We had the pleasure of presenting at the second-ever evening event organised by the Bristol meet-up for digital marketing and social engagement professionals, Rules Of Engagement. Loom decided to tackle the practical elements of Social Selling for Marketers and presented alongside Sam from Best of Bristol. It was another great evening with lots of valuable takeaways and interesting discussions.
If you missed it, check out the slides from our talk below…
The key takeaways about Social Selling are:
- Make sure you understand your audience’s sales journey so you can decide where and how social media can be most helpful in the sales funnel. For some of you this maybe at the education phase of the buying journey only, for others it maybe at the solution phase too, and for some it maybe at every stage of the buying journey.
- Work closely with your sales team if you have one, as well as seeking information from other internal teams to feed the knowledge you have about your audience.
- Set SMART goals to focus your social media marketing efforts and have clear targets to work towards.
- Have a strong brand and clear USPs. Make sure your profiles explicitly express the benefits that hitting follow will bring – think beyond your products or service too. When I land on your Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn profile, I’m not looking to buy something, I’m looking for interesting profiles that will add value if I decide to follow.
- Use your known audience to market on Facebook – whether that’s a newsletter list, data from a native app or traffic from your website. It works better much better than random targeting and it’s cheaper.
- Organise your audience into smaller, niche audiences based on industry, interests or job titles. This will make it much easier to create relevant content and map it to your customer’s journey.
- Don’t stop listening to your audiences find out about their interests, needs and pain points. Look for changing opinions and trends, have your finger on the pulse always.
- Don’t forget to BE social – spark interesting conversations with your audience, share great content, ask questions, give them new ideas…genuine engagement is better than a metric and it’s great for building trust. Trust is great for sales.
- Look for trigger events which indicate that someone is ready to buy your product or service. Be proactive with this information by passing it onto your sales team or hitting that audience with a stronger, tailored sales message.
- Regularly make time to analyse how you are performing against your set goals and look at ways you can improve. The insights you get from social media will not only make you a better seller, but can improve other marketing strategies and wider business goals.
- Remember social media is not a silo, it relies on great content, good PR and an excellent website. These should all be held together with a strategy that is aligned with your business goals.
At Loom we offer social media services for businesses in Bristol and beyond. Contact us on hello@loomdigital.co.uk or call us on 0117 923 2021.
*at the time of writing we were called ‘Digirank’. This article was updated in September 2019 to reflect our name change.
