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5 Tools Everyone in the Social Selling Game Should Be Using
Social selling involves connecting with your prospects on social media and engaging them through one-on-one conversation. The result is a meaningful relationship where you learn about their needs, and they learn about the unique value you offer.
It takes more of your resources to have this kind of personal experience with your audience, but it’s well worth it. In addition, there are tools available to help take some of the work out of the process.
Social Listening Tools
Social listening is an important aspect of social selling. It helps you locate your target prospects online and create a profile that describes them in detail. This profile helps you identify the ideal person to seek out conversations with.
Social listening tools also help you find conversations and content relevant to keywords and hashtags you choose. They allow you to monitor discussions over several platforms at once so you can find opportunities more quickly.
Content Creation Tools
Social selling requires a great deal of content creation. You need to share content that will interest your prospects and get them talking. Creating this material can take up a lot of your time.
However, there are software tools to help with every aspect of content creation and sharing. Some programs like Grammarly help you write better and edit your work. Keyword tools like Uber Suggest can help you discover trending topics that you can write about. For visual content, there are programs like Canva that allow you to make stunning images easily.
Content Curation Tools
Content curation allows you to bring interesting content directly to your audience without having to create it yourself. Share a piece of news that’s relevant to your niche, and you can ask your audience members what they think to create a conversation.
The only challenge is finding good material to share. Tools like Feedly and Flipbook help by bringing together stories based on parameters you set. Programs like Google Trends and BuzzSumo can also help you find trending topics to share content about.
Monitoring and Tracking
You’ll need to monitor and track your results to make sure your social selling strategy is working. There are a variety of tools available to help you do this. Some social media platforms offer robust tracking tools built-in, so check your platforms first. You want to see which of your posts are having the greatest impact on your social selling efforts.
If you’re using a customer relationship management (or CRM) program, you can monitor and track your progress directly in there. Keep track of how many conversations you’re having and which ones turn into sales.
Organizing and Managing Your Social Selling
Finally, you can use tools like a social media dashboard to create a schedule, manage your time, organize your prospects, and view your activity across all platforms.
Social selling does take some time and effort, but the rewards are well worth it. Take advantage of these tools, and you’ll start seeing results quickly.
The Top Reasons Salespeople Switch from Cold Calling to Social Selling
There’s a debate raging: Which is better, social selling or cold calling? Proponents of each say their method is the most effective at turning leads into qualified buyers.
But today, more and more salespeople are switching from cold calling to social selling, and here’s why.
What is Social Selling?
Most salespeople have experience with cold calling, but what is social selling? Social selling involves finding prospects online, usually through social media, and then engaging them in one-on-one conversations. The goal is to learn more about people and build relationships that will eventually lead to sales.
This is different from social media marketing because it focuses on the individual rather than casting the net wide. It offers the one-on-one conversation of cold calling but using a digital platform instead of the phone.
More Targeted Leads
A big advantage of social selling is that you’re able to qualify leads much more effectively before you make the initial contact. You can create an ideal customer profile and use social listening tools to search for the right people online.
By looking at user profiles, you can vet prospects and qualify them even before you make first contact. Social media allows you to search for keywords and topics within the conversations people are having to find good leads.
By the time you open the conversation, you can be fully confident that you’re talking to a potential buyer.
Opportunity to Build Your Personal Brand
With social selling, you can warm up prospects before you engage with them by creating a strong personal brand. The goal is to establish yourself as a trusted expert in your niche online.
You can do this through sharing relevant and engaging content and growing your audience. Your prospects will come to see you as a helpful authority who has solutions to their problems. This will makeyour conversations much more productive.
Add More Value
It’s hard to offer the maximum value to a prospect in a cold call. There’s no way you can be prepared to answer any question the person might have. When you’re talking through social media, you have more opportunity to provide insights and help.
Social selling creates a two-way dialogue where you listen to the prospect and their issues, and then provide the help they need. You can start adding value at the outset of the conversation, and this will lead to greater customer satisfaction.
Social Selling Works
The main reason so many salespeople are switching to social sellingis simply that it works. Not only does it bring you more targeted leads, it also makes the entire process easier and more efficient. Though it takes some work upfront, the results this strategy brings will be well worth the time invested.
What I Wish I Knew About Social Selling Before Starting
Social selling offers a great way to engage your audience, build your brand, and see more earnings for your efforts. It involves learning about your audience through social listening, creating highly targeted content to engage them, and using one-on-one discussions to drive sales.
Are you ready to get started earning more through social selling? Here are the things I wish I knew about it before I got started. Hopefully this will help you avoid making the same mistakes.
It’s Not About Selling
Of course, the end goal for social selling is to earn more through your products and services. But this shouldn’t be the primary focus.
Social selling is supposed to add value, build relationships, and help the prospect make the right buying decision. If you do this correctly, the prospect will naturally buy from you when they need your products or services. There is no hard sell or promotion involved.
Your one-on-one conversations should focus solely on providing value, answering questions, and helping with your expertise.
Social Selling Tools Make It Easy
Social selling takes a great deal of time and resources, but you don’t have to do everything yourself. Software tools can help by automating and taking out some of the work.
What kind of tools can you use? Social listening tools help you find your audience and engage with them. Content tools allow you to make and share relevant content that will lead to conversations with prospects.
Monitoring software is essential for tracking your metrics, and there are organizational tools that can help with scheduling and time management.
What Social Selling Isn’t
Social selling isn’t social media marketing. While it shares some of the same features, you’re not just sharing content online and leading people to your offer.
