HOW TO GENERATE MORE SALES: 10 SOCIAL SELLING HACKS
Today, more than ever, businesses are under pressure to drive sales, attract customers, and grow their revenue digitally and from a safe social distance.
A few years ago, if anyone told you that was possible. You’d be calling them crazy, right?
Fast forward to 2020, now that face masks, social distancing, remote working, and religious hand washing has become the norm, businesses must find creative ways to generate profit and grow their customer base.
Thanks to the pandemic, the digital revolution in society has accelerated and the use of social channels for business, entertainment, and daily activities like shopping and schooling has become the new normal.
While the pandemic effects halted social activities like parties and events, businesses are still thriving adapting, and growing.
The enormous question now is how do you engage with your target customers online, build a relationship with them, and get them to buy your product at services?
The big answer is social selling!
What is Social Selling?
Simply put, social selling means discovering and connecting with potential clients on social media to build relationships and increase sales.
When you use digital channels, like social media, to build and nurture relationships with current and potential customers, that’s social selling.
Selling on social doesn’t mean you’re pushing a product or service down their throat, either.
It could be as simple as:
· Engaging with a client’s social media post (s)
· Using social media to study a lead before your pitch meeting
· Endorsing or reviewing a client on LinkedIn
· Following vital accounts on Twitter
· Using LinkedIn’s advanced search to search for potential clients
In this article, I want to show you 10 ways you can harness the power of social selling to increase your chances of sales and gaining qualified leads for your business.
At the end of this post, you should be ready to start applying social selling to your business strategy for quick results.
Here we go…
1 — Understand your customers
The first thing you want to do is to know the social platforms your potential customer will likely be found. If you are trying to reach B2B professionals, your best bet is LinkedIn and Twitter. If your target audience are young and entertainment lovers, you should be targeting Instagram and tik tok. You should first understand what products you are selling and who buys your product, understand their social media preference, and meet them there.
2- Establish and Refine your professional brand
Because you will be building a relationship with potential customers, you want to ensure that your social media presence is clean and consistent. Are you easy to find online? Is your profile image, job title, company name and handle consistent across all channels? What other parts of your identity are you letting out? It's okay to show a bit of personality, like your hobby or interest, that way you can have a kick-starter for conversations with prospects who are not ready to hear about your products or services. This brings out the human side of the relationship.
3 — Follow the right prospects
Now you know where they can be found on social, your social presence is on fleek, reach out by following them, or connecting with them on the platforms they spend time on. Sometimes it's better to connect with a short note pointing out why you are connecting with them or something about them, their profile, or personality that attracts you. This small gesture can go a long way into the future when the prospects are ready to start engaging with you — it puts you ahead of salespeople or businesses who don’t put in the extra effort.
4- Listen actively
While you are following your prospects individually you also want to keep an eye on what your competitors and similar businesses are doing on social media. Follow them online, subscribe to their newsletters and create alerts for certain topics using google alerts or mentions or any listening tool. This will give you a good sense of the target market, the competitive landscape and what’s working generally.
5- Respond Strategically
Listen for buying signals or problem signals from prospects in their posts, status, stories, groups, forums, threads, and comments sections. Are they asking for purchasing advice online? If they are, this is your cue to speak to them with answers and solutions. When your listening is done right, you can easily identify when a prospect is ready to make a purchase and position yourself as a solution provider. That’s how you win.
6- Engage purposefully
Engage with industry leaders, peers, and prospects on social media. Like, share, comment, retweet, and drop mentions. This will give you more visibility, especially when your comments are insightful, thoughtful, and interesting. This is how you build a relationship. Not just waiting for your content to get reactions, react to others' content too and the same will be done onto you.
7 — Share only valuable content
There are so many contents out there, many are trashy and the good ones are few and sometimes hard to find. What you can do is to share content that brings value to your prospects on social media. Sometimes these helpful contents are not created by your brand and that’s okay. Third-party content helps to build your brand and brings about an unbiased point of view.
8- Include a Call To Action Always
Okay maybe not always, because some content are just there to entertain. But when you are talking about a solution or benefit of your product or service, make sure that the person on the other side of the screen knows what to do next. Don’t assume they will know it by themselves. Prompt them to action by asking them to click through or to call or to fill out a form or to register. Point them to action when it counts.
9 — Leverage Social Proof
Humans are social beings and many times they look at the majority to validate their decisions. Reviews and testimonials are proof of this. If you can highlight positive reviews and testimonials about your products and service, you will be helping your prospects decide faster. Always ask for reviews from current customers.
10 — Stay consistent
You might be tempted to give up when you don’t see engagements immediately. Don’t get discouraged. Rome was not built in a day. Keep showing up. Follow through with the 9 tips already shared. Put in the work, fan the flames of passion with your mind on the end goal — Relationship and More Sales. You will get it if you are consistent. Social selling is a marathon, not a sprint. Keep at it and you will enjoy the results.
CONCLUSION
Social selling is more about building relationships, helping, and providing value rather than selling and pushing your products and services down your prospect's throat. You want to understand your business and customers, clean up your social media presence, follow the right people, keep tabs on your competitors, respond at the right time, and engage with others.
Despite COVID 19, your business can thrive, you only need to be social and strategically so.
BONUS
If you are a DIY lover, looking to take social selling more seriously, I recommend this free course for you — The Business of Social by Coursera
Thank me later when the results start pouring in.
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