Maximizing Your Social Commerce Strategy: A Guide for Brands
An integral part of an inbound marketing strategy, social commerce is a people-oriented take on online purchasing with the potential to transform your connections with customers.
There is a huge possibility here, but it won’t materialize until brands collaborate with platforms, creators, and consumers to do it right.
Companies have a hard time figuring out how to include social commerce into their overall brand strategy because there is no “social commerce playbook” to guide them.
The interdependencies among content producers, influencers, customers, and platforms are what set social commerce apart, but they also force brands to expand their usual norms.
Giving up some measure of command is necessary if they are looking to effectively participate in the co-creation of a social commerce experience.
Instead of trying to micromanage every aspect of the customer’s journey, businesses should put their faith in the people they collaborate with, especially the customers who ultimately make a purchase.
1. Social Selling.
To assist generate leads; salespeople can make use of social selling, which involves interacting with potential customers via social media. Using social listening, salespeople tune in to the online conversations of their ideal customers.
They participate in the social conversations that are most relevant to their target audience and use the information gleaned from these interactions to forge genuine connections with them.
By disrupting the usual transactional experience of customers and businesses, social selling facilitates more organic connections with prospects.
With social media’s instantaneous nature, salespeople have a better chance of making contact with, engaging, and nurturing high-quality leads.
As a result, salespeople may now use offline connections to their advantage, making the 1:1 experience possible. When handled properly, online conversations can lead to face-to-face meetings and, ultimately, deals.
There are clear advantages to both the brand account and the individual when it comes to social selling. To get your sales team off the ground, here are some pointers:
2. Strengthen your Reputation.
The use of social media can aid in establishing a name for oneself. You can build your credibility and online presence with every tweet, LinkedIn post, and Facebook update you make.
Its proof that you’re who you say you are, and it’s a fantastic way to show off your expertise to prospective employers and customers.
It’s not enough to sneak into someone’s direct message (DM) in a “classy” approach to engaging in effective social selling.
It’s about getting acknowledged publicly as the frontrunner in a particular field. By “personalizing” their brands and fostering affinity with appropriate audiences on the individual level through employee accounts, companies like Chili Piper have generated tremendous inbound interest in their products, as explained by Arias.
Trust, according to Sullivan, may be easily established in the digital realm through open discussions that highlight the individuality of the speaker on matters of personal interest. To maximize their social selling potential, he suggests the following communities for sellers to engage with:
- Leaders in your field and in the market your company serves
- Customers who work for businesses that could use your wares
- People you work with! Engage with them and provide thoughtful comments on their postings to show them some internet love.
To establish yourself as and authority in your field, it’s important to publish articles of interest, participate in conversations with insight, and offer solutions to any problems your potential customers may have.
All of this is being done to lay the groundwork for trust. When people find what you have to say to be of interest, they will either repost it, tag you in it, or have a conversation with you about it.
Authoring and posting fresh, industry-related content on LinkedIn is also an option. Asking for recommendations or endorsing others in the hopes that they will endorse you back is another strategy to gain trust and social proof on LinkedIn.
Finally, gets the conversation going around you by asking your network to share and comment.
3. Track down Potential Customers.
Take note: where do you think your prospective customers go to learn more about the issues they might be facing and where can you help them? What kind of group is this?
An online discussion group that meets every week on Twitter or in a dedicated Twitter Space? A secret Facebook community? Settling in to listen to and participate in their talks will get you far.
Although LinkedIn is the go-to for professional connections, Twitter has a more robust search feature and a lower barrier to access.
You can follow anyone you like, from CEOs to celebrities, and they don’t even have to accept your request as they do on LinkedIn or Facebook. They may even start following you back.
The Tweet Reports Twitter Chat Schedule is another great resource for finding popular Twitter discussions to join. Explore conversations happening around topics related to your business, jump in, and start following the most promising leads.
You may learn a lot about your target audience and the issues they care about by searching relevant hashtags on Twitter.
Assuming you’ve already found a few promising leads, they could provide you with introductions to more people. Try checking out the individuals they’re following and following them yourself.
Keep your information structured after you’ve found new customers. Twitter Lists allow you to build public or private feeds that are specific to your interests, saving you time.
Make a Twitter list with your top 25 potential clients, and then make other lists for your rivals, opinion leaders, and existing clientele.
If you visit the list each time you log in to the network, you’ll gain insight into the perspectives of the people who matter and it’ll be simpler to strike up meaningful conversations with them.
4. Maintain your Level of Activity and Contribution.
Engaging in social media requires a significant time investment. If you want to keep the proper individuals following you, you need to keep adding to the conversation. Avoid being a social butterfly by being selective about your network of acquaintances.
You can’t just leave for a few weeks if you’ve got a lot of followers and followers who care about what you have to say on Twitter. Your reliability and credibility could be called into doubt if your network has been abandoned.
You can maintain your social media presence in a variety of ways:
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Contribute your knowledge
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Provide answers
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Keep the customer, the potential purchaser, in mind at all times.
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Increase the specificity of your Twitter post by using hashtags.
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Learn from the leaders in your field and you’ll always be up-to-date and relevant.
There are ramifications if you don’t provide steady value or maintain activity. People will stop following you, block you, and turn off your notifications if you bother them too much. Keeping a low profile will get you nowhere; instead, show that you are regularly check-in.
5. Assess the efficacy of your current social marketing initiatives.
The greatest strategy to improve your social selling skills is to analyze and apply the data from your current activities. Determine which social selling KPIs are most important for your business and focus on improving those areas.
Examine the data you have gathered so far to determine the efficacy of your present strategy. To learn how your tweets are performing, use Twitter’s built-in analytics. Which types of postings get the most attention from your target audience?
Consider what you could improve upon and what you could do differently in light of this information. This might point you in the right direction, giving you an idea of how to improve your efforts.
Sprout Social’s Sales force connectivity is helpful since it allows you to see how social media referrals are performing on your site, which might be difficult to deduce on your own. Beyond just consumers, you can also record communications with other business associates.
Salespeople can use Sprout’s additional functionality to manage their social media profiles in addition to Sales force.
Sprout’s Optimal Send Times is a fantastic tool that helps you get the most out of your social selling efforts, and it’s one of my favorite features. According to Sullivan, “it gives you the optimal time to post on each network by analyzing your audience’s past engagement patterns.”
In a nutshell, analytics can show you which sorts of content resonate most with your target audience and thus serve as the best sales leads. Your ability to reach and engage this audience with compelling messaging will be much improved with the knowledge gained from this analysis.
6. Get Offline.
Social media engagement can be supplemented with email correspondence if enough of your fans can be convinced to make the switch.
However, your ultimate goal should be to transition your online friendships into meaningful offline relationships. Get to know each other better through the medium of social media.
It’s simpler to suggest a phone call or coffee date through Tweet, direct message, or email if you’ve already started a back-and-forth dialogue with someone on social media.
It seems to reason that a prospect would be more inclined to open an email if the subject line referred to your exchange on Twitter. It is up to you now to make sure that your offline reputation matches your online one.
Using these guidelines, you can advertise your business on social media to win over new followers and drive more traffic to your site. Now, all you need to do to make the most of these concepts is craft a thorough social marketing approach.
However, social selling is not something that can be contained to your company’s sales division. As a result of employee advocacy, social selling can grow at any given organization. In this tutorial, we explain what employee advocacy is and how it may benefit your business.
