Social Selling – How to Leverage Social Media to Close More Sales

Image by Coffee Bean from Pixabay

Have you ever heard of social selling? Do you use social media as a marketing channel for your brand? Are you interested in taking marketing to the next level? 

If you are looking for the answers to these questions then we have it here for you.

Social media networks are mainly popular for their huge user base that actively access, explore, share, and browse content along with brands using them as advertising and engagement touchpoints. 

But the social media platforms and technology have been constantly evolving for better with enhanced updates and innovation. One such update is the introduction of social selling as social media has a great influence on the behavior and decisions of the users.

What is social selling? 

Social selling is the strategy of using social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. by marketers and brands to attract, engage, and convert consumers into customers. 

Many brands use social selling to nurture their leads, form meaningful brand-user relations, encourage engagement, enable social shoppable content, etc. 

Social media marketing can be understood as the basics of social selling where you can take it further by selling your brand’s products with social selling. 

Importance of social selling for brands

1. Shorter buying process

It is common knowledge now among the brands that social media users leverage the social platforms to discover and explore the products that either they want to buy or come across on social media and purchase it later on e-commerce platforms. 

Social media has effectively removed the longer buying process that hampers the user experience, which is known to have been responsible for interest decomposition among the users and low conversions. 

2. Brand visibility and reputation

Social selling improves your brand visibility among the vast social users along with an excellent reputation management opportunity. When you are selling through social media efforts, it allows you to attract more users leading to enhanced reach, exposure, and brand awareness. 

Also, it brings transparency and a positive brand image with direct brand-customer engagement, credibility, social proof through reviews, etc. 

3. More sales and revenue

The most crucial benefit of social selling is increased leads and sales for the brand that ultimately contributes to the increase in revenue. As the buying becomes more trustworthy and easier for the users, it makes them make more purchases comparatively. 

Also, revenue generation becomes consistent as once the user builds trust and a meaningful connection with the brand along with ease of use, it tends to lead to long-term customer retention and repeat purchases. 

 How to leverage social selling for your brand

1. Identify your target audience

It is important to know who and where your target audience is, to make your social selling effective. There are numerous social media platforms with each having their own distinctive features and benefits leading to a unique user base. 

Also, not every social user will like to be a customer of social selling. Now, it isn’t necessary that all of these platforms and users should be targeted so carry out an in-depth analysis to know who your target audience is and which platform is the best suitable for your brand. 

2. Embed UGC social feed on the website

Similar to the earlier point, you can also add your social media feed to the website but the catch here is that you can use a UGC platform to curate all the valuable and relevant UGC from different social media platforms into a single feed. 

For embedding social media UGC feeds on your website you can use the best tools like Taggbox Widget.

You can display it on your website pages like homepage, category page, products page, etc. to build social proof for your brand, showcase brand advocacy, and enhance your conversions. 

3. Indulge in social listening and engagement

If you want to create a more fruitful and efficient social selling strategy, then start with social listening i.e. know what your users are talking about, their interest and liking, social behavior, products they buy, which brands they follow, how they engage, what content they engage with, pay attention to comments and likes, etc. 

Also, along with social listening, you should engage with the consumers through comments, likes, reposts, messages, etc. Once you understand their behavior and engage with them, it will automatically lead to better leads and conversions for your brand. 

4. Display user-generated content

User-generated content in this context is any form of content your customers or followers are creating about your brand and sharing it on social media. Leverage this content in your social media activities to build social proof for your brand. 

UGC is the most trustworthy, authentic, and reliable content out there and over 90% of the consumers trust UGC while making a purchase online. User-generated content helps in increasing user engagement with your brand, uplifts your brand image, makes it more relatable to users, etc. 

5. Turn your content into shoppable content

The best way to leverage social selling is to make your content shoppable so that users can explore and buy products directly from social posts. 

There are 2 ways to do so. 

Firstly, Platforms like Instagram give you the option to sell your products by adding products to your posts and providing checkout links letting users buy the products instantly. 

Secondly, curating your content from social media platforms into a single feed, making the feed posts shoppable with product description, check out links, CTA, etc. and displaying it on your website. 

This will help you link social media to your website and leverage social selling perfectly by increasing user engagement and conversions through shoppable content. 

6. Platform-based strategy

As discussed above, each social media platform has its unique features and functionalities so it is essential that you create your social selling strategy based on the attributes of each network rather than going uniform on all platforms. 

For example – Instagram is a visuals-focused social media platform where the fashion & accessories industry is quite popular among the users and Facebook is a platform built for all industries, given you target the right audience. 

Conclusion

Social media influence is expanding with every passing day with new innovations and updates making it a holistic platform to fulfill vast consumer needs. 

So, it is essential that you stay up to date and ahead of your competition, to capture the consumers and magnify your brand growth and social selling is a perfect way to get started, so find opportunities, do your research, and execute your social selling strategy.

Contributed by Anne Griffin