Many sales and marketing professionals today have been charmed and persuaded to believe that success in today’s hyper-competitive business climate is based on the number of digitized B2B or B2C contacts you have. Successful sales and marketing is simply not defined by how many Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, Facebook likes, and Instagram followers one has. Feeding these so-called “must update” social channels and checking them 12 times a day can be overwhelming, boring, and self-defeating.
But you can improve the “social selling experience” with people by following some of the suggestions in this article. I have been using various social media channels for the last decade to leverage my sales and marketing footprint, but doing so to create a genuine and rich experience for the individual.
How sales professionals think about, use, and execute social selling strategies to gain competitive advantage will ultimately determine their success. The future of sales today depends on one’s ability to interact with qualified people (human to human) in an authentic and personal way. We want to build these relationships more human, more real and more valuable.
All businesses and working professionals are hungry for time and should not waste time on unproductive sales and marketing practices. Before you get started with a social marketing/selling initiative, you need to define what the purpose of using these social media channels is. Part of any good business plan is a well-developed, practical, and creative marketing plan. This includes digital marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click (PPC), content management, reputation management, and video optimization. These are the main areas to consider in your digital marketing plan. The old business adage, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” is even more relevant today.
These key performance indicators (KPIs) must be tied to key sales, marketing and business metrics to ensure success and adequate ROI for senior management to make well-informed business decisions.
The real challenges for marketers in social marketing/selling are:
– Marketing automation and having the right technology stack in place
– Seamless integration of existing and future technologies to the “technology stack”
– Align compelling content that will resonate with each constituency and facilitate a conversion to a goal, for example, filling out a contact form, email, or phone call.
– Align content with business and revenue goals.
– Understand how content strategy can scale to meet business needs over time.
I submit to you and invite you to consider that the power and reach of a well-developed and executed social selling plan can pay big dividends. It will take more time and effort initially as you launch your plan/campaign, but after launch it should take no more than 30 minutes per day to manage and feed. And before you know it, you’ll be connecting more effectively and easily with an H2H (human-to-human) social selling approach.
