The typical adult now spends close to two and a half hours per day on social media, which is a significant increase from its original use case of simple photo sharing and contact maintenance.

Apps like this have become indispensable to the operations of modern businesses. By the year 2020, nearly all brick-and-mortar stores will be present on two or more social media sites.

You undoubtedly know more about social media than you give yourself credit for, even if you have never worked in this field before. Your marketing department does a fantastic job of keeping your brand active across all social media platforms; but, incorporating social media into your sales plan might provide even better results.

Marketing in the Age of Social Media

It’s only the tip of the iceberg to use social media to promote your brand; it’s also a powerful sales driver. These are the most effective methods for incorporating social media into your sales approach.

Figure out which channels your target audience uses most frequently.

If you want to succeed in sales, you need to create a detailed profile of your ideal client. The profile you create for your buyer personas should include all the pertinent details about them. In the case of business-to-business sales, this might contain information like the target client’s annual revenue, number of employees, and firm structure.

Companies with a consumer-facing product or service should take the time to carefully profile their target clientele, down to the granularity of their age range, hobbies, and the issues they’re hoping to alleviate by purchasing their wares.

Identify the most effective channels for reaching your target audience by analysing the demographics of your ideal client profile. If you operate for a business-to-consumer firm and your target demographic consists of people born between the early 1980s and early 2000s, you would be better to devote your marketing resources on Facebook rather than Tik Tok. However, if you’re in the B2B sector and are trying to network with other professionals, LinkedIn may be a better bet than Pinterest.

Get Customer Experience

A buyer’s confidence in a purchase is bolstered when they see a customer review or testimonial praising the goods. Truth be told, 83% of consumers agree that recommendations from friends and family play a role in their purchases.

The most effective method for incorporating word-of-mouth marketing into your sales strategy? Sharing customer success stories helps you connect with potential customers. An important part of being a sales agent is hearing and relaying client tales. It’s common practise to have the marketing department handle content creation for the company’s social media platforms, but don’t discount the potential content goldmine that is your regular interactions with potential and existing clients.

Use examples from real customers in your marketing materials

Don’t only tell marketing about happy customers; use their testimonials and other examples of social proof in your sales materials. If your product has been given a positive review online or if a satisfied client has written an appreciating social media post about it, be sure to mention it when trying to persuade new buyers to buy from you.

Make the most of your individual social media profiles.

Your personal social media profiles may act as a more personalized extension of your company’s brand, complementing the official profiles that your business maintains. Optimizing your own social media profiles can help you as a sales professional. Customers will immediately recognize you as a representative of your brand in this way.

Twitter (where consumers frequently go to connect directly with businesses and thought-leaders) and LinkedIn (where professionals regularly go to find jobs) are the two greatest platforms for this purpose. If you want to learn how to make the most of your personal accounts as a sales tool, read this post.

Do your prospecting on social media

Sales professionals, especially those in B2B, may benefit greatly from using social media to expand their network and get new leads. LinkedIn should be one of your primary resources for finding new business prospects if your firm sells to other companies.

You may use LinkedIn to locate and connect with individuals who would make excellent clients for your company. The free edition of the programme includes a search bar that lets you narrow down your results based on users’ keywords, fields of expertise, locations, past jobs, and relationships with other people. You may locate additional people to reach out to by simply refining your search to include criteria that describe your ideal consumer.

Salespeople who want to get the most out of LinkedIn as a prospecting tool will appreciate LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s comprehensive search analytics, excellent lead recommendations, and seamless integration with your CRM.

Metrics that matter should be monitored

You, as a sales professional, are certainly new to monitoring KPIs like pipeline velocity, average response time for leads, and sales cycle length to assess the health of your company. Additionally, you should incorporate social media data into your regular reporting if you haven’t previously.

What percentage of your leads originate from social media? What percentage of social media leads really become paying customers for you? How much of your business do you attribute directly to social media-generated leads? It’s important to keep tabs on this data so you know how to proceed with incorporating social into your sales plan.

You might also wish to keep track of qualitative information in addition to these numbers. Take notice of the sort of social media post that brought in the most leads that eventually converted, for instance, and try to figure out why that post was so effective. Your future plans can be shaped by this information.

Analyze the competition

If you want to get a leg up on the competition, social media is the way to go. Accessing comments and reviews allows you to get an idea of how customers really feel about your rivals’ goods, as well as what material they are using to interact with their audience, drop news about upcoming items, and promote the ones they already have available.

Reviewing this data on a regular basis may help you identify the differentiators of your organisation and offering in the words of consumers seeking for those characteristics, regardless of whether your audience is living good or negative criticism for your product. Reading the blogs and social media posts of your rivals is a valuable investment of time that may teach you a lot about the state of the business.

If you’re in business-to-business sales, it’s also a good idea to research the companies that compete with your potential client. When you enter a sales interaction with a prospect understanding their industry challenges, you are better able to explain how your solution can help them overcome those challenges and expand their business.