The social selling revolution has changed the way we do business. Gone are the days of cold calling and emailing to get in touch with prospects, social media provides a much more personal medium for prospect engagement.
But social selling is not just about using social media to connect with customers; it's also about staying top-of-mind through constant marketing efforts, providing excellent customer service, and establishing trust by understanding your buyer personas. On this Golden Nugget of The ROI Online Podcast, CEO Lenwood Ross will share with us the four pillars that can help you become a social selling master!
Click the video to watch below!
It's the future of sales and it doesn't involve cold-calling. Social selling is a new approach to prospecting that allows you from establishing rapport with your prospects, who are already connected to you in some way or form through social media channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, etc.
Lenwood Ross talks to us about how social selling is a way for your business to zero in on prospects who are reachable through social media and build rapport with them. This can replace the dreaded practice of cold calling, which wastes time spent reaching out to people you don't know or have any connection with.
Here we have the four most important pillars of social selling:
Number one is social presence
Most people don't realize this but whether you are intentional about it or not, you have a social presence. The question is whether that social presence is going to be working for you, or working against you. So if you have a LinkedIn profile, for example, and it's incomplete, and there's no picture, it's working against you, because if you're selling something, or you have a business, one of the first things that people will do is go and look your LinkedIn profile up. So we can craft a social presence that will make people want to like you and get to know you.
Number two is your network
The larger your network, the more opportunities you're going to have. So you really need to constantly be building your network, but you want to be strategic about it because it's not just numbers. If you have 20,000 people who don't care about what you do, or what you have to say, it will be meaningless.
Lenwood shares an example of how a guy on LinkedIn had 200,000 followers and was putting out content every day, no engagement at all and he was using some kind of automation to get all these followers that don't care about what he's writing about. That's not going to do you any good. So you want to be crafting a network that turns into a community over time.
Number three is engagement
We want to engage with people, and we want people engaging with us. And there are things that we can do to make that happen. There are social media platforms that we can use to make it so that when you're engaging with somebody, they know about it. So every time someone comments on your content or likes one of your posts, the person who posted it knows about it and there's an opportunity for a conversation.
Number four is content
You got to have content. Everybody needs content.
The beauty of this thing called content, and what Lenwood calls the democratization of content is that anybody can create it right? I can create. The beauty of it is that you can now get your viewpoint your message out. So if you're somebody that has something to say, this is like the goose that laid the golden egg, because now the unique selling proposition is you.
"So if you have even if, you know, I tell people this all the time, I share content as well as create original content. Taking things that I've learned, and I'm formulating my own opinions about, and I write an article or blog about it, or even when I post the piece that I write myself, that's original to me, but I take that content, and I share that, but I don't just share it, like, oh, here's their stuff. I always put what I think about that. Sometimes I agree, sometimes I don't, this piece is more important than that piece. And that's how I add value, that's how I build my reputation."
You should start a social selling campaign today to win back the business you are losing.
We know that it's not easy for businesses who have been using traditional marketing strategies until now but once they finish reading this guide, they will be able to confidently incorporate social media into their campaigns and see an increase in customer base as well as sales revenues.
We hope that this social selling guide has been helpful for you. Now that you know what social selling is and the four pillars of social selling, it's time to start implementing these principles into your marketing campaigns so you can win back the business you're losing. Don't forget to include social media in all aspects of your digital marketing strategy because once people see how much value they get from interacting with brands on social channels, their customer base will grow as well as sales revenues.
