#5 Techniques to up your B2B Social Selling game!

Social selling works. According to LinkedIn, 75% of B2B buyers use social media to make purchase decisions, which might explain why sales professionals using social selling make 40-50% more new closures than those who don’t.? If you’re still not convinced, take a look at these statistics below.

As the world becomes increasingly digital, adapting to new modes of selling is the only way to thrive.

Building an Engaging Social Media Presence

Facebook has come a long way from being a simple social networking platform where users could upload a photo and their interests. While some of the website’s success could be attributed to Zuckerberg’s study of psychology and business acumen, a huge part of it is because of how hard it tries to stay engaging. It has been at the forefront of transforming itself constantly - competing with Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram and Whatsapp.?

However, Facebook is more popular with B2C businesses. When it comes to B2B companies, LinkedIn is the largest content channel, with over 94% of B2B marketers using it as their main platform. LinkedIn, like Facebook, started off as a much simpler platform – a professional networking and job-hunting site, where you would only be allowed to connect with people you knew. Since then, it’s exploded into the hub of content and innovation that it is today. With a feed that mimics other social networks but focuses on the professional, its own publishing platform, and various algorithms to facilitate connections between like-minded people, it’s safe to say that LinkedIn changed the game for B2B social selling.

Utilising Social Media for Prospecting

Social media is a powerful tool to identify and target potential customers, and lead generation has always been one of the biggest challenges for B2B companies. By leveraging social networks to build relationships and engage with prospects, you can increase your lead generation. Here are some key strategies for social prospecting:

1. Define your target audience: Start by clearly defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). By targeting specific groups based on combinations of demographics, interests, and needs, you can better tailor your efforts.
2. Choose your platforms: Different platforms attract different demographics and industries. For example, LinkedIn is more popular with B2B customers and sellers, while Instagram and TikTok are more focused on visual content and can be effective for B2C businesses. Use your ICP to identify the most useful platforms for your purposes, and focus on those.?
3. Monitor conversations: Use social media listening tools such as Google Alerts to monitor keywords and hashtags relevant to your industry and product. By keeping an eye on these conversations and participating in them, you can gain insight into customer pain points and needs, and maintain relevance.?
4. Engage with potential customers: Continuing off the last point, actively engage with prospects by participating in discussions, answering questions, and offering valuable insights. On LinkedIn, the best social sellers are often the ones who are conversing with their prospects via groups, logically commenting on the prospects’ posts or other LinkedIn activity, or tagging them in 3rd party conversations that matter and are important for them. We have seen that through proactive and logical engagement, intelligent social sellers are able to position themselves as industry experts.?
5. Personalise everything: Avoid generic, one-size-fits-all messages, which are spammy and easily ignored. Instead, tailor your interactions to fit each individual. Do your research on their interests, challenges, and goals, and you will be able to craft messages that resonate with them, increasing the chances of generating (and maintaining) meaningful conversations.

Building Relationships and Trust

Sales has always been about building relationships, and social media is a great platform for that – if you do it right.?

It can be difficult building authentic relationships on social media when there’s such a huge volume of content to compete with. Here are some techniques you can use to initiate conversations and set yourself apart from the masses.

1. Actively engage with your audience: Responding thoughtfully with relevant insights to comments, messages, and inquiries promptly will foster a sense of credibility, while asking open-ended questions and running polls or contests can encourage participation. Building a genuine connection with your audience fosters loyalty and increases the likelihood of conversions.?
2. Personalised outreach: Reference specific details from prospects’ profiles or recent posts to create a connection. Anything in common – shared groups, an interaction between you on someone else’s post, or a mutual friend – can help spark their initial interest in you and distinguish you from the spam and the content mills.?
3. Be timely: Respond promptly to interaction from prospects. Being responsive shows that you value their time and are committed to providing excellent customer service. It also reduces the ‘creepiness’ of replying to someone’s post months after the fact. A good rule of thumb is to respond within one week.?
4. Show personality: People are more likely to engage with someone who comes across as genuine. Sharing personal anecdotes and relatable experiences that align with your brand will resonate with your target audience. It is also a good idea to add your own flavour to the messages; for example, the usage of emoticons is a great way to differentiate from other comments or messages.
5. Acknowledge successes: Celebrate the achievements of your prospects and clients on social media. Congratulating them publicly and sharing their accomplishments will facilitate relationships to build a positive image.
6. Incorporate multimedia content: Visual content tends to capture attention and drive higher engagement rates. Experiment with different formats to stand out and create memorable experiences for your prospects.