What makes social selling unique is the personal aspect. Your marketing is supposed to lead to one-on-one conversations with prospects. This is a dialog, not simply broadcasting your marketing message. Through these discussions, you can help the prospect with issues they’re facing and learn more about them.
You Can Learn from Your Competitors
While we spend time perfecting our content strategy and focusing on our prospects, we often forget to research the competition. Your competitors offer a wealth of information about your market. You can learn from them and get ideas for your own social selling.
For example, you can discover what topics they’re covering in their content. You can read comments to see what kinds of discussions they’re having with their audiences. This can give you ideas and show you where there are underserved segments of the market.
Social Selling is the New Online Marketing
Salespeople are switching in droves from traditional sales and marketing to social selling for the simple reason that it works. If you haven’t started leveraging one-on-one conversations with your target market yet, now’s the time to do it.
8 Reasons Your Social Selling is Broken (And How to Fix It)
Your social selling plan has been put into action, but you’re still not seeing the results you want. What’s going on?
Social selling is a highly effective way to leverage social media and sell more. It works through the one-on-one conversations you have with prospects and, when done correctly, can bring higher conversions than other marketing methods.
Here are the reasons your social selling might be broken and what you can do to fix it.
You Don’t Know Your Prospects Well Enough
The first step in social selling is to get to know your prospects well. You need to create a profile that includes demographics as well as data on their attitudes and behaviors.
If you don’t understand your audience inside and out — their goals, their dreams, and their pain points — then you’ll struggle to see success with social selling. Spend some time researching your prospects so you can deeply understand them.
You’re Focused on Selling
Buyers don’t want to feel like they’re being sold to. If you’re “selling” through your interactions, you’re losing people.
Instead, the focus should be on building relationships, which you do by providing value. Use your conversations to give prospects the help they’re looking for, and they’ll come to you when they’re ready to buy.
You’re Not Listening
Your conversations should be a two-way dialogue. If you’re doing all the talking, then you’re doing it wrong.
Use the discussions with prospects to give them a chance to talk. This is a great opportunity to learn from them and gather feedback. Listen to what they’re telling you and then use this information to offer solutions.
Asking for Something First
Trust is the key to selling online, and it’s even more important for social selling. People are distrustful and looking for signs that they shouldn’t buy from you.
If you ask for something upfront before you’ve established trust, this will drive prospects away. Make sure you’re providing value to the prospect first, before you even think about asking anything of them.
Your Content Isn’t Relevant
Social selling requires a great deal of content to engage your audience. Through this content, you can create natural opportunities for one-on-one conversations.
If your content isn’t doing this, it could mean that it’s not relevant or engaging to your audience. Does it focus on your prospects’ pain points? Is it interesting enough to get them talking?
Forgetting to Monitor and Track Progress
If you’re not monitoring and tracking results, there’s no way to understand whether your efforts are effective or not.
Start by identifying the goal for your social selling. Then, choose a few key metrics that would track progress toward this goal. You can use tracking tools to make monitoring easy.
Your Profile Isn’t Ready
Before you get out there and start talking to people, you need to make sure your social profile is ready. It should be easy to understand who you are and what you’re all about with a quick glance.
Your profile also needs all the appropriate links to your offers so that people can easily find what they need.
You’re Still Wondering if Social Selling is Right for You
Don’t make the mistake of waiting to get started with social selling. Your competitors are already engaging their prospects one-on-one, and you should be doing it too.
The 5 Myths About Social Selling
Social selling is a new tactic that’s taking the digital sales and marketing world by storm. Before you add this tool to your marketing repertoire, let’s debunk the major myths around social selling.
Myth 1: It’s Just Social Media Marketing Rebranded
Many people make the mistake of believing that social selling is just a buzzword for social media marketing, but this is not true at all.
The two do share some similarities: Both leverage social media to brand you as an expert and lead prospects to sales in a much more organic way than traditional marketing methods.
But, while social media marketing casts your net wide and broadcasts your message, social selling is based on one-on-one conversations you hold with your prospects.
Through these conversations, you listen, learn about their problems, and offer help. You build a relationship where they will come to you when they need your products or services.
Myth 2: Social Selling is Extremely Hard Work
While it sounds like a great deal of work holding one-on-one conversations with prospects, it’s much easier than you think. Much of the process can be automated or made easier using software tools.
Tools can help you locate prospects, find conversations to join, build your personal brand, and manage your social selling schedule. There are also ways they can help with creating content and finding good content to share.
Tools are also essential for monitoring your progress. You’ll need to choose a few metrics to track in order to see whether you’re reaching your goal.
Myth 3: Content is Key
Content is an important element of your social selling strategy, but it shouldn’t be the main focal point. The content you share with your audience is meant to inform and, even more importantly, engage them. It needs to be relevant and valuable, but that’s not the main point.
Since the goal is to engage people in conversation, the nature of the content is different. It’s aimed at asking questions, soliciting opinions, and inviting your audience to discuss a subject of interest to them. Content is used to facilitate one-on-one discussions.
Myth 4: You Must Be a Social Media Expert
You don’t need to be an expert at social media to use it for social selling.
What drives success in social selling is the strength of your personal brand, your understanding of your prospects’ needs, and your willingness to provide the value they’re looking for.
You’ll use social media platforms for researching your audience and gaining opportunities to talk to them. Once you have the basics of social media down, the rest is just interacting with people through the platform.
Myth 5: You Can Start Without a Plan
Does it sound like social selling is something you’re ready to tackle? While you should start leveraging this opportunity as soon as possible, you shouldn’t do it without a solid plan and clearly defined goals. This bit of planning will go a long way later in ensuring your success.
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