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If you’re not yet the master of your social selling strategy, 2023 is the time to do so. With more customers online than ever, you can’t afford not to take advantage of every lead generation opportunity. Leading on from our last podcast episode about the current challenges of prospecting and tips for generating more leads, Tom Abbott will be jumping straight into several ways you can supercharge your social selling strategy to take the year -and your targets- by storm.
What is Social Selling?
Social Selling is a lead-generation technique salespeople use to directly interact with prospects via social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
While social selling has made sales much more accessible than traditional selling, it still requires more than luck.
So while it’s clear that social media has changed how customers buy, have you changed how you sell?
If you still need to establish a social media presence, it’s time to start with these 9 tips.
But if you have already started, are you taking the right approach?
Let’s find out below.
If you want to take your sales skills to the next level and learn how to master the entire sales process, join SOCO Academy and get certified in SOCO Selling.
How to Supercharge Your 2023 Social Selling Strategy
1. Solidify your ICP
First, I want you to think about the following:
Who do you serve, who do you help, and who do you support?
I really want you to think hard about who that person is on the other end of the phone.
Remember, not everyone is your customer. Actually, only a few people are your customers.
To establish your ideal customer profile (ICP), hop onto a platform like LinkedIn, generate lists of those people and start going after them.
To get started with an idea of who your customers really are, look at your past client records.
Ask yourself: Who are the companies we tend to sell to most frequently, successfully, and with the largest deal size?
2. Determine Where to Find Prospects Online
Next, you need to find out where your ICP mainly hangs out online and establish a strong presence on these platforms.
Your ideal customer might be on any or all of the following social media platforms:
- YouTube
- Clubhouse
Now that I’m using the right platforms, I’m reaching the rightpeople. My company has thousands of followers on Facebook,thousands of connections on LinkedIn, and hundreds of followers on Twitter.
– Tom Abbott, author of Social Selling
It’s crucial to identify your prospective audiences’ preferred platforms and the most effective language to use for each one.
Otherwise, you’ll invest much time and effort into launching social media initiatives on a particular platform.
Only to discover your target customer isn’t active on that platform, ultimately wasting your time.
3. Get the Positioning Right
Nowadays, prospects have access to more messages than ever.
They know that more choices are available now than ever in history.
They’re still looking for answers, but figuring out which solution is right for them is challenging.
Where’s the best place to hide a dead body? Page two of Google.
To position yourself as the ideal solution provider, you’ve got to stand apart from the competition by proving your expertise.
The way to achieve this is to establish yourself as an authority, a thought leader and an expert in your industry.
Ways to do this online include:
- Sharing valuable content (gated or not)
- Engage with everyone (comment, like and share!)
- Be consistent with posting, interacting and connecting
- Prepare the perfect profile
- Optimizing your website for search (SEO)
4. Master Presenting Yourself on Social Media
No one cares about us. No one cares about you.
If you check out my posts on LinkedIn, they’re very rarely self-promoting at all.
It’s about issues of the day that are important to my followers.
When you’re trying to present yourself differently from your competitors, it’s essential to remember that you are one of thousands of people
It’s about wearing your expertise and authority rather than a suit and tie. A lot of people who come from a corporate background see social media
-Tom Abbott, CEO of SOCO Sales Training
as if it’s an extension of their webpage.
At first, I posted these motivational quotes. But why would anyone follow me when I’m just posting motivational quotes?
So then, I started composing posts that engaged my audience and revealed my personality.
There are enough customers for everybody and room for you -you have to give people a reason to choose you.
5 Serial Social Selling Mistakes (& Solutions)
1. Using the Wrong Social Media Platform
What happened to me when I first got started with Social Selling is that I was overexcited. I tried out a lot of platforms at once.
I started posting more on Twitter. But what I realized was that Twitter was more of a broadcasting tool. A broadcasting platform more for news, instant messages, and updates.
Consequently, it was difficult to actually zero in on and connect with my ideal target client. I wanted to create meaningful discussions, but the platform didn’t yield the desired results.
2. Failing to Reach a Large Number of the ICP
There’s no point in working hard on messages that no one will see.
Drop an email or a WhatsApp message to your top 10 customers and ask them,
“Hey, I’m curious; what’s the best social media platform to connect with you? Which do you prefer?”
Just sit back and listen to them. If you get about six out of 10 veering towards one platform, there’s your market research; there’s your answer.
Double down. Go hard. Go deep on that platform. Narrow but deep. Focus on a particular platform and start building your platform and your audience.
3. Avoiding Video
Start thinking about posting videos on LinkedIn.
Videos do great and have a higher click-through rate than photos and even more than text.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video must be worth a million.
– Tom Abbott
So if you’ve got any videos, just little question-and-answer stuff, or quick tips like 30, 60, or 90-second tip videos, post them on LinkedIn as well, and they get a lot of engagement.
Before you say, “Tom, I don’t have the time or effort to produce high-quality video content.”
Anybody with a handphone can do a little selfie video these days!
4. Not Personalising Messaging
Most people send generic connection invitations online, simply pasting in their e-mail addresses and clicking the Connect button.
Yet, if you actually want to stand out from the competition and avoid looking like a spam account, you must personalize your message.
Tell the prospect how you know them (for example, through a mutual connection, association, industry, etc.), why you want to connect with them, and how you might add value.
Warning: Please do not try to sell using the connection request!
Do not pitch and do not hard sell in the contact message. It’s a common pet peeve for prospects when the first thing salespeople do is send a flurry of PDFs about services and products.
5. Not Keeping Up with Industry Trends
You can go on LinkedIn and see trending topics and hashtags.
Instagram and Twitter are the same. You can see trending hashtags. So you’ll see what some common topics are.
You can even put in some of these niche topics you’re thinking about on LinkedIn and Instagram and see how many or how few posts come up.
That way, you can see who’s discussing those topics in your space.
Click on the hashtag, see who’s talking about those topics, and start conversing with them, liking their posts, commenting on their stuff, connecting with them, and building relationships.
Want to generate leads with the help of social media?
Join our Social Selling Mastery training, and you’ll get access to our complete Social Selling Course and our BONUS LinkedIn Outbound mini course. Inside, you’ll learn how to use social media to position yourself as the ideal solution provider for your prospects and gain access to proven LinkedIn scripts that will help you book more meetings with prospects.
