Social selling, when done the right way, can help you find the right stakeholders opportunities with laser precision and predictive results within your new or existing key-accounts.
The common practice in B2B marketing is segmentation of buyer personas. While segmentation does help to increase leads, the personalisation needed to get high ticket clients is often not enough. Social selling not only boosts but also supports existing ABM strategy. By leveraging social media, you can focus on key buyers within accounts, learn their habits via social listening and most importantly, the problems they seek solutions to.
Research your Target Audience
Finding your key buyers on social media and researching their activity can place you in a good position with your ABM. In real life, C-Level suite professionals and key decision makers are hard to reach. Such people tend to be surrounded by gatekeepers, making them difficult to reach out to. The upside to social selling is the ability to reach decision makers through their LinkedIn profiles.
If you can’t find them on LinkedIn, there is a good chance they are on Twitter or Facebook.
Social Listening
Research into your decision maker’s posts, comments, likes and favourites groups and pages offers valuable insights and the opportunity to tailor content that fits their needs.
This process can be optimised through:
- The use of social listening tools that automate your social selling and uncover deeper data and insights on your target.
- Speed up the research process by tracking keywords related to your target.
- Monitor their social media activity and behaviour in real time to be the first to react with your own valuable content.
Refine Your Content
Now you have built up a strong buyer persona through social selling, it’s time to refine your content. Armed with the knowledge of your buyer’s key needs and challenges, you can create blogs, videos, surveys, infographics and other content specific to their needs alone. You can connect with your target in a ‘soft’ manner by sharing and quoting their content.
A mention on social media is a powerful signal that you resonate with your potential buyer.
Over time, your buyer will see your commitment through sharing and commenting on their content. They may reciprocate with a follow, presenting an opportunity to view your tailored content in a ‘warm’ non salesy way.
This combination of a soft approach to content sharing and your own tailored content should lead to an eventual conversation. By the time this conversation happens, you will have already built a strong relationship and placed your target into the sales funnel.
Build Lasting Relationships
The next step after a targeted social selling campaign is to take things further and more personable:
- At this point, you might want to invite your target buyer to share insights on a guest blog post or on a collaborative video.
- If you are not quite ready to commit to a collaboration, try joining their groups on LinkedIn. Regular interaction in this private network will strengthen your ABM strategy through positioning you as a thought leader.
- Use Social Listening to determine that one successful LinkedIn approach, referral, insights -, or trigger selling, to build loyalty and challenge that one stakeholder converting him into a suitable call2action.
Social Selling is the B2B marketing strategy that will improve your ABM-strategy and skyrocket your ROI within ABM-accounts, if implemented correctly.
Wherever you are on this topic at this particular moment, it might be interesting to reach out, share information & experience.
I am happy to share experiences, methods and suitable business cases, based on your ABM challenges and need.
Please send me a LinkedIn message or call me at my mobile: +31(0)650663733.
About the Author: Peter Rovers is managing Partner of 2MARK-IT, a global Social Selling & marketing, consultancy and enablement firm.
