This week we examine the need-to-know concepts, strategies, and do's & don'ts of social media engagement for more effective use of digital content, and an enhanced sales process that can position the sales rep as a trusted conceirge before they ever suggest the product or service, let alone solutions.
Background: The Social Media Marketer
Success in social media is no different than success in any other prominent customer communication medium. Like print, broadcast, or direct mail, social media communications must represent a concerted effort for success, anything less could spell disaster in the eyes of the consumer.
Social media (SM) marketers understand that this avenue is as demanding as any other, and must be integrated with the communications strategy of the entire organization. SM marketers know what value they intend to extract from their SM investment, and maintain consistency and momentum in achieving their goals.
Leaders in SM know that this medium is like none other before it, allowing for 2-way conversations and voluntary participation. SM marketers know that success is driven by content, and simply hoping that the SM page is nothing more than a billboard for promotions is a recipe for disaster. Leaders in this area strive to deliver desired value to their fans and visitors, not spam.
The 2-way environment of SM shouldn’t be ignored, and leaders in the area of SM know that providing meaningful participation with their visitors must continue to remain a core strategy of their presence. Whether providing answers to questions posted, or simply a link to your digital content resources and products/services, SM consumers are looking for meaningful interactions.
Finally, SM leaders know that the value doesn’t stop at the conversation. SM interactions are online and tracked, thus leaving room for analytics. Leaders in this area have set their key metrics and analyze their interactions daily. Knowing your customer is a key to success, and SM analytics are abundant and customer-centric.
SM leaders streamline their workload and maximize success by employing enablement technology to complement their SM interactions. Painting a fuller picture of the customer, establishing the brand image, or just disseminating information is more easily accomplished with the right tools.
Intro: Uncharted Territory
As the internet continued to develop and grow, and, enhance consumer interactions, SM was a likely development. Today, SM is a viable communications medium unlike any other. SM allows for 2-way conversations which empower the consumer to have a voice, and has encouraged a shift from ‘changing thinking’ of the consumer to ‘delivering desired customer value’ in communications.
But SM doesn’t just personify the brand in the consumer mindset, it also provides companies with an unmatched consumer segmentation awareness. People who connect with the brand can be tracked, interacted with, and nurtured with digital content based sales processes.
Now, achieving this can actually be a daunting task for anyone new to digital content-based communications, and a great place to start is this post about which digital content types to use for each purchase decision stage.
The state of the SM market is fragmented, with several leaders on the bleeding edge of engagement and others either shying away from the medium or delivering poorly. With such a spread, there are established best practices and guaranteed red-hearings that permeate throughout all SM engagements.
Goals: Extracting Value from Social Media
If you use SM with the intent of making sales, you are surely setting up for failure. SM is an enabler of sales, not a selling platform. This can be achieved through a number of common ways:
To educate your market is a common goal of SM. Consumers voluntarily visit or follow your page. This puts them in direct communication with your brand and provides an opportunity to add value to your target market.
To develop relationships with your market is achieved through conversations and content. SM is great for retaining loyal customers by providing solutions for disgruntled visitors, and by rewarding and using preferential treatment for followers and fans.
To earn new leads, always easier said than done, but something which can be partially automated with effective SM use. Potential leads may stumble upon, learn about, and engage with your brand, eventually leading them to your site and interacting with a sales rep.
To establish branding. Every post, every interaction etc. is a public record of your brand. Consumers can see “who” your brand is through the personification of an online profile. Actions do speak louder than words, and your SM interactions represent your brand.
Rules of Engagement: Social Media Do’s & Don’ts
The constitution of SM is drafted by the readers, and there are some common must-dos in this area, or risk being ignored by the community at large.
You must be participatory, ignoring questions and posting only about the product is not participation, and your visitors will return that favour.
You must be authentic, from your objectives to your posts, deceptive tactics are swiftly realized, and the viral nature of SM ensures everyone knows of deception.
Your SM must be resourceful. Like interacting with an old friend, if all they do is sell things, you stop listening. You desire enjoyment or knowledge from interactions, your visitors do as well.
Credibility, achieved by knowledge/expertise and a willingness to provide rationale, this is most important in B2B SM where each interaction feeds back to the brand personality, which should be seen as credible.
Winning the Battle: Strategies for Social Media Success
1) Integrated Social Media Strategy
Not unlike planning each play of a football game, SM requires an overall strategy in line with company goals, an actionable delivery strategy in tune with the company communications strategy, and a day-day strategy for interacting with customers and delivering value. Everyone on a team must know what is expected from the SM engagement, and how to react in any interaction.
The big thing about social media for selling is that it can be used to leverage sales opportunities. LinkedIn is the obvious example, as we all know that business professionals host detailed personal and professional accolades for all to see.
But it goes deeper than that.
