Traditional forms of making sales are quickly dying out.
And good riddance too!
No one likes cold calls or manipulative and pressure-filled interactions.
Instead, many brands now use social media to build relationships and connect with current and potential customers.
It’s a much more human approach to sales and it’s effective.
A Forbes article states that 78% of brands that use social selling outperform peers who don’t use social media.
Why do they do so much better?
Well, 75% of B2B buyers and 54% of consumers use social media to make buying decisions.
You can’t argue with numbers like these.
Social selling is clearly an important part of increasing your sales and boosting your revenue.
To help you out, we’ve listed the top four social selling strategies for creators below. Once you’ve read through them, start taking actionable steps to implement them and watch as your sales go through the roof.
Four easy ways to get better at social selling
1. Optimize your profiles
When it comes to effective social selling, make sure all of your profiles have brand consistency. This includes both visual elements (logo, typeface, color palette, fonts, photography, etc.) and your brand voice (tone, narrative).
Brands that maintain consistency across all platforms can increase their revenue by up to 23%.
That’s a big payoff for just a little work!
Another way you can optimize your social accounts to improve your social selling is to completely fill out your profiles.
Don’t leave any section blank.
And make sure to spend extra time crafting the words on your bio section. It’s here that you can tell your followers what you do and the value you provide.
It's also a place for you to try and subtly convince people they need what you’re offering.
For platforms that limit the amount of character space you have, like Instagram and TikTok, you can add a link in bio to provide additional content.
A link in bio is a single page that allows you to share clickable and shoppable links in an organized and visually-appealing way.
A link in bio can help you increase engagement and sales by making it easy for followers to make purchases or navigate to your sites.
If you don’t already have one, there are free link in bio tools that you can use to quickly create one for your brand.
Once you’ve made one, just pop it into your bio section on your social profiles and tell followers to check out your link in bio in your posts.
2. Share success stories
Everyone loves a good success story. And it doesn’t have to be a “from rags to riches” one to be effective. Simply sharing a few positive impacts your product or service has had on your customers can do the trick.
Customer success stories help you gain your followers’ trust by providing evidence of the value you provide.
Instead of just saying, “Our product can help you double your sales,” you can show real results of you helping a customer achieve just that.
Framed as a story, a customer’s success with your product or service helps others visualize the same outcome for themselves.
And nothing helps build credibility more than a real-life example.
Customer success stories can come in the form of case studies, testimonials, or even just a simple review that you share.
Or if you want to get real creative, you can make a custom image with your customer’s photo or brand logo and an overview of the results you helped them achieve.
Whatever you choose to do, try to make it easy to repeat.
Successful social selling is all about consistency.
Show your followers how big of an impact you're making in your customers’ lives by sharing success stories often.
And if you aren’t sold on the idea that success stories are worth the effort yet, consider this: Customers trust product reviews 12x more than product descriptions. And what is a customer success story, really, other than an in-depth product review?
3. Create a content schedule
It’s not easy to become a master at social selling. But it is possible.
And one of the best things creators can do to sell better on social media is to develop and carry out a content strategy and schedule.
Yes, we know content takes time to create.
But like we said, it's never easy to become the best at something, and if you want to increase your social selling effectiveness, then content marketing is your golden ticket to do so.
Take a look at a few facts:
- Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and sends 3 times as many leads your way. (DemandMetric)
- 60% of the most successful B2C marketers have a content schedule and strategy. (CMI)
- 82% of brands that blog experience a positive ROI from their inbound marketing. (HubSpot)
As you can see, content marketing is one of the most affordable and effective ways to bring in new leads on social media and get higher conversion rates.
So let’s cut to the chase and get into how to create a content schedule.
- Choose your channels. Find out what social platforms your current and potential customers use and define what type of content makes sense for you to post to each of them.
- Make a calendar. You can download free content calendars online, make your own on Excel, or do it the old fashioned way by putting pen to paper.
- Plan it out. Planning your content out ahead of time makes it easier for you to stay on schedule and post consistently. Use the calendar year as a base to plan out your content. Start with holidays and other important dates for your brand that you want to generate content for. Once you go through all the important dates, fill in the blanks with content ideas that are relevant and helpful to your ideal customer.
- Decide frequency. How often you post will depend on each social channel.
On Twitter, you might post between 1 to 5 tweets per day, while on Instagram, you might post around 3-7 times per week. Choose a realistic goal for how often you want to post on each channel. You can always add more later. The point is to just start posting consistently. - Improve with time. Pay attention to what content does well and helps bring in more leads. Knowing this information can help you tweak your content schedule to be more effective.
4. Perform social listening
Social listening is when you read and analyze what other people are saying about your brand and your competitors online.
In other words, it’s basically when you spy on people’s online conversations.
And no, the point of this isn’t just to be nosey.
Social listening helps you understand how your customers and potential customers think by analyzing what they say on social media.
You can also learn what they think about your competition, the pain points they have, and the solutions they are looking for.
As a result of this information, you can improve your social selling strategies by speaking to your customers' pain points and providing the solutions they are looking for.
To perform social listening, track mentions and conversations related to your brand.
Although it’s possible to do this manually, it is difficult and a bit boring.
Thankfully, there are many affordable social listening tools available that allow you to track conversations around specific phrases, words, and even emojis relevant to your business.
As you gather this data, begin to develop and tweak your brand voice so you can better resonate with your target audience.
Create content around how your brand helps solve a common pain point your customers have and speak about your brand in the same language your customers use.
Doing all this will help improve your social selling strategies and convert more leads.
One last bit of helpful advice
Obviously, selling on social media effectively isn’t a walk in the park.
You have to put thought, time, and effort into building and carrying out your social selling strategies.
However, there are tools available for creators that can make your journey a bit easier.
Take Amaze, for example.
Amaze is a powerful design platform that allows you to create digital shopping experiences in just a matter of minutes.
These experiences can then be shared across all your social media platforms to help you sell better and engage your audience more.
And want to know the best part?
It’s free.
Sign up for a free account today to see how Amaze can help you improve your social selling through digital shopping experiences that turn clicks into cash for your brand.
