Where are you? I could not find you
With the current social media trend, social selling coupled with employee advocacy will put your brand in the spotlight.
Definition of terms
What is social selling?
Social selling is the advanced channel to meet people, spot potential customers, and develop healthy relationships with them in order to achieve your sales goals. With social selling your brand becomes registered in their subconscious mind, so you are the first thing that comes to mind whenever they are ready to make purchases.
Besides, it permits sales representatives to communicate with prospects in an informal manner instead of being assertive or compelling them to patronize your brand. While social selling is a great tool for a salesperson, backing it up with an employee advocacy plan will lead to a great outcome.
Zooming out further, social selling is the method of engaging with people on social platforms and building a strong interaction with them as created in the sales plan. This can include sensitizing them about a specific topic, trends, and problems, industry, or about your brand activities. It includes recognizing prospects, creating awareness, building a good public image, until prospects become buyers.
A salesperson successful at social selling, open doors to more opportunities and has an upper hand to attain their sales goals than those who don’t practice social selling.
– 45% more sales opportunities
– 51% more likely to hit quota
– 78% of social sellers outsell peers who don’t use social media
– 3X more likely to go to club
What is employee advocacy?
Employee advocacy is the promotion of a brand by its employees in order to bring the business to public notice, and create awareness on social platforms or offline means. An employee advocate recommends a brand’s product or services to friends and family.
Without further ado let’s jump right in.
Bringing Employee Advocacy to Social Selling
Social selling has proved to be effective for the past several years. However, companies still struggle achieve this effectively. Making social selling part of the sales enablement is key.
Work with a common goal
Sales teams who practice employee advocacy will work together with a common goal on social media. Also, they will be equipped to share brand messages and interact with audience online.
Thorough scrutiny of contents
All contents intended for use in the employee advocacy plan must pass through the marketing team in charge of the program for thorough scrutiny. That is to keep members of the program in check and assure them that the contents are appropriate to use on social platforms.
Communicate the social media policy
Most times, employees avoid posting content about their brand or promoting it on social media due to fear of doing the wrong thing. However, introducing an employee advocacy program encourages employees to use their online presence for brand promotion without fear of posting inappropriate content.
Brand visibility
Employees with a strong digital presence, involved in employee advocacy will bring your business to the public.
How?
Brand messages posted and shared by employees on social media gets more engagement than those posted from the brand’s social media account.
Brand credibility
Engaging people with perceptive content on social media will boost the credibility of your brand. Also, it will improve your social influence and your career as a thought leader while using employee advocacy.
Posting perceptive content on social media will not only boost your visibility and credibility but also encourage audience to interact with your brand in order to know more or your opinion about similar topics.
Besides, such posts will strengthen your digital presence, increase your followers, lead generation, and bring more sales. Prospects will likely check for you online before getting in touch. They can check your website; visit your blog or vlog, read online reviews, and reviews from customers as means to judge your credibility.
Content Insight for Sales Team
For your sales team to work together, posting appropriate content to position them as reliable thought leaders, you must supply them with the right content for digital platforms to improve your brand.
You must strike a balance between promotion and insightful posts on social media. If all they do on social media is promotion without engaging