Social selling is a no-brainer for most businesses, eCommerce or otherwise, but creating a scalable social selling machine is no mean feat.
How do you keep tabs on all relevant sales conversations? How do you balance engagement and community management with sales? What happens when customer support requests start to flood your feed(s)?
Fear not — a scalable social selling strategy is merely the product of some careful planning and strategic time management. Here are seven easy steps you can take towards a social selling strategy that won’t let you down. (Before you dive in — head these words of warning about social selling done wrong).
Define your social purpose
A good social selling strategy starts with a purposeful social media strategy.
You won’t be able to engage with customers or leads on social media if your channels and targeting are wrong in the first place.
The best brands on social media have a clear message, a coherent visual style, and post consistently.
If you know LinkedIn works for you — great. Stay there. Start publishing your company blog posts on LinkedIn Pulse, but don’t feel the need to start creating Instagram Stories (unless that’s where your customers are). Stick with a simple social media strategy, rather than chasing after new formats and platforms.
Stick to clear social media boundaries that make sense for your business model. Clarity will make your social strategy much more scalable.
Have a goal-oriented growth plan
It’s also important to have clear goals so that you can track the success of your social selling strategy.
Have clear social media selling KPIs — this could include things like the number of conversations had, number of sales made from social, traffic to a landing page, reach and impressions etc. Make your goals realistic, but remember that a healthy sense of challenge can also help galvanize sales teams.
Without clear goals, things tend to fizzle out; social media is no exception. As you scale, keep your KPIs and goals at the heart of your strategy so that you invest in the things that matter the most.
Hook up your data sources for better sales management
This is a mundane, yet essential, element of social selling. So many brands skip (or mess up) the data part of social selling, ending up with a sales pipeline that nobody can effectively manage or act on (definitely not what you want as you scale).
Make sure that you have a CRM (or equivalent system) that can handle the complexities of social media selling. For eCommerce merchants, multi-channel selling is a must. You want to be available on all possible platforms and be ready to close a deal and accept a sale whenever (and wherever) possible. Social selling is also about being able to bridge that gap between prospect and customer and deal with any support issues or queries quickly and efficiently.
Having good systems in place will help you save time. Being available and present on social media is often the product of lots of intensive data work. Automation can help take some of the burden away from you by ensuring that laborious tasks like contact research and management aren’t slowing you down.
Data management is essential for when you scale, so don’t try to cheat the system and grow before you have proper systems in place.
Invest heavily in social research
For social selling to work, you need to invest in research. Prospect research and engaging with people are some of the most effective ways to use social selling for your business.
Selling on LinkedIn for example, is all about brand credibility, building trust, conversations, and creating incredibly relevant content. All of this comes from intensive research and a deep understanding of your customer base. LinkedIn groups, Pulse, and company profile pages are all great places to find current customer preoccupations and industry themes.
Use social platforms to create better customer profiles, get new content ideas, and improve your sales targeting.
Doing this at scale will allow you to create really clear customer journeys — and you might even find that you need multiple social profiles to appeal to all your diverse target groups. A customer journey map is an essential social selling tool.
Nail your value proposition
There are many ways to approach people and prospects on social media. Whether you decide to go down the direct messaging, advertising, or engagement route, you always need to have a clear value proposition.
A vague first touch on social can be annoying (unless you’re just genuinely engaging in a developing conversation). But when you’re in ‘sales mode’, you need to get to the point incredibly quickly.
Think about the following when designing yours:
- What does your product and service help solve for people?
- How are you different from other similar services?
- How are you similar to other services out there (also important)?
- How can you make your uniqueness crystal clear to new prospects?
Make your value proposition front and center of your messaging. Experiment with your approach to find a succinct and effective message delivery formula. Remember, a video or an image may be just as effective as the written word.
Having a clear set of value propositions and openers will help you scale. They are also the first stage of training others to help you with your social selling strategy.
Launch and test
It’s great to launch into social media selling, but it’s also important to take some time to pull back and analyze your current strategy from time to time.
Testing and improving the positioning of your social media outreach activity should be a combination of looking at social media analytics, reviewing your sales results, and feedback from user testing.
A social selling strategy that has not gone through a review process is not one to scale — you could be easily investing in the wrong types of content and mismatched targeting.
Delegation is easy — try it
At the end of the day, delegation is essential to business growth.
Contact research, list building, scheduling, cross-promotion — there are lots of social media tasks that can be safely outsourced.
Whether it’s a consultant, or someone from Upwork, social media help is never too far away. A community manager or a social selling guru with a proven track record may help unlock the potential of your current customer and prospect community.
Social selling isn’t always the right route for your business, but 99% of businesses would benefit from doing more on social media. Even if social media feels more natural as primarily a research tool right now, social selling at scale can be hugely profitable and worthwhile for a wide range of businesses.
Rodney Laws
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