Social selling is not just about making sales, it's also about building relationships. By engaging with your prospects and customers on social media, you can create a strong network of advocates and referrals that can boost your reputation, credibility, and reach. But how can you use social selling to achieve this? Here are some tips to help you.
Before you start social selling, you need to know who you want to connect with and why. Identify your ideal buyer persona, their pain points, their goals, and their preferred channels. Then, research and segment your audience based on their industry, role, location, interests, and behavior. This will help you tailor your content, messages, and offers to their needs and preferences.
One of the best ways to attract and nurture your network is to share valuable content that educates, entertains, or inspires them. Content can include blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, case studies, webinars, or ebooks. The key is to provide relevant, timely, and useful information that solves their problems, answers their questions, or showcases your expertise. Avoid being too salesy or promotional, and focus on adding value and building trust.
Social selling is not a one-way communication, it's a dialogue. You need to engage with your network by liking, commenting, sharing, and responding to their posts and messages. Show genuine interest in their opinions, challenges, and achievements. Ask open-ended questions, offer feedback, and start conversations. This will help you build rapport, credibility, and loyalty with your network.
One of the main benefits of social selling is that it can generate more referrals and testimonials for your business. Referrals and testimonials are powerful forms of social proof that can influence your prospects' buying decisions and increase your conversion rates. To get more referrals and testimonials, you need to ask for them. You can do this by reaching out to your satisfied customers, partners, or influencers, and asking them to recommend you to their network or share their success stories with you. You can also incentivize them with rewards, discounts, or recognition.
Land and expand!!! Referrals and Affiliates. Huge opportunity and a program I believe most companies should have in place. So many people oversee this. Built in customer and employee referral/affiliate programs should be part of EVERY GTM strategy (not including the industries this wouldn’t apply to.) I don’t see anything wrong with planting the idea of them referring customers mid or post cycle, but I do believe in delivering value anD ROI first, that way when your “champion” goes to bat for you he or she can use actual results to position your product or your domain expertise and make that introduction happen :) *as far as video testimonials, if the person isn’t camera shy, and the rep’s done a good job, this shouldn’t be a hard ask
Social selling is not a one-time activity, it's a long-term strategy. You need to nurture your relationships with your network by staying in touch, providing ongoing value, and delivering on your promises. You can do this by following up, sending personalized messages, offering exclusive deals, inviting them to events, or sending thank-you notes. You can also use tools like CRM or automation to track and manage your interactions and follow-ups.
To know if your social selling efforts are paying off, you need to measure your results. You can use metrics like reach, engagement, leads, conversions, revenue, or referrals to evaluate your performance and identify your strengths and weaknesses. You can also use tools like analytics or dashboards to monitor and visualize your data and insights. By measuring your results, you can optimize your social selling strategy and improve your outcomes.