In a time where social media can be automated and scheduled with just a few clicks, it’s easy to forget the power of authenticity and how much it adds to our social interactions. In reality, social media is inherently personal and a winning social selling strategy will incorporate personalized and meaningful interactions.
So, what’s the best way to sell authentically when using social media to reach a larger audience of clients and prospects? Here are our top tips:
1. Offer Your Customers Value
Creating lasting and meaningful engagement with your audience requires a shift from selling to providing value. To put it simply, you want to offer your customers something of value in exchange for their time.
Informative, educational, or entertaining content usually performs best and gives you a reason to reach out. Once you see customers interacting with your blog, podcasts or books, this is the perfect segway to discuss your product or service.
2. Make it Personal
The beauty of social media is that it gives others a glimpse into your personality and allows people to get to know you better. If you’re reaching out to prospects on social channels, it’s critical to personalize messages based on shared likes, interests, hobbies, etc.
Prospects will often reveal important tidbits in their bio, groups, or content they share and you can bring this up on the next call or email. These social selling techniques are definitely noticed and the extra investment in time helps you to stand out from the other communications that less savvy sales reps tend to use.
3. Keep the Conversation Going
Part of what makes social selling an attractive strategy is that it allows you to have a constant pulse and open dialogue with potential customers.
Highly effective social selling means making the effort to keep an ongoing conversation that is mutually beneficial for both you and your customers. You can’t expect your customers to give you their attention only when you have exciting news to share, you need to keep an open dialogue with them at all times to build trust and keep them engaged at all times.
Make sure to focus only on the social channels that are best targeted to your customers as opposed to trying to get the attention of everyone on every social channel that exists.
A targeted and well thought out interaction is a much better approach to social selling. In the long run, it will yield much better results which will help you increase leads and close more deals. Be sure to use insights and analytics to measure and refine your social messages. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter all offer powerful (and free) metrics.
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