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Social Media Selling in 4 Easy Steps

By Moora Salam
Technology Social Media Selling in 4 Easy Steps
MAY 30, 2017 LISTEN

Visit:www.moosocialplus.com/blog for more.
I know the feeling (Oh, social media is for only brand awareness and engaging your target audience!) This is a common misconception held by many. In this article, I will show you how to create a sales process that will transform your prospects into leads and leads to customers who then become repeat buyers using social media. You’ll be surprised to know that social media sales process is so much easier than traditional selling.

Why?
You can automate part of your social media sales process but you can’t automate traditional selling, you can only create a system for it.

530201732523traditionalsalesprocessvssocialmediasalesprocess

So how can I sell to my prospects on social media and make it work for me?

Before I show you how to create your own sales process for your products or services, I want to shed more light on marketing on social media vs the sales process.

Social media marketing and the sales process produce separate results. Unfortunately, many marketers assume that it is the same.

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As you can see, the above result does not look the same and therefore we shouldn’t expect to get sales benefits when we are employing a marketing strategy and we shouldn’t expect marketing benefits when all our social media activities are based on sales strategies.

According to statistics from aaronzakowski.com, Facebook, for example, is more about socialising than buying. This means Facebook users have low buying intent. That is why you need a social media sales process if you want to close sales through social media.

“You just can’t expect a large number of people to go from being part of your cold audience to being super-qualified leads that are chomping at the bit to buy( Neil Patel).”

How to create a Social Media Sales Process
In order to succeed in social media, you will need a sales process and I’m going to show you how to create and implement a simple social media sales process.

A typical social media sales process should include:

To simplify all the above, we will only focus on:
Awareness=interest,=consideration=and= purchase.
1 Awareness Stage
An over 20,000 customers’ experience analysis carried out by McKinsey & Company shows that “consumers consider an initial set of brands based on brand perceptions and exposure to recent touch points.” This means your brand has to be known to your target audience before they even take it into consideration. And this can only happen through brand awareness.

Brand Awareness is the probability that consumers are familiar with the existence and availability of a company’s product or service. On social media, this will be your page followers.

  1. A) Create a variety of Content.

To begin with, you’re going to need content like infographics, blog posts, eBooks, videos and slideshows. You are going to make sure you create quality content. And of course, you must make sure that it’s on your website.

  1. B) Promote your content.

After creating your content, you need to make sure it is well promoted. In fact, 20% of your time should be used in writing or preparing your content and 80% should be in the promotion.

4 ways you can promote your content:

  • Send an outreach email
  • Share multiple times on social media
  • Send new content to your email list
  • Social media paid Ads

2 Interest
After the hard work and cost of promoting your content, you wouldn’t want them to come and go just like that. So at this point, you want to keep your audience interested by engaging them.

8 ways to engage your audience:

  • Create a Newsletter Sign-Up Series (Blog post)
  • Convert Your Blog Posts into an eBook (Blog post)
  • Reply Comments (Social media and blog post)
  • Hold Q&A Sessions. (Social media)
  • Host Social Media Contests. (Social media)
  • Conduct Polls and Surveys. (Social media)
  • Join Twitter Chats. (Social media)
  • Create and Join Groups/Forums (Social media)

At this stage, you get to know your audience better. This provides you with an opportunity to get a little closer to your audience. You will want to develop rapport and show empathy to their problems. In a physical sense, this will be the initial handshake.

Before I talk about the consideration stage I’d like to emphasise the importance of content in this whole process.If you want to be successful in any part of your online marketing strategy then you will want to invest heavily in your content strategy. Quality content is so important that Neil Patel will invest about $30,000 for just a single content and give it out for free.

You check it out, Google processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide. Most of these search queries are informational search queries. So, the question is why someone will want to read your article when there are hundreds of similar if not on this topic everywhere. Therefore, your content must be unique and of quality.

3 Consideration Stage
After you’ve generated enough awareness and interest for your products or services, you will now want to deliver targeted content that will lead them to the next stage.

At this point, your content should educate your target audience and also give them all the reasons why they need your products or services.

Type of content you should be using at this stage includes Whitepapers, case studies, videos, webinars, discounts, coupons, and the use of tripwires. So how does this stage work?

Remarketing Ads
In most cases, first-time visitors to your website or who engage with your brand on social media may never convert. At this point, they’re properly considering your brand. How then do you move your audience to the next stage of your funnel?

This is where an effective remarketing campaign comes in. After you’ve gotten your audience engaged, you will want to move them to the next stage of your funnel by using effective Google AdWords or Facebook remarketing ads. There other means of moving your audience to the stage like email marketing. But today, I am going to only talk about using Remarketing Tactics.

What is remarketing ads?
Remarketing lets you show ads to people who’ve visited your website and may not have made an immediate purchase or enquiry.

