strategy Archives | waveSpawn Marketing

April 24, 2012

Social selling with social media

Increasingly, small businesses want to understand how to leverage social media to increase sales. In previous topics, we’ve discussed methods for creating a social media marketing strategy and using metrics to measure the return on your social media investment. Having a plan or roadmap should always be the first step in any marketing initiative including social media.

Can social media be an efficient, cost-effective channel for finding new customers and selling to business clients?

By now, you’ve probably heard the term social selling (or Sales 2.0). Social selling is about engaging prospects on their terms. It involves learning their marketing, communication, and buying preferences and then positioning yourself to be of value. Social selling (and social media) is not about blasting offers in your tweets and posts. With social selling, you need to recognize that the buying process is controlled by a better informed and more connected customer. Keep in mind, sales still remains a relationship-driven business. The concept of prospect networking through social media enables sales professionals to learn about and connect with potential customers. More importantly, they can tailor sales information and product specs to accommodate the needs and concerns of each individual rather than the mass – enabling relevance throughout the sales cycle.

The amount of prospect information available has increased the need for comprehensive sales intelligence. This generally brings together both traditional data and social media. It can be very beneficial for sales professionals to leverage the social web to simply listen, engage, and add value to the customer conversation. Being in the right place at the right time can create the top of mind status needed when the prospect is ready to buy.

Social media outlets are great places for starting conversations, but they’re not the only place to have them. When the time is right, take the conversation offline. With all of the modern conveniences and technical advances, still nothing can replicate the power of a face-to-face meeting.

The challenge with prospect networking and social selling is that it requires a lot of time and daily commitment. It’s impossible to automate messaging and conversations through social media. While many sales professionals don’t have interest in adding another “to do” item to their daily routine, finding the right balance is key. Each individual needs to assess their industry, audience, product, positioning, and price to form a strategy that fits their business and equally as important – their schedule.

If you have comments or questions, we’d love to hear from you. If you’d like more information on developing effective strategies for social selling, please contact us.

March 15, 2011

Creating your social media strategy

Create your roadmap Is it wise to start a business endeavor without a plan? Most people wouldn’t build an office before they determined what their business would actually do. Without a strategy there is simply no structure, no clear objectives and no real way of determining its success.

The same principles apply to social media. Establishing a roadmap with clear objectives can help you determine the success or failure of your program. For example, what is your business trying to achieve through social media? Is it to:

Interact with customers and prospects
Increase visibility and strengthen your brand
Reach new audiences
Create loyalty
Deal with customer service and support issues
Boost revenue

Regardless of what you decide, you should plan to create measurable metrics for your social media program. These types of statistics, if tracked properly, can help to measure and monetize the results of your social media campaigns. Let’s say, for example, you have a small business and your goal is to interact with customers and prospects. In this case, you’ll want to define what would constitute success. For instance, the number of:

Completed customer satisfaction surveys per month
New features suggested by users (that are implemented)
People who post something about us
Blogs that link to us

There are a variety of criteria which you can use to measure progress. The idea is to define relevant success metrics that translate into meaningful business context for you. For example quantitative metrics may include number of sales, new leads, new qualified subscribers, while qualitative could track satisfaction levels, loyalty, visibility, amount of interaction, feedback. For qualitative goals, don’t get too complex, use simple rules as metrics.

Set your social media campaign goals based on these metrics. Monitor often and course correct as necessary. Don’t expect to get it right the first time, but by establishing benchmarks you can filter out channels and strategies that don’t return good results. Trial and error can be your best ally in discovering where to focus the most energy.

January 20, 2010

Profiting from social media

Many people continually ask me how they can make money or increase sales from social media. My answer is simple: it’s like losing weight. There are no shortcuts or magic pills that will instantly shed pounds. Losing weight is a lifestyle change and commitment to health and fitness.

The same holds true for social media. Don’t expect to sign up at Twitter or Facebook in the morning and start generating sales in the afternoon. It’s not that simple. It’s a change in corporate culture. It’s a commitment to participating in relevant online communities and discussions. It is most effective by adding relevant and interesting content and opinions, inviting others to share their experiences, and most importantly reading and listening.

Jeffrey Gitomer had some interesting observations in his article: Social media – the new cold call. Wanna play?

There are key words to consider as you try to build your social media world. Connections, attract, video, value, consistent, fan, relevance, write, allocate, monetize.

But there’s a secret. How you position and promote yourself in the NON-social media world is critical to your success in the social media world. Your writing, your website, your blog, your ezine, your personal brand in your marketplace, your perceived value in the marketplace, and your reputation, are elements of attraction that affect your social media status – and surely your success.

There’s billions of dollars of new business being generating by social media – how much of it will you get? Maybe you need to get a bit more serious about being a bit more social.

It’s not an overnight sensation; social media is here to stay… and your involvement could be critical to the future of your business.