With more than half of the world’s population active on social media, social selling has become vital for any business. But LinkedIn Social Selling does it work, and how to get results?
Social Selling helps companies leverage their network, connect with the right audience, and build long-lasting relationships. This, in turn, allows businesses to achieve sales goals by improving lead generation and building sales prospects without the need for cold calling.
Over the years, LinkedIn has become one of the most effective tools for social selling. While Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram help you gather information on customer persona, LinkedIn provides a platform to reach out and connect with prospective customers. Thus, lead you to better business opportunities.
Before you can start your social selling journey, it is essential to understand the basics and get started with social sales in no time. As a leading sales organization, be an early adopter to reach new zeniths and avail the best deals.
Basics of LinkedIn Social Selling:
Social selling is a process of connecting, interacting, and networking with customers on various social media channels, notably LinkedIn. Sellers can do so by re-sharing or posting customer feedback, commenting on the posts, and liking customers’ posts. It also allows them to build a meaningful relationship with the buyers and boost their credibility.
Instead of cold calls, social selling allows you to nurture the leads and prospective customers for a loyal consumer base. This is why social selling is not for sales reps looking for a quick deal with rather short-term benefits.
For social selling, you need to spend time and efforts for effective customer engagement on an ongoing basis. Here are four basic pillars of Social Selling:
Establish a Professional Identity
Today, customers are highly selective with their choices and connect with brands that they trust. Having a strong online presence shows the agility and experience you hold in the industry. As a result, it generates the interest of prospective customers. It will also boost customer engagement on your posts and open avenues for communication.
The first step to build brand identity is creating a professional business profile, generating information important for customer inspiration. LinkedIn, being a selling platform, lets you connect with potential buyers; therefore, it is important to build a strong LI profile:
- Use real name
- Upload a professional picture
- Make an engaging headline
- Create compelling work summary
- Use slideshow or videos to share content
Target the Right Audience
Through LinkedIn, you can effectively connect with the right target audience compared to traditional channels, such as email and phone calls. More than 76% of buyers are interested in holding a social media conversation with the chosen brands. Through LinkedIn, B2B marketers can identify and reach out to the right market based on your established criteria, including job roles, responsibilities, and industry.
However, content is highly important to entice the right target market. According to a market survey, Millennials and Gen-Z startups are 4.1 times more likely to rely on content, such as product descriptions and testimonials, for an online purchasing decision.
Showcase Your Expertise
As per the market report, more than 60% of B2B buyers reach out or connect with brands that offer data-centric and insightful communication. You can share current news, latest updates, predict trends, and share tips to improve within the industry to establish your rapport.
By staying up-to-date and networking with industry experts, you can establish a leading reputation in the field of sales.
Create Meaningful Relations
For effective social selling, you need first to empathize and then sell. Thus, you should focus on your buyers’ needs and help them with a relevant or piece of information to strengthen the bond. Talking about the common pain points will improve your business integrity and sincerity towards the community.
LinkedIn as a Powerful Social Selling Tool:
Staying in the game of social selling for long will reap exponential benefits, as declared by experts. According to successful social reps, with a 51% more close deals rate, social networking platforms an important tool for success.
With social selling, you tend to get an 18% higher pipeline volume and 21% increased selling speed. Moreover, LinkedIn also improves social selling by more than 25% through its Sales Navigator tool, which decreases the sales cycle by at least 20 days.
It also increases the chances of getting referrals and establishes credibility, effective for sales and marketing activities. To enhance the experience, LinkedIn also offers a Social Selling Index (SSI) that measures the effectiveness of networking on LI for B2B activities. Based on the four pillars, LI, the marketing social site measures your networking activities to reap social selling tactics’ benefits.
Earlier, the sales process was one-way communication, in which sales reps would make the cold calls and offer sales demo to qualify leads. Though still important factors for selling, they need additional elements to support the revolutionizing buying process.
Today, more than 90% of the customers research online for the desired products and services before corresponding with the sales rep. Each buyer review 3-5 articles before deciding on the brand or company he wants to interact with.
During the last stage of the process, buyers use social media to find user experience, quality, and assurance. If, at this stage, businesses and sales rep leverage the opportunity to fill and speed up the sales funnel.
Social selling does it work? Definitely, social selling works for not only B2B marketers but also B2C businesses, and they can cap on it through various social platforms. Prospective customers usually, posting on various platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, to discuss their needs and expectations through comments, posts, and status updates.
As a business owner or a sales rep, all you need to do is listen to the noise and provide a solution. During the process, you can also highlight your product and services without hard-selling. Today, social media savvy salespeople can dive deeper to gain customer insights for a tailored response. Equipped with the right data, you can devise a creative, emotive, and insightful sales pitch to improve the selling rate.
Useful Tips For The Successful LinkedIn Social Seller
By far, we know social selling is important in the times of today. But as the competition is increasing, the rate of success is declining even among the early adopters. So, how can you strengthen your LinkedIn Social Selling skills and improve your success rate? Here, we have useful tips to help you throughout the journey:
Social Selling Does It Work? Only If You Choose the Right Platform:
Several social media platforms have an extensive user base, but not all are suitable for every business. Therefore to succeed as a social salesperson, you need to be active on the same platform as your target audience is. For instance, fashion brands and artists capitalize on Pinterest, while B2B sellers are successful on LinkedIn.
Although YouTube and Facebook have the greatest consumer base, research shows key decision-makers in the B2B industry use LinkedIn and Twitter.
Follow and Connect With the Right Audience:
It is highly important to network with industry experts for establishing a credible reputation. You can use the LinkedIn search bar to find people with the same job roles, demographics, or connections. It is also important to become a subject matter/industry expert; however, you can’t do it overnight.
According to professional salespeople, it takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve perfection. Well, you can use this time to share your lessons and provide tips for success.
Sharing mistakes will improve your credibility and ensure trust. When you have nothing valuable to write, consider tips or content from industry gurus and mentors. Include as many stats, infographics, and case studies as possible to reinforce your expertise and knowledge level.
Get Instant Notifications
Connecting with big brands is a dream of every salesforce. It might have been impossible to reach out to mega-corporations, but it’s become super-duper easy with the advent of social media. All you need to do is follow them and get the latest updates. It will also foster ways to communicate and interact with these brands.
By using the LinkedIn Saved Search option, you can find and connect with ideal prospects. Moreover, LI will send a notification when a person with similar profile criteria join the platform. You can even send them a custom email for an invitation and nurture relationships.
Participate in Groups
With more than 650 million LI users, you have a ton of opportunities to get referrals and build successful connections. There are more than 1.8 million groups on LinkedIn, but only 16% of users have joined only 100 groups.
Find groups relevant to your industry and expertise to hold meaningful communication. You can check out your customer profiles to find out the most relevant groups. When you participate in these groups, you’re more likely to know the buyers’ challenges and needs.
Share valuable information
Share your knowledge and information-based content, providing a solution to prospective customers and buyers. With compelling content, you can also entice and influence the buying decision, thus increasing sales likelihood.
It builds credibility, strengthens sales prospects, and increases customer engagement level, vital for long-term relations. You don’t necessarily spend time writing new content but re-share interesting articles, infographics, and stats to add value.
So, social selling does it work? We hope we’ve given you a good insight into one of the most powerful sales methods out there. If you need some guidance when it comes to improving your unique lead generation strategy, check out our online training pages and tools today! Or don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Ready to learn more about how to use LinkedIn more effectively for social selling? We’re ready to help! Please take a look at our article LinkedIn Premium, Everything you need to know, where you can discover how to build up your personal brand, pull in leads, and become an authority in your niche.
Main Photo by inlytics | LinkedIn Analytics Tool on Unsplash
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