How do you become more proactive, to move beyond the softly-softly approach? These are the approaches I recommend?to help you turn social media sharing into social media selling. The social selling examples I use here mainly related to B2B selling over LinkedIn, but they can also be applied to higher involvement consumer products too.
- Be transparent?- when you connect with someone on LinkedIn, send them a short message and tell them why you want to connect -?'Dear John, I'm looking to connect with forward thinking leaders in the sales and marketing sectors, within the Yorks & Lancs areas & came across your profile. Would you like to join me on LinkedIn? Steve'?- Keep it simple & to the point. Don't just send vanilla invites saying:?"I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn".
- Provide a solution?- Do you clearly understand your prospect's business issues? Can you offer a solution? If lead generation is an important business challenge for them, do you have an article on your website, a blog possibly that provides 5 top tips to generate more warm business leads? What are the problems you can solve for your clients - share good content with your new connections, provide links to your content in your message.Make sure this information is truly valuable, it doesn't have to be your own content either but be cautious, there are a lot of people out there asking you to download very average content.
- Follow up?- with your warmest prospects, make sure you have a plan to follow up. Periodically, send your prospect a message - include industry news and other articles that they would find useful, maybe share a case study of work you have done with a similar client, continually prove your value and worth to your prospect - again make sure that this content is truly valuable or you'll simply become a nuisance. Your goal is to create know, like and trust with your prospect at this stage.
- Call to action?- Please do not add a note at the end of your content asking the prospect to visit your website if they 'would like more information' - they don't know what information is there so there's no incentive to go look!A call to action, must entice, it must suggest that by clicking the link you have provided, there will be an unmissable benefit to them. A call to action is: 'Need more sales? Download my new e-guide (name of guide) today. Limited availability, don't delay'
- Follow up again?- I can't emphasise this enough. If you're not prepared to follow up then why market in the first place? You are better off marketing to half a dozen prospects and following these up properly than you are connecting with scores of new contacts and never following up any.My advice would be to use the content you have been sending as the reason for your follow-up call, email or letter:?'Hi John, we recently connected on LinkedIn. I'm calling a handful of my 1st degree connections regarding an article I messaged them with last week, i want to check if this kind of information is useful to you?'?This is a great reason to call and it's a warm call also. Whatever the response from the person you call, you're into a conversation, which you can now control.
Don't confuse social media marketing and social selling, they are different - one will help raise your brand profile and in the process generate some enquiries - over time, these enquiries will continue to increase.
https://www.smartinsights.com/b2b-digital-marketing/b2b-social-media-marketing/5-tips-social-selling/
