With over 3 billion people using social media it is important that businesses learn how to utilise these platforms to boost their sales and build brand engagement.
The key to implementing social selling into your sales plan is taking the time to build and nurture your relationships with your customers online. Social selling differs from traditional sales techniques as it relies on building a rapport with your customer before you initiate the sale, the opposite of techniques such as cold calling.
Businesses should work to build their brand awareness on sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter. By creating interesting and relevant content, brands will be able to connect with their target audience and build their engagement which will, in turn, generate leads and convert to sales.
Engagement is key to social selling. The more engagement your content has, the more potential customers you are reaching. However, customers want to engage with content that interests them and offers them something in return with many shying away from anything directly promoting your products or services.
So how do you build engagement as a brand?
Choose your platform carefully
There is no point in spending time and money to create content for a platform that your target audience doesn’t use. In addition, some businesses are more suited to one platform than another. With that being said, it is important to carefully consider which social media platforms you are going to use and for what reason.
Things to consider include your target audience, your brand values, which social media platforms your ideal customer would use and what content you want to create. It’s important not to spread your resources too thinly and have poor quality content across a lot of sites.
Optimise your content
Once you have decided which platforms you should use, you need to optimise your content. This means creating content that is relevant, suitable and properly sized for the site that you are using. First impressions count and your content should look professional and appealing.
At this point, it may also be worth investing some time and money into training to improve the content you are creating. At Maverrik, we provide a range of training programmes that cover topics such as writing copy, improving your digital sales technique and generating leads online, all designed to help boost your sales.
Do your research
It is important to have a good level of information before you start creating any content or even choose your platform. Firstly, you need to have established your target audience and brand values. Then you should research what your competitors are doing online and analyse any related trends, themes or keywords.
This information will be vital to increasing your engagement as for example from your customer profile you can gain an idea of what your target audience enjoys and are into. This will help you create content that is interesting and engaging. Plus you can target potential customers using the relevant keywords and trending topics.
Establish your expertise
Your customers need to be able to trust the information that you are providing, even when it is being distributed via social media. If the tone of your content is off or it is factually incorrect, potential customers will be driven towards your competitors. This is why businesses need to establish their expertise in their market quickly.
You can establish your expertise in a number of ways. Publishing useful content that is free and benefits your customer is a good place to start. It may also be useful to create infographics that can be shared and other content such as podcasts, research papers and even free eBooks or guides. Building brand engagement is all about value.
Be transparent
As previously mentioned, customers need to be able to trust your information and your business as a brand. This is a vital component to improving engagement as customers will only engage with posts that are genuine and relatable. The easiest way to do this is to be authentic and personable with everything you post.
Do not try to hide your sales techniques in your content, customers will be able to spot this and will lose faith in your brand. Instead, focus on creating good quality content and the sales will follow naturally. Be sure to engage with your customers in the comments or by using live videos to add authenticity to your account as well.
