4 Social Selling Tips to Boost Sales
Don’t miss out on the tons of benefits of social selling! A few minor tweaks to your sales strategy will completely revamp your profits. Social selling is very different from hard selling. When you social sell, you focus on connecting with potential customers within your social media audience for a longer term sales strategy. These simple social selling tips are guaranteed to transform your business. The immediate results will compound over time into amazing sales.
1.Optimize Your Social Media Profiles Your social media profile is your primary social selling point. No matter the size, age or purpose of your company, it is crucial to optimize your profile for effective social selling.
Simply add branding elements to your social media pages. A branded cover image on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter is a great start. For visual platforms such as Instagram, keep your visual content engaging and consistent to encourage engagement. Then add a link to your landing page to your bio. Leading prospective customers to your app or website is one thing but only a great user experience will keep them there. A good UX software will help you create this experience. Another minor tweak is having punchy and creative biographies for your company’s employees. Ensure too that everyone has a clear professional photograph of themselves. Display each of your company’s employees’ contact information on their bio. Add links to their various social media profiles for another strong social selling point. Optimizing your social media profiles drives traffic, improves your search engine ranking and facilitates lead generation. All these build and strengthen your brand’s credibility. A strong brand will nurture a loyal audience of potential customers which eventually boosts sales. An example of a LinkedIn optimization strategy is having catchy headlines and compelling summaries for your published articles. Pick a strategy that aligns with each different platform. Optimization strategies vary across platforms. You should have different content strategies for each platform for successful social selling. Insist on high quality content as a cornerstone. Use a social media management dashboard like Vista Social to schedule and publish content across all your different social media channels. It will save you a lot of time.
Image source: vistasocial.com Other Vista Social features that will help with social selling include review management, analytics, customizable reports, et cetera.
2.Personalize Your Content
In 1996, Bill Gates wrote, “Content is King.” This evergreen quote demonstrates that good content is the foundation of any robust sales strategy. Here are a few content writing tips for creative, concise, informative and readable work. Effective personalized content is high-quality content with a personal twist. Studies show that the future of marketing is personal. 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide them with personalized offers and recommendations. 74% of customers feel frustrated when website content is impersonal. 72% of consumers say they only engage with personalized messaging.
Create Value Instead of trying to get a potential customer to immediately purchase or subscribe to your product, find out what their pain points are. Focus on how your product or company will create value by filling the gaps created by those pain points. This kind of personalized social selling is a bulletproof longer-term strategy. Communicating value as opposed to demanding hard sells is a good way to build a trustworthy and durable brand that will keep your loyal customers coming again and again. Optimizing your social media profiles like we discussed facilitated lead generation. Use the data gained from the lead generation process to forecast pain points. Use affiliate marketing software to find and create the most value for your company.
Audience Feedback Notice how the audience responds to your personalization social selling strategy. Did it get you more followers or increased engagement? Adjust your personalized social selling strategy using the feedback you get. If you get great feedback, don’t fix what’s not broken, meaning, retain the same strategy to get the same results. Despite your best efforts, your personalized social selling strategy will sometimes lead to zero conversions, or even negative results! Respond quickly by changing the strategy. Even if you’ve gotten great results, you will always have to regularly review your strategies. The only way to have a perfect personalized social selling strategy is to constantly change it.
Be Relatable Connect with each potential customer on a human level for increased engagement and conversion. Avoid impersonal or generic interactions. For example, have an email template with a salutation that addresses the receiver with their first name in an easy going manner like, “Hey there [First Name],” instead of “Dear Sir/Madam.” Generate customer personas. With enough leads, you will be able to segment your audience according to factors such as age, gender, income, location, interests, and pain points.
Map out your content using these customer personas. Tailor each piece of content for each segmented audience. Finally, add your own personal stories on the website! Make your brand more relatable by telling your founder’s story or adding pictures of team activities to your social media posts.
3.Conversational Engagement Imagine that you are speaking to a friend. Use that kind of conversational language on your website and social media interaction posts. Overall, the language should be friendly, relaxed and professional. Avoid language that is too “salesy.” Optimize your social media posts in the same way you’ve optimized your website and sales and marketing materials like emails and brochures. This consistency builds brand credibility. Over time, your brand will grow to be associated with the friendly yet professional tone you’ve put together. Here’s a great example of a funny tweet in a conversational tone! A tweet like this does wonders for brand awareness.
Source: twitter.com
4.Provide Customer Service Social media platforms are very accessible to the everyday customer. Customers tend to feel more confident about a brand when they can directly message a company through social media. Create a dedicated social media page for customer service. Be sure to link back to your customer service landing page. A dedicated customer service page filters complaints away from your company’s main page. Netflix’s customer service Twitter handle (@Netflixhelps) is a great example.
Source: twitter.com