Social Selling is a term used in digital marketing to indicate an organic strategy of attracting clients on social media through creating content of quality and establishing trust with prospective clients.
Although it has the word “selling” in its name, it’s not about directly “selling” your product or service on those channels as much as it’s about selling your brand, personality, or the value that you provide to users in order to make you an integral part of their lifestyle or work.
What Does Social Selling Do?
Social Selling is the result of synthesizing three basic elements of digital marketing: inbound philosophy, social media presence, and creating content of value. It’s highly effective in the medium and long term because part of the technique is establishing trust with customers in a non-invasive manner.
The purpose of Social Selling isn’t closing sales immediately. Instead, Social Selling helps you:
- Open channels of communication with prospective clients in order to get to know them better.
- Identify your audience’s needs and doubts as well as identifying individual sales opportunities.
- Get leads.
- Create customer loyalty and make them spokespeople for your brand.
- Obtain visibility, establish a positive reputation, and be recognized as an expert in your industry.
How Does One Do Social Selling?
Like any other digital marketing strategy, Social Selling is a process that involves extensive knowledge of your opportunities in the market, creating clear objectives, and conducting a permanent result analysis using the best technology and software available.
- Read and learn the Buyer Persona from front to back.
- Create content of value for each stage in the purchase process.
- Start conversations on social media and strengthen the digital community.
- Be open to questions that users have, offer objective help, and adapt your offer to each prospective customer’s needs.
- Identify the stage that every prospective customer is at and add them to a lead nurturing process.
Don’t forget that every inbound strategy is based on offering help; before you ask for someone’s attention or try to sell, it’s important to focus on the human exchange and mutual benefit.
Advantages to Social Selling
- The ROI is nearly double that of mailing and telemarketing.
- It’s especially useful in the B2B industry because it puts brands directly in touch with the decision makers.
- 60% of consumers are influenced in some way or another by social media.
- It helps your brand become an integral part of your clients’ lifestyle.
- 74% of buyers choose companies that offer them insight and content of value first.
Social Selling and its Connection to Personal Branding
Personal Branding is the combination of distinguishing values that a company, brand, individual, or personality evokes in others when they come into contact with any of their communication channels or symbols. In other words, it’s what we feel when we see the Coca-Cola logo, the optimism that we have when we contact Workana customer support, the peace of mind that returning an Amazon product brings us, and the appreciation we feel when we read an article with useful makeup tips on MAC’s blog.
What do your clients think of when they think of you? Obviously, the more they know you and how great your value proposal is, the more positive reactions you’ll be able to generate from your audience. These are directly proportional to the space you occupy and the place that you have in their daily lives. Ultimately, the purpose of branding is to become an integral part of your audience’s lifestyle, to always be your audience’s first and most trusted choice, and for them to be ambassadors for your brand.
In addition to the characteristics that define your brand in terms of quality, price and service, taking care of your clients, sharing, and listening to your audience is a value proposal in and of itself.
We also recommend: Get the best Branding for your e-commerce with a dream team of freelancers
Social Selling and Creating Content of Value
In order to make your Social Selling strategy’s content work, it has to be frequent, useful, consistent, altruistic, communicate values, and not focus on selling directly, but on enriching tastes, interests, and necessities that don’t necessarily have to do with your product or service but are consistent with the personality of your brand and your audience.
Remember that it’s important to create content in different formats (blog posts, videos, infographics, etc. depending on your audience’s preferences) and align it with each of the stages of purchase in order to add more prospects to your lead nurturing process. In other words, create content that is:
- Aligned with the general interests of their profile (although they don’t directly have to do with your product or service.)
- Focused on identifying a customer’s need without pressuring them.
- Provides timely and trustworthy information.
- Promotes decision making according to your unique value proposal.
- Continues exceeding your clients’ expectations or creates customer loyalty with your current clients.
Around 70% of all content that you publish on social media should correspond to content of general value for the first stages of a sales funnel. Only 20% should be brand content or content that directly mentions the advantages that you offer, and the last 10% should be used to show your more human side with personal content that shows a bit of your values and projects that aren’t business-related.
This article may be helpful: Advantages of integrating freelancers into your content team
What Does Social Selling Require?
In a nutshell, you’ll need a solid digital marketing structure that covers social media management, content creation, an optimized website, a CRM to convert prospects into active clients, etc.
Social Selling is a very effective strategy, but in order to implement it, having a good digital base and a marketing professional is essential. But if you still don’t have either of them, don’t worry! At Workana, you can find hundreds of specialized freelancers that can help you use the digital strategy that you already have and optimize it with Social Selling. You can even build your digital strategy from the ground up!
More tips for hiring and working with freelancers: Was Your First Experience With a Freelancer Not What You Were Hoping For? Learn How Freelancers Have Been Going Pro Lately
Learn More About Social Selling and Personal Branding
Want to learn more? Check out these resources on social selling and personal branding:
- Social Selling: What Is It, Why It Matters? (And How to Do it) – By Moss Clement (LinkedIn)
- The Most Comprehensive Guide To Social Selling You’ve Ever Frickin’ Seen – By Sales Hackers
- Successful Social Selling For B2B Marketing & Sales Teams – By Intricately
- 10 Social Selling Best Practices For Sales Teams – By The Dog Social Media
- 6 Steps to Implement a Social Selling Strategy with Automation Technology – By Business2Community
- Hawkers Sunglasses Did 3 Things To Turn Into A $60M Business – By Referral Candy
- Using a 360 Degree Approach to Make Your Social Selling Program Deliver – By Thought Horizon
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