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Nowadays, the volume of people utilizing social media continues to increase, pushing sales and marketing teams to apply new ways to get leads. Social media brings more opportunities and allows people to target leads more effectively.
However, how to sell on social media? The answer lies in the social selling meaning and the gentle approach behind it. Read on to know more about the social selling process and get some social selling tips to use.
What is Social Selling?
Before all, social selling contemplates utilizing social media platforms to look for leads, connect with them directly and establish deeper relations with them to better convert. Usually, the social selling process requires the sales team to develop a brand page or an employee page to act on behalf of the company. Later, they engage with the prospects, give solutions, and offer a deal.
Notably, the social selling definition is different from the social marketing one. To define social selling correctly, one should see that the main distinction is concerned with the goals. Social media marketing follows the branding and marketing goals, while social selling aims to communicate with leads to enhance sales directly.
Why is Social Selling Important?
The importance of social selling lies in better engagement with your target audience by modern instruments with a greater reach and targeting. Sales teams usually apply cold calling and cold emailing. Even though cold calling is not so popular today, cold emailing is a widely used technique, while social selling can add to it.
For instance, you design a lead magnet to get emails from your leads, then utilize a specific software to check their validity (B2B salespeople are likely to use this email verifier https://getprospect.com/email-verifier).
However, the cold email does not always provide quality connections, while the social selling can. How? Social selling strategies aim to approach the leads with the solution to their pain points, educate them, and only after this produce the offer to close the deal.
The sales team can first connect with customers and then provide them with a more accessible offer. At the same time, as social network selling allows using the best functions of social platforms, it enables you to do better targeting and social listening. Lastly, if you apply the proper social selling techniques, it will likely improve your brand authority and raise you as an opinion leader.
Best Social Selling Techniques
The social selling process is built around three main concepts: networking, expertise, and relationships. Thus, the critical social selling tips refer to how you position yourself and engage with the leads. It means that you have to think about what you publish and how you communicate.
Let’s look in detail at the critical social selling strategies:
Provide value and help
First, the salesperson needs to start their engagement by offering value to establish good relationships with leads and show that they are human. You are not selling instantly and annoying the clients, but provide a valuable piece for free.
In this regard, you have different materials that can be interesting to the leads and crucial to building the image. In particular, you can offer guides, case studies, e-books, and recommendations on your page or in the comments. For it, you can use a link or direct people to your page. It is essential to educate people and help them find solutions to their pain points. As a result, you will develop relationships with them and attract potentially loyal customers.
Put the expertise at the foundation
At the same time, social network selling requires you to create a particular image with expertise in the center. Why? It is to maximize your efforts and support your actions with trust. The few chances are that people will follow your advice if you have no recognition or your LinkedIn page is shady. Thus, you should create a pleasant and detailed page and support it with quality materials.
Firstly, create a profile and fill all the fields and blocks on experience and skills that many social media ask to fill. The more details you offer, and the more profound you are, the better trust you will have in the preliminary stages. It is especially true on LinkedIn. Then, when you have established a plan and have some followers, you can start organizing events and ask other people to contribute to your solutions.
One of the options is to write a direct message to an expert, or use an email address finder to extract their corporate email and start cooperation. When you get recognition, you will need to keep producing suitable materials to be visible.
Engage in different places
Lastly, do not limit yourself to the personal page when applying social selling techniques. You can engage with the leads on their feed, in industry groups, and a comment section. Your main goal is to look for pain points and provide a solution to them. In this regard, you can search for issues by hashtags or just scroll through the news feed within the groups.
At the same time, be nice and do not push people. Your first task is to help. In the end, make sure you leave a link or an encouragement to visit your page or website for more information.
