting your target market – Because of the large scope of social media, it can be difficult to pinpoint your target market on these platforms. To find out more about your target market, you should carry out research about your industry to be able to pinpoint the customers you want on social media.
Stay aware of trends but don’t copy them – It is important for your business to stay aware of trends to identify if there are any opportunities for growth. However, you do not want to be too “trendy” as your business will blend in with many other competitors in the market doing the same thing. You should be involved with trends that suit your target market and where you can share your USP.
Social selling with TEB
Enhance your social selling with TEB, our sales automation CRM software. TEB will help your business increase sales, generate more revenue and improve your social selling. The way TEB does this is with unique features such as:
- Track your lead generation sources – View, organise and track your lead generation sources to find out how well your social selling strategies are performing
- Access important customer data – View customer storyboards, industry details and more to better understand your customers to offer them a more personalised service
- Track the performance of your sales representatives – Track how many prospects are being converted to leads and deals that are won by your sales representatives
- Generate over 250+ reports – Increase your data visibility by generating reports to make more insightful decisions about your strategy for social selling
Schedule a demo with us, where we can show you first-hand how TEB will enhance your social selling, increase your sales and generate more revenue.
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