Using Your Social Media Profile To Drive Sales
lead generation, sales, mobile,
Curating a well-crafted, professional social media presence can help cut down the amount of cold calling you do on a daily basis by generating leads that come to you. All you need to do is build out profiles that make potential customers want to engage and interact with you and your brand.
How to Build Your Profile So Customers Contact You
Through building meaningful relationships and providing value to your potential buyers on social media, your social platforms themselves can be an addition to your other proven sales methods. Though specific etiquette may change between the different social media platforms, the general best practices tend to stay the same. Check out these tips on how to use social media to generate leads and drive sales.
Social media and lead generation
Social media can feel like something to do in your downtime, that’s completely separate from work, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Driving leads through your social media profile is a modern, efficient way to drive sales.
The practice of lead generation through social media is called social selling. By having a well-fleshed out profile, researching your customer base, and connecting with them, you’re going to be able to drive more calls.
Creating engaging LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts helps keep you at the forefront of your customer base’s mind, and then they will come to you when the need for your product arises (or even before that). Social selling is all about creating relationships and joining conversations that help build brand awareness, thus drawing leads to you instead of the other way around.
Social selling best practices
The main goal of social selling is to attract leads through your social media profiles – but how do you do that? By providing genuine value to your customer. Below are some best practices to keep in mind when creating your professional social profiles.
Be personablePeople like feeling they’re talking with someone real when considering buying a product or service, so don’t be afraid to be yourself. Use fun images and GIFs, include your interests and expertise in your profile, connect and engage with colleagues and industry peers – whatever makes your profile and social presence seem more “you.” But don’t be afraid to flex your professional knowledge either! Having a mix of your professional and personal personas helps familiarize yourself and your brand with the customer, thus allowing them to feel more comfortable approaching you.
Engage oftenNobody is going to reach out to you if you’re never online, just like you’re never going to make sales if you never make any calls. Make sure you’re regularly engaging with your network, and always connecting with potential clients. When you do reach out to to your leads and potential clients, using new tech like in app call notes and call recordings and transcriptions can help you always remember important details of a call, and the next time that person calls, have all the information you discussed last time at the tips of your fingers. If you see an opportunity to promote your brand on LinkedIn, try plugging your website in the comments section of a post relevant to your company’s message. If your colleague is regularly responding to somebody on Twitter, give them a follow and see if you can grow your network to increase your profile visibility. The more people see you and your brand, the more likely you are to attract high quality leads. It’s science.
Be consistentHaving a fleshed-out profile and wide network is great, but it can’t do all of the work for you. Once you’ve done both of these things, it’s time to put those social selling skills to work. If you’ve connected with potential leads, save their info in your CRM so you can shoot them a quick message later to check in. Keeping your CRM updated with accurate client interactions is important but has been painful in the past due to the manual nature of it, luckily there are now apps to help update your CRM instantly with call details, notes, comments etc..
You can also try researching competitors’ profiles, and see how they’re engaging with their client base (or see if they have any dissatisfied users!) A strong start helps build you up, but you’ve got to continue finding new leads to connect with and researching how to increase your following or network. That way, when the time comes, customers know how to find you.
Different social media platforms: which is best?
Although the idea behind social selling is the same across platforms, there are different times and places for each, depending on what customer base you’re trying to attract.
Facebook and Instagram tend to be the best platforms for B2C businesses. You can engage with your customers through messages and DMs, post stories about you and your brand, and create really personal, photo-driven content that gives insight into your product. The more involved you are with your own profile, the more prospects will see your content and reach out to you.
For B2B businesses, LinkedIn and Twitter are going to be your best bets. You’re going to want to connect with lots of industry peers and plug company content through Twitter chats, LinkedIn posts, and the like. LinkedIn definitely has a more formal tone than Twitter, and messages and DMs are good here too, but for enterprise type sales the phone is still your best friend when it comes to interacting with clients. If you make and receive lots of calls, keep it all straight with call search technology. If prospects see you as somebody who regularly discusses their company or product with passion and gusto, whether formally or informally, your inbox and call history will start filling up.
Conclusion
More and more people are using social for selling, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s personable, can be less time consuming, and you can easily track your success with a marketing analytics tool. By creating a social presence that shows how approachable and knowledgeable you are to prospects, the amount of traditional lead qualification you have to do can decrease, and the amount of quality leads you build increases.
Whether you’re curating an Instagram profile for your e-commerce site, or a Twitter account for the SaaS company you work for, having an engaging social media presence creates brand awareness that draws customers to you, instead of you reaching out to them. Sales has always been about building connections, and what better way to do that than through connecting with the people you’re selling to on social platforms they spend time on as well?
