How to Optimize Social Selling for Digital B2B Sales?

By thought-horizon | Sep 2, 2019

Social selling never ends.

Even when you have clocked out, packed up your laptop, and turned your phone off, your prospects are there, browsing through your business profiles, researching you and your brand as you enjoy another season of Friends on your couch.

Social platforms offer you a promising avenue to represent your brand around the clock. Apparently, a profile tailored to deliver value to the customers is a must. Don’t forget, you don’t just sell services or products, you sell humans to humans.

To help you with the same, we have zoned in on some of the essential aspects of optimizing your social media for digital B2B sales. Let’s begin!

1. Be Authentic

Authenticity becomes a critical aspect in your social selling strategy. Studies claim that 63% of the consumers buy from a brand they find authentic. 

Having your brand on social platforms is easy; the real challenge is to build a presence that your market can trust. If your social media can garner the faith of your buyers, conversions are easier to generate. 

Start by creating an online voice that is helpful, reliable, human-like, and one that resonates with your audience. Your social presence should represent an honest picture of who you are as a brand as well as align with your mission, values, and goals.

Here are a few things that can help you build authenticity, grow your followers, make conversions, and become a thought leader in the industry:

#1: Listen and respond to customers.

#2: Focus on your customers and helping them.

#3: Publish content consistently.

#4: Stand by your products, brand, and values.

#5: Be transparent.

#6: Personalize your outreach.

2. Add Value and Insight

More than 80% of executives and B2B buyers rely on social media to research vendors and learn about their products and services before making purchase decisions. Apparently, brands need to pull up their social selling strategies and fit in those spaces to be discovered. That said, it is not enough to just show up along the buyer’s journey. Contributing value and insights that identify your customers’ business challenges and offers them a solution is crucial to relationship-building.

Begin by identifying the platforms that your target market uses to search for information. Find what engages them and keep adding value to it. Share relevant insights and offer regular, relevant content combined with targeted thought leadership to further educate and nurture your customers throughout the buying process.

3. Spice Up Your Social Media by Being Creative

Presentation matters! And for that reason, how you represent your brand among potential clients is essential.

You need to stand out from competitors. No matter how amazing your ideas are, every great idea still needs extra “oomph” at times. And the easiest way is to figure out the point that connects your buyers to your brand. Once you do, move forward.

For instance, imagine a brand that provides fleet management solutions. While you always have the scope to promote your software with the same name, you cannot overrule the effectivity of putting it up as a problem-solver for your prospects. Identify your customers’ pain points and tell them how you address those. Here, not many of us would relate to fleet management software, but most of us will connect to the problem we face while operating diversely separate vehicles.

The idea is to deliver the message effectively rather than confusing the audience with your vocabulary.

4. Recalibrate Regularly

The social media landscape keeps adapting itself to the changing market. Trends continue coming in and out, and by the time users figure out their way through one, another is already knocking on the door. Identify how can you align your sales processes with the trends and strategize accordingly.

Don’t forget to take care of your prospects’ changing demands. Utilize social media analytics and finesse your understanding of the audience, how your strategy is working in real-time, how your content is driving conversions, and more. Use the findings to come up with a strategy that aligns with your business goals as well as satisfies the needs of the current market.

5. Humanize Your Brand

Let’s face it: Customers don’t trust brands – not at least as much as they trust their peers. For most customers, companies are faceless enemies who are out there minting money by telling you what you want to hear. So, individuals are 10x more likely to click the content distributed by a human than a brand.

Letting prospects get a glimpse of the people behind the business is a powerful way to humanize your brand. Figure out how to get your salespeople to carry on these messages and determine the next steps that will delight B2B buyers, earn you meetings, and funnel sales progression.

Take-home Message

B2B buyers, today, are socially sophisticated and informed. And for that reason, your sales team should be too. Get yourself the dose of tactics, tools and training to leverage social media for sales success. Connect with the social selling training experts at Thought Horizon to build your sales funnel effectively and crush your quota skillfully.