Social selling may be the new norm, but without proper audience engagement, even your most earnest efforts could be seen by your potential customers as nothing but annoying spam. In this article, we talk about how you can ensure your social selling campaigns hit the right mark.
Ever since the social media boom around the turn of the decade, marketers and entrepreneurs alike have thrown themselves into it with gusto.
When they do, it’s often in search of the answer to online marketing’s billion-dollar question:
How Can We Make Social Media Work for Us?
How can we hitch our cart to the social media bandwagon and ride it all the way to increased sales and greater brand awareness?
How can we use platforms such as Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook to find our audience and convert potential leads into actual sales?
One answer, of course, is social selling.
Rising to prominence as both a turn of phrase and a method of approach over the past few years or so, you’ve likely already heard about social selling, so we’ll spare you the need to read over the same stuff you may have already read.
What we will say, however, is that when you strip away all that hype, this seemingly new approach to using social media as a sales channel is really no different than any other method we’ve heard about in the past.
Indeed, package it up however you like, the answer to the ultimate question of how can we use social media to make sales all comes down to one single answer:
Engagement
Yes, there may be other things involved.
Yes, social selling may involve brand building, content sharing, and social listening, but all of those things are ultimately different means to achieving the same result:
Developing relationships with your customers.
At least, they are if they’re done right.
When Social Selling Becomes Spam
We live in an age where customers no longer need to put up with being marketed and sold to all day long if they chose not to.
With online ad-blockers, fast-forward buttons on their television remotes, and greater control over how and when they consume content, finding a potential new customer and diving straight in with your sales pitch is no longer going to cut it.
Not that all businesses seem to have grasped this yet.
As sophisticated as social media has become in recent years, there are still some who take the hard sales approach, finding a potential customer and hitting them with a quick tweet or message that all but screams ‘hey, we’re really awesome, come buy our stuff.’
I’m not sure about you, but from where standing, that’s spam; contacting people without their permission in an effort to sell them something they haven’t asked for.
If those customers have found ways to avoid blatant advertising elsewhere, they’re unlikely to tolerate it on social media.
How to Do Social Selling Without Spamming
Again, this all comes down to relationships, engaging with your audience about the things that matter to them, establishing some level of trust in your brand and earning the privilege of being able to pitch to those you engage with.
Think about it another way.
Go offline and try to build a new relationship with a total stranger by talking about how good you are and why they should invest their time and energy in you.
Now try building a different relationship by asking that stranger about them, complimenting them, doing them a favour, finding out what interests them, and engaging them in conversation about it.
No prizes for guessing which approach is going to produce the best results.
Apply that same approach to your social selling strategy, and you may well just find the answer to that billion-dollar question of how social media can work for you.
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