Content Strategy for Social Selling

A solid content strategy can engage and influence potential customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey.?

• At the awareness stage, you want content that addresses their pain points and educates them about the problem, like blog posts or educational videos.?
• At the consideration stage, you should be providing content that highlights your product as a viable solution and demonstrates its unique value propositions. This can include product comparisons, expert guides, or customer testimonials.?
• At the decision stage, the goal of the content is to help customers get over any remaining reservations. Content that focuses on specific benefits and features will help the buyer confirm their choice. Examples of this kind of content include product demos, free trials, and personalised offers.?

Some best practices for sharing content effectively include:

1. Make data-based decisions: Look at existing data for both your and your competitors’ social media posts. Assess which formats and platforms give you the best results. Analysis on this can reveal something about your audience, or perhaps about current trends in social media usage. Either way, it will help you focus your efforts instead of being spread thin.
2. Use user-generated content: User-generated content – aka content that your followers and customers may create about your product – not only increases engagement but also acts as social proof, showcasing satisfied customers and their experiences. Make sure to share these posts and interact with the posters to maintain a good relationship with them.?
3. Provide value: Share informative, entertaining, and relevant content such as articles, videos, infographics, etc. Use visuals and interactive features (for example, twitter polls), to capture attention and encourage sharing. For instance, this guide by Sam Szuchan was timely and informative, capitalising on the ChatGPT buzz. It also utilised a visual format, LinkedIn’s carousel, to attract attention. Notice how it has more than 55k likes and 2.4k comments?!

4. Consistent posting schedule: Consistency helps build trust and engagement with your audience. Use analytics tools to identify optimal posting times when your audience is most active. Tools like Hootsuite , Taplio , Zoho , Missinglettr , Sprout Social, Inc. , Buffer etc help with scheduling as well as providing optimal posting times curated for your audience.

Leveraging Social Selling Tools and Analytics

Social media analytics tools collect and interpret data about the impact of your social media marketing, allowing you to make data-driven decisions. They can measure ROI, streamline workflow by integrating with your CRM or managing multiple sites, analyze data for improvement, and track interactions in real-time through social listening.

Some of the top tools in this market are Google Analytics, HubSpot, HootSuite, and of course, LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Depending on your platform, there may be other website-specific analytics tools (for example, Meta offers Facebook Insights). In our engagements with clients who are driving social selling campaigns, we have seen success with tools like Sales Navigator, Expandi.io , and Taplio , which integrates with LinkedIn for analytics and scheduling posts.

Measuring Social Selling Success

?Although there is no definite way to measure social selling success (I would love to hear from you if you have identified ways to track this better), the most popular method is LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index (SSI). It measures success based on four factors: professional brand, useful content, a strong network, and building relationships. The SSI also compares your score with the averages for your team, your industry, and your network.

There are also several KPIs you can use to understand your social selling success. The engagement rate for your posts can reveal the success of your marketing approach and how well it resonated with your audience. Network growth is another way to analyse the value of your content – an influx of connection requests can be a sign that your content is reaching the right eyes (i.e. people who are interested in building a relationship with you or your brand). CTR is another valuable metric to use to measure the concrete results of social selling. The best measure for us has been the ability to assess if your ideal customer profile (ICP) is viewing and engaging with your content.

Conclusion

Social selling on #linkedin is a powerful, proven tool that is only going to get more popular. Almost all your buyers are already on this network. The discreet access to prospects at every stage of the buyer’s journey is a huge feature that social media platforms provide, and by building a strong online presence you can make use of it. Embrace the change, and leverage social selling – maybe one day your story will be the one being converted into a movie! Happy Selling!

P.S: If you like our content, do use the “subscribe” option to receive the updates when we post our next blog. Our endeavour is to share practical advice on B2B sales using pop culture references.