For the sake of this post, I’m going to show how to use Facebook remarketing for this stage. I forgot to mention from the beginning that for this strategy to work, you must have a responsive website.

So I assume you already have a website and a Facebook account. Now the first thing you need to do is install Facebook pixel by following the steps below:

  1. Log in to your Facebook account and Go to your Pixel tab in Ads Manager.
  2. If you can’t find the pixel tab just type pixel in the search box on top.
  3. Click create a Pixel and enter a name for your pixel. This name can be changed later.
  4. Check the box to accept the terms and click create.

Installing pixels

  1. Log in to your Facebook account and Go to your Pixel tab in Ads Manager.
  2. Click on set up a pixel. You will be provided with two options choose the copy and paste option.
  3. Follow the instructions provided by Facebook.

Creating a Retargeting Audience.
I want to remind you that we are creating this ad to target those who have already been to your website through the first stage (Awareness) but do not buy, opt-in for trial or make an enquiry.

We are going to tell Facebook to do something special for us. We are going to tell Facebook if someone visits my website or blog show the person this ad. For now, avoid being too salesman and encourage them to delve deeper and learn more about your product or service. So, this ad is going to take them back to an interesting article or video in your website.

  1. Log in to your Facebook Ads Manager and select Audiences.
  2. Click on create an audience and select custom audiences.
  3. Select website traffic.
  4. Select your target audience from the drop-down menu.

For more detailed instructions click here.
Now that we have our audience created, let’s go ahead to create our ad based on what we told Facebook. Our ad can set to show in the News Feed or the right-hand column, and on any device.

Creating your ad
1 Go to your Facebook Ads Manager and click on Create Ad.

2 Choose traffic as your objective since you want to send people back to your website.

3 Next thing to do is to name your campaign and click continue.

4 Give a name to your ad set.

530201732525adsetname

5 Choose where you want to drive traffic. You will want to choose “Website or Messenger”

but of course, you can choose app if you want to drive the traffic to your app.

6 The next is to choose your audience. Choose the audience you’ve already created earlier.

If you choose differently or even create new audience your ad will go to the wrong target.

530201732526facebookaudience

7 The placement section allows you to choose where your ad will appear on Facebook.

Use the recommended setting provided by Facebook.
8 In the Budget and Schedule section, you can choose a budget and when you want it to run.

530201732526facebookbudget

9 Facebook provides different ad formats to create your ad. Choose your ad format, the creative or image you want to use, add text to your ad and enter the URL of the article you want to redirect your audience too.

530201732526facebookadformat

So at the end of this remarketing, it will look like this.

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Conversion Remarketing
Now we are going to create a campaign that will end up converting some of our audience.

At this stage, 35% of your target audience is making a decision about your solution or the products. So, you will want to hit them hard on the head by providing them with content that will lead them to opt-in.

If you are service provider you might want to serve them with a FREE consultation, Whitepaper, or Case study. A B2B company can use the same form of content to lead them to opt-in. A SaaS company can provide free trial or download and if you sale products you will want to give discounts or coupons.

Follow the same process we used in creating the first ad to create this second one.

Not all will convert at this stage but you will have a high percentage opt-in if you provide them with quality content. This means you will have them on your email list. This presents an opportunity for you to keep warming them up until they’re ready to buy. You can use email drip campaigns to keep them warm. I do not want to go deep into this as this is another topic on its own.

Warming your leads simply means engaging them with your content through email marketing.

4 Purchase
At this stage, you are going to try selling your core products or services to individuals who have downloaded your case study, whitepaper or used your free trial but didn’t sign a contract or go to your final core product checkout page. This time we will tell Facebook. “If someone downloads my case study or sign up for my free trial but didn’t go to my final checkout page show them this ad”

The content to use for your ad at this stage can be a link taking them back to a landing page on your website that explains why they should purchase your product or service. You can also use videos (Recommended) at this stage giving them reasons to buy your product or services.

Follow the same step above to create this ad.
At this point, all your leads should be familiar with your brand and are ready to buy.

At the end, your sales strategy or funnel will look like this.

530201732527completesocialmediasalesprocess

Conclusion
As you can see, social media selling goals are achievable once you have optimised the sales process. One thing you should know is, there is no ‘one size fits all’ sales process or strategy but there is a customer journey.

Everyone has to create their own sales process with a focus on quality content and smart communication as per their own goals, targeted audience, interest and ROI in mind.

Setting up your sales process from the beginning might look tedious to you and yes, it is but after your first sales process is setup, your next one will be automated. You only have to keep updating it with the latest content.

If you need help setting up your sales process, feel free to contact me and I’ll be glad to help.

Remember to constantly measure and test your content and be prepared to make changes quickly.

What do you think? Leave your comment below. I’d love to learn more from you.

Visit:www.moosocialplus.com/blog for more.

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