Sales & marketing teams are coming round to the reality of Social Selling and it’s unique benefits to improve digital branding, transform sales into Smart Social Sellers and drive a predictive pipeline.
Social Selling helps you find the prospects that fit best for your pipeline, is common practice among the businesses with high ROI and has the data to eliminate any doubts and follow a personalised approach.
Wherever you are on the journey, nothing is stopping you in improving:
- Brand and credibility
- Customer loyalty
- Pipeline predictability
- Transforming sales from a traditional sales into a Smart Social Selling sales.
Here’s 5 ways to leverage social media and fill up your pipeline:
Ditch the old, adopt the new
Cold calls and emails are pretty much dead in the water.
If you want to gain qualified leads:
- Adopt the social media process and behavior
- Find your target audience and engage them on their preferred platform (LinkedIn).
- Build relation-ships with them through educational content
- Pinpoint at their challenges & needs and
- Watch your pipeline filled with serious leads and opportunities grow.
Personalise your content
The biggest brands personalise their content and reap the ROI. Think Netflix, Apple, Google & Facebook. Think how each of these brands successfully engage with their audiences by tailoring content based on available data. But you don’t have to be Netflix to know your buyers. You can build trust with your own niche audience through pain point solving. As you get to know your own buyers, you will gain greater understanding of their wants and needs and how to convert those needs into buys with carefully tailored content.
Leverage LinkedIn
It’s almost guaranteed that your prospects are on LinkedIn. Over the years, LinkedIn has grown a vast database of C-suite professionals and other major industry professionals. If you can learn the etiquette of LinkedIn and how to leverage the network, the possibilities are endless.
The first and most important rule is: don’t be salesy, be helpful.
Build a strong brand if you want to be seen
Position your brand as a visible problem solver. Write your profile from the customers’ eye. When people come across your person LinkedIn website or your LinkedIn business page, they immediately see how you can help them fill in their needs and solve their pain points.
It’s not enough to have web copy stating in vague terms how you solve problems. You need to prove to each prospect that you can solve their issues before even doing it.
Take the right necessary steps:
- Use the right SEO optimised keywords to improve your online visibility
- Tell your story, explain in clear simple terms why you are different from the rest.
- Show your unique expertise in your posts
- Comments and your LinkedIn and Twitter bios
- Act as a really trusted advisor not as a sales.
- Provide a suitable call to action so prospects can reach out to you for help.
- Use assets like LinkedIn / sales Navigator and video to demonstrate your unique authority and knowledge.
- Have eye catching professional images on your profile and craft a tag line that attracts the right prospects.
Leverage existing Clients
Your existing clients are the biggest asset you have. You may have solved some of their problems but they will encounter more. Keep coming back with fresh solutions to new pain points, strengthening the sustainable relationships you have already built, you can keep these clients in the funnel by delighting and making those clients a massive social proof for your brand.
Social Selling is the B2B sales– and marketing strategy that will skyrocket your long term ROI if implemented correctly. In future articles, we will delve more in detail into Social Selling and also how Social Selling adds unique value to Account Based Marketing (ABM), the different types of ABM, and how to implement it.
Drive a predictable pipeline in 2019
Wherever you are on this topic “Social Selling Strategy “ right now, it might be the right time to reach out and book a free consultation with an appropriate consultancy (such as 2MARK-IT!) to discuss your needs and the way to move forward successfully in 2019.
About the Author: Peter Rovers is CEO of 2MARK-IT, a global Social Selling & marketing, consultancy, enablement and training firm.