The sales process doesn’t need to start when a lead contacts you, nor does it need to start when you cold-call a prospect. Positioning as a trusted concierge can be as easy as reaching out to a potential lead and suggesting some great digital content or blog posts to read.
In fact, using social media to funnel leads to your blog is a great way to influence someone without selling anything to them. Let your blog content and CTAs do the work, and build outreach into your social media strategy.
Impactful blog content is certainly easier said than done, and even with practice, composing A+ quality digital content doesn’t happen on a whim. (Believe me, I know, it’s tough) We put together a post about how to compose blogs for improved MQL acceptance and sales enablement, it’s a good place to start for this kind of insight.
2) Right Content
Your visitors aren’t looking to hear about the upcoming sale every single day. As a SM member, you are a specialist in that area, and your visitors want to hear about your knowledge. Consider an automobile manufacturer; whose visitors would be drawn in by news of new technology, competitions, and even stats about the market. Some may like to know about ‘employee pricing’, but not every day.
The right way to ‘do’ content isn’t a magic formula, in fact, it’s far from it. I read this great quote and I think it applies well.
“Content marketing is more like weightlifting than bowling. The results can be massive, but manifest themselves over time and consistency. Lucky strikes are rare” (Source: Snow, S. 2014)
This is the reality of all content, and it means that you need to invest regularly into improving over time.
If you’re sharing the wrong content and nobody ever gets involved with it, something needs to change. If you find that readers do engage with other content that you post, it may be the direction that you should go.
Content on social media isn’t just your text based posts. The best strategies are to share all your content formats through social media, and extract key highlights like impactful stats, to share regularly with readers.
REMEMBER that you’re not going to close a deal with the first interaction, it’s about positioning as a trusted concierge and go-to resource for solutions. If you can get to that point, you can start monetizing your engagement.
3) Meaningful Participation
Your consumers are going to comment and share, and it could be positive or negative. You must be prepared to provide value to your target consumers with all interactions. Most importantly, remember to link your SM back to your brand or related landing pages, at the end of the day, leads are looking for you.
I saw an amazing couple of stats about this and it’s completely worth sharing. (Source: Act-On, 2015)
- 4 out of 5 messages that require a response go unanswered
- The average response time for brands who do reply is 11.3 hours per message
Basically, you want to make sure that your participation is meaningful. If you avoid 80% of the messages, and reply the following day (or later), it’s a negative shot to the way a lead may perceive your brand.
And also, isn’t meaningful.
Take a look at this post about 4 steps to get your customers to say yes with digital content, because part of being meaningful, in my opinion, is being able to provide value added discussions that are mutually beneficial to every reader.
People aren’t naïve, and they realize you’ll want to sell them something. The trick is adding that value so that it progresses the decision journey with insights the buyer needed for their pain points.
4) Analytics
Whether qualitative or quantitative, you must seek to extract value from the investment in SM. Common concerns should be shared with the sales team, and common market segments or popular content should be shared with marketing. With SM, you get what you put into it, just be sure to extract that value in a meaningful way.
The best possible value extraction is a lead that converts and closes, fine.
But value is a broad spectrum of insights, and getting the lead to convert requires many steps along a potentially long and data-laden trek.
Marketing teams have a great tool at their disposal called Marketing Automation that allows them to capture lead details and nurture them until they hand off a fresh and ready-to-be-sold-to MQL.
But what if it happens the other way around. Using the points in this outline, let’s examine if a sales rep makes the first contact, and instead of visiting the site, the buyer decides to continue to interact directly with that sales rep.
First, this is excellent, because it means you’ve already got a foot in the door and a direct contact to talk with.
BUT, it’s also terrible, because you’re now scrambling to find content that your marketers would have just had prepared in a drip marketing process. You’re juggling this fresh lead with established MQLs already being given to you. Lastly, you may not have a solid system to sort and organize your communications with them.
Oh, and analytics, because this point is all about analytics, and many sales reps don’t have the tools to track and analyze the digital content fingerprint of their lead.
If sales level analytics are new to you, I suggest taking a look at this post about sales enablement key performance indicators, for a brief introduction.
Back to the point. Few reps have the tools to track and coordinate communications with the customer using content. Marketers understand the unprecedented value of consumption insights, as actions do speak louder than words, and they track these through their marketing automation.
Reps can leverage consumption insights to have a more relevant and value-added discussion with leads that reduces the sales cycle, improves marketing contribution to revenue, and delights the buyer through and through.
Check out this comprehensive post about how to produce more relevancy from the sales process for an insightful look into how this kind of analytics can be leveraged.
[RELATED CONTENT] Otherwise, you might like a browse through this whitepaper about multi-channel engagement.
Are your sales reps enabled with the ability to start a value-added discussion through social media? Can they track consumption metrics right from day one? Are remote digital sales calls something you’ve got in your arsenal? If not, let us show you a demo of what the future of sales activities look like through real sales enablement.
