10 Ways to Sell on Social Networks and Boost Your Online Business
Numerous brands have recognized the potential of social networks as a sales platform to enhance their business prospects. You are likely pursuing the same approach or seeking information on the keyways to sell on these social networks.
A Sales Guy Consulting survey reported that 72 percent of salespeople exceed their quota by as much as 23 percent if they use social media. In the same survey, you’ll find a direct correlation between closed deals and social selling. The report shows 54 percent of the survey respondents tracked closed deals to engagement on social media.
Since social media has become integral to most brands’ marketing, leveraging social selling has gone beyond seeking a competitive advantage. It is now a matter of staying relevant in an industry or getting completely left behind.
Before discussing how you can sell on social networks to boost your online business, let’s understand the concept of social selling. Because if you’re yet to incorporate social selling into your business, you’re losing sales to the brands that have.
What is Social Selling?
Social selling is the act of a brand building and nurturing a relationship with its target audience on social media with the intent of selling to them.
Think of social selling as a modern cold-calling technique. Here, instead of salespeople educating prospects about their products over the phone, they engage them on social networks and get them to quickly move from the awareness stage to the decision stage on their buyer journey.
According to research by Data Reportal, 26.5 percent of global social media users use social media to find products to purchase. And 23 percent use social media to view and follow content from their favorite brands.
That shows the impact of social selling on the ROI of most brands that know the effective ways to sell on social networks.
10 Ways to Sell on Social Networks
Selling on social networks is similar to the traditional way of cold-calling prospects to inform them about your products and services.
However, the slight difference in social selling is that you must build relationships on these platforms by providing valuable content on how your products and services meet their needs.
Understanding how to build and nurture these relationships is vital to selling on social networks and boosting your business successfully.
Create a Content Calendar
As you already know, content is king in digital marketing, and only brands capable of leveraging it would have a massive ROI from social media engagements.
To sell effectively on social networks, create a content calendar to guide you through the process of leading your prospects through their buyer journey. Social media content calendars help you create content that drives engagement and ultimately transforms your prospects into hot leads.
Creating an effective social media calendar requires you to mark your goals for each social media channel and plan your posts. You must also plan for the hashtags, links, images, and other relevant content you want to add.
Choose the Right Platforms
To ensure a maximum outcome for your social media marketing efforts, you must be on the platforms where your audience is most dominant.
You can achieve this by studying the demography of your target audience to know where they are most active. The Data Reportal survey above proves that people between 18 and 39 are more active on social platforms like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. At the same time, LinkedIn is dominated mainly by people between 40 and 64 years old.
Therefore, when selling products like entertainment and fashion to the younger generation, you should avoid going to LinkedIn, where professionals and decision-makers are predominant.
Build a Community
Instead of trying to sell your products to everyone on your chosen social media platforms, focus on finding prospects who are interested in them. These people look forward to your educational and valuable content daily and are ready to engage with it.
Building a community of interested, loyal customers on social media will make your marketing efforts less stressful. These people are already close to the decision stage in their buyer journey. They’re the easiest people to sell to because they are already interested in your offers and probably just need a little nudging to buy.
A community of happy and loyal customers will also gladly promote your content on their walls and educate those who care to listen to them talk about your products.
Join Relevant Groups
Groups are to social networks what industrial associations are to physical networks. Joining niche-related groups on different social media platforms gives you an audience that is already informed about your products and services.
To stand out in these groups and acquire the followers you need, actively participate in discussions. Post valuable content that initiates engagement and gets people to check out your profile. Also, do not hesitate to contribute meaningfully to other people’s posts. These acts would establish you as an authority in your niche and get people to visit your brand profiles.
Provide Value with Relevant Content
Check well; a common factor among top-performing brands in your niche is their consistency in sharing valuable content. Buyers gravitate towards brands that know their pain points and prove to have the answers they seek.
Therefore, with many prospects taking to social media to search for information about their pain points, providing those answers and tailoring them around your products or services earns you high-quality leads.
With content, you can provide information on why your prospects are experiencing specific problems and how they can solve them. Then you can introduce your products or services as the solution they need. Selling becomes easier on social media when you deliver value without explicitly sounding salesy.
Invest in Social Media Adverts
Adverts on social media platforms have proven to be one of the best ways to make sales on the internet. This is possible because there are over 4.7 billion users on social media platforms, so it’s easier to carve out an audience.
However, so many social media users also make it difficult for brands to be seen. You must invest significantly in social media advertising to make your brand visible to your target audience.
If you already share high-quality content on social media, running ads will ensure you get the needed ROI. This is because the more people who see your valuable content, the more loyal followers you will attract.
Use Live Sessions to Promote
Having many social media followers is one thing; getting them to buy your products is quite another. Social media users buy products based on trust. That’s why you see them looking for real-life images and videos before buying items on social media. Sometimes, they will also ask for reviews from other users to help make buying decisions.
Hosting live sessions on social media is a great way to cut down on that decision process and get your customers to buy. Often, all they need to buy is to see you review the products and answer other questions they might have.
Work with Influencers
According to a survey by Matter, a PR agency in the US, 69 percent of consumers trust an influencer’s product or service recommendation over information coming directly from a brand.
Working with influencers in your niche helps you tap into the loyalty they already enjoy from their audience. This influencer partnership increases your visibility and ultimately leads to more sales.
Share User-Generated Content
Consumers resort to social media to get views and opinions about products they want to buy. Often, they come to your business profile to read other customers’ reviews and comments.
This is why sharing user-generated content is an effective way of selling on social media. When satisfied customers take to social media to share their excitement about your products and services, repost them on your profile to gain the trust of newer visitors.
Therefore, you must encourage your customers to share their photos online to help increase your credibility on social media platforms.
Link Your Accounts to a Trusted Escrow Account
While doing everything listed above will help you build brand trust on social networks, there will be prospects who will need an extra nudge from you.
This is where you direct them to reputable online escrow platforms like Peppa.io to complete a transaction.
Peppa.io takes away from you the burden of trying hard to prove your credibility to your prospects. It also gives you the confidence to ship your products or render services without first getting the customer to pay.
In the end, both parties win. Your sales will massively improve while your customers walk away with satisfaction.
Sell With Ease on Social Networks and Boost Your Business
Social media is a vast marketplace for brands that know how to sell there. With the right social selling techniques, you can establish a strong connection with your target market and quickly develop them into the hot leads you need to boost ROI significantly.
Now that you know ten key ways to sell on social networks, don’t hesitate to implement them and optimize them for better results.
