Table Of Contents
What Is Social Selling And How Is It Effective For Brands?
Social selling in marketing is a practice in which a brand uses its social media channels to connect with customers. It develops a relationship with them and engages them to get potential leads.
Social selling is a powerful method that helps businesses reach their sales targets. You may just think of it as a modern-day relationship building. If your brand has a LinkedIn Page, a Facebook Business, or a Twitter profile, or if it is active on any other social media platform, you have already engaged in social selling basics.
Any type of business may use social selling. Whether you are a big company or an independent entrepreneur, or if you are selling handmade granola or jet skis, social media is an incredibly effective tool that helps nurture relationships with customers.
What Is Social Selling?
In simple terms, social selling is a strategic method that sellers use to connect and build relationships with customers through social media channels. Recently, social selling has converted into virtual selling as businessmen have been increasingly using sales technology to connect with potential buyers.
Virtual selling it allows people from sales to build relationships with customers through social networks.
Virtual selling and social selling allow salespeople to build stronger relationships, boost social credibility, and reach ultimate sales goals.
As communication and technology advance, connecting with potential customers for B2C and B2B markets has replaced outdated selling methods. These older techniques of sales, such as cold calling, lack the personal nature and convenience of it.
Using social media channels of the brand and sales tech collect to actively engage with customers and develop a relationship with them helps you reach the business sales target.
What Is A Social Selling Index?
The social selling index is the metric used to measure the impact the social selling efforts of brands cause.
The concept of SSI was first introduced by LinkedIn in 2014. The LinkedIn SSI comprises four components that help establish a score. This goes through a regular update.
It judges if you are:
- Establishing a professional brand that has a well-managed profile on LinkedIn.
- Finding the right individuals on the platform.
- Sharing conversation that is relevant and inspires conversation.
- Builds and strengthens relationships.
If you want to find your LinkedIn SSI score, you need to sign into your LinkedIn account and go to the Social Selling Index dashboard. You will treat your score as an initial point to start improving your performance in social selling.
The SSI report you get will tell you how to stack up in your specific industry and against your network.
Benefits Of Social Selling
Social selling primarily impacts -as its name says- the sales of them. However, the sales team reaps, which benefits the whole organization. Let us go through some of these benefits that you can expect after implementing a solid strategy of social selling in business.
Increase In Brand Visibility
When multiple employees are sharing their content and optimize their social profiles, their networks are getting clicked and engaged. Most times, these are individuals who may not be familiar with the organization. And did not even realize what they were missing out on.
More And Better Quality Leads
With an increase in brand visibility, the lead quality and volume also increase. The team of social sellers, who are armed with content, may educate all of their social connections, primarily on LinkedIn. Additionally, people trust more on the recommendation from their friends, family, or colleagues way more than any kind of marketing.
Boosting Website Traffic
With high brand visibility and more content sharing from employees, more people will tend to search for the company online, which will, in turn, generate website traffic.
Improvement In Sales Results
Other than the increase in quality leads helping sales, social selling is also a brilliant way to increase the average size of the deal and drive better winning rates. Social selling may help you reach out to more potential buyers in an organization, which will drive up the size of the entire deal. More potential denotes more customers, which in turn means more revenue generation for the company.
Importance Of Social Selling
The world today is digitally heavy, and social selling is the best improvement over the traditional sales technique that may often be impersonal. Through direct engagement, such as liking, commenting, and sharing the posts of customers, companies may organically generate social media credibility and generate ?free? advertising opportunities to turn prospects into buyers.
Which Are The Best Social Selling Platforms?
The choice of a platform must depend on the target audience that you are serving and the approach of your social selling. In short, it depends from one business to another.
Instagram and Twitter are great platforms when it comes to interacting with customers. They have the right tools to help in responding to customer queries, and they are casual virtual platforms where you can communicate naturally.
In simple terms, these platforms are perfect for building relationships.
LinkedIn, on the other hand, is more of a formal business platform, which is ideal for the B2B organization that is looking to identify and reach out to business decision-makers. Here, businesses may connect directly with potential customers to build a professional relationship.
?Top-performing salespeople today utilize social selling through sales technology and tools, like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, to leverage all the data they need at their fingertips to reach out to the right buyers with the right message at the right time.?
The Bottom Line
Social selling is one of the most calculated and efficient ways to improve the engagement of a company with prospects, who later convert into buyers.
While it is a strategy that the sales team primarily follows, it benefits the whole of the organization by generating more leads and, therefore, bringing in more revenue. Social selling helps in establishing a professional brand with a strong network of prospects. Social selling also helps brands engage with their target audience with meaningful insights and nurture healthy customer relationships.
Continue Reading:
