Social Media for Sales: Hell yeah!

We all are victims of annoying spam email messages. In today’s digital age, it appears as those brands have lost sight of how to utilize the tools available to them in a constructive, meaningful way. Instead, most internal marketing teams and agencies seem to think social media is simply a superhighway for the worst kind of what marketing is today. Send out a thousand connect emails, and just maybe, you’ll get one or two people to bite on your offer.

Guesswork is not a strategy. And don’t think for one moment that sending pest-worthy email marketing and social media messages aren’t destroying your credibility as a brand.

Instead, we’ve put together some strategies to leverage social media, and improve on conversion rate. Let’s focus on creating relationships with your potential customers to make real connections and drive results.

1.) Make your own social accounts worth looking at

If you’re going to spend the time investing in social media, the platforms you’re utilizing have to be up-to-date, active and filled with the right stories, the right visuals, the right content, and the right activity. Every social media account tells your brand’s unique story. Is each social media account telling the same story? Remember that all personal pages represent your company as well.

2.) Build your audience

While the number of connections, friends and followers is a vanity metric that rarely has any direct impact on the number of leads your company generates, these numbers are important.

They are important because, just like your email addresses, these connections represent people who have allowed you access.

Focus on building your own company audiences, and leverage your team’s audiences in a tactical way, as appropriate and in selected situations.

3.) Actively connect and engage prospects

Sales can and should use social media to make connections, and then after those connections are solid, attempt to engage the person in a conversation even if that conversation is via email, social or other online formats.

You need different tools to make a new connection then you need to drive engagement.

4.) Active Social Listening

Social listening is the monitoring of your company’s social media channels for any customer feedback and direct mentions of your brand or discussions regarding specific keywords, topics, competitors or industries.

In short, you set up a list of words, keywords and keyword phrases in tools like BrandwatchHubSpotHootsuite or Sprout Social, and you sync these tools with your database (HubSpot does this automatically). The tools then notify you if anyone is using any of these keywords on social media platforms.

Once you get notified, you can jump into the conversation and influence, educate or even direct the discussion.

We hope these tips help you start with a smarter, more strategic and more efficient plan. Leverage the power of social to help tell your story, not to push demos or appointments on people who don’t know you and now don’t want to know you, your company or your products/services.