Where’s the evidence for social selling? Look here!

By Sharon A.M. MacLean

Still not convinced that social enterprise adds to your bottom line? You’re not alone.

“Only 52% of companies say that executives are informed, engaged, and aligned with their company’s social strategy,” reports the Altimeter Group on the state of social enterprise. Altimeter was founded by New York Times best-selling author Charlene Li who penned Leadership and Groundswell. Her group says the path to social enterprise is being limited by a dearth of executive buy-in.

Too bad.

CEOs might take social action more seriously if they knew that modern marketers deliver on average 20 percent more revenue and 60 percent higher profit growth. McKinsey & Company—named in the top 10 of Fortune magazine’s World’s Best Companies for Leaders—adds to the fuel by noting that leaders must champion social change if it’s ever going to happen for an organization.

The bottom line on social selling, asks LinkedIn powerhouse Melonie Dodaro: Can you afford to be beaten by competitors?

Hubspot hands us these stats: 72.6% of salespeople who use social media outperform their colleagues who aren’t using it…that includes your competitors. Dodaro asks business leaders if they can afford to be outperformed by their competitors by 70%. If you want to pick up speed, here’s a few steps to take.

From Nataly Kelly, MarketingProfs

1. Establish a social business program with goals that reflect the realistic value of building relationships online. Next, apply the social framework to departmental goals that include a number of new leads.

2. Take some training. This may include social media boot camps to get your leadership team on the same song page. You are going to need resources for training and tools to get employees on board with your social media strategy, new technology, and new social workflow.

From Melonie Dodaro, Top Dog Social Media

3. Optimize your online presence for the company and for sales reps. This means producing profiles with strong copy, including professional head shots, and ensuring that unique aspects of each social network are taken into account. 77% of B2B buyers do not speak with a salesperson until after they have performed independent research notes HubSpot. So, it’s important for prospects to be impressed when they look for you. There’s no point in losing a potential sale even before you get out of the starting gate.

4. Current statistics show that 1 in 3 business professionals around the world are on LinkedIn. This makes LinkedIn an amazing tool that you can use to gain access to potential prospects in your target market. If you understand how to operate within the LinkedIn environment, social selling can be a powerful tool for your business and will only continue to get stronger with each passing year.

5. Therefore, take the initiative. Social selling combines the age-old skills of relationship selling with the modern practise of online engagement. Create (or find) high-quality content that is valuable to your prospects and relevant to the services you offer before using it as a way to open up dialogue via private messages.

6. Join relevant LinkedIn groups that attract your target market. Share valuable content daily through your LinkedIn status update to stay top-of-mind with your network. A common mistake, I see, is where LinkedIn professionals join their professional groups and spend time commenting in those groups instead of building relationships in their client groups. I made this mistake during my early days on LinkedIn; the turn-a-round made a big difference in my own business.

From Jesse Noyes, Kapost

7. Marketers need to practise accountability and answer these questions:

Who are the key content players and what role will they play?
How will topics be prioritized?
What resources are needed to create content? What resources will need to be added?
How will tasks be tracked to get content out the door?
What can be done to ensure content gets seen externally and internally?
How is success measured?

From Nick Johnson, Incite Marketing and Communication

8. I have a lot of time for this global enterprise which recently polled their network of big brand marketers on “The Future of Content”. They asked how much more total potential audience could content reach. They answered this way.

3% not much more
18% more than half
54% less than half
24% not sure

Only 21% of respondents felt they were even approaching audience saturation. There’s still a lot of room to grow.

9. The value of negative comments. Recently, a business owner asked for my recommendation on how to deal with a negative comment they’d experienced. The CEO felt it was completely unfair to his family-run business. The comment was bogus, yet, nonetheless it existed.

If you can help an unhappy customer, you will benefit from the good will generated. Even better, others will see that you took the extra time to care for a slagger who took a swing at you. Chris Krohn, CMO at Restaurant.com, thinks it’s more valuable for your customer to leave a negative comment on social media than to leave no comment at all. He says to cherish every Tweet that says your brand “sux”, because at least now, you have the chance to prove that your brand does not, in fact, “sux”.

10. Leave room for creativity. I like this story from Toni Jones, U-Haul International, not least because of experiences with my own client, Sharon Romank of Affordable Storage Sherwood Park. They are completely different businesses but come from a similar genre: moving and self-storage.

Jones came up with an innovative social media-based campaign for the iconic brand. Her social listening found that, while U-Haul was associated with a high amount of negative sentiment online around the stress of moving, lots of people were taking pictures of themselves posing inside or outside the trucks on moving day. In the case of Affordable Storage Sherwood Park, Romank thought self storage might not be interesting enough to warrant publication of a newsletter.

U-Haul invited their customers to send in pictures of themselves with their trucks. They did –-thousands of them. These pictures were placed among a collage on the trucks themselves, creating another frenzy on social media as people tried to find themselves, then took pictures of themselves with themselves.

In the case of Affordable, the newsletter with stories from renters and ideas about self storage generated a 50% opening rate; typical opening rates that are considered good hover around 16% to 18% . Customers store their precious goods with Affordable and are very keen to stay connected with the company looking after their property long-term. The U-Haul campaign was a roaring success. What was the key, according to Jones? The project let consumers be creative. Nothing crazy, nothing involved. Just the act of staging and taking a picture was enough to inspire connection.

Business owners will become convinced that social enterprise is good for their bottom line when they start to see similar irresistible evidence. It won’t be long.

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Need help with your strategic content? Contact me through LinkedIn or by email: sharon@worldgatemedia.com. You can also pick up more ideas from my website: http://www.worldgatemedia.com

Life-long communications strategist Sharon MacLean owned and published a traditional print magazine over 21 years for business people. She now applies her enhanced knowledge in digital marketing to the needs of her clients and believes in the value of combining the best of both worlds.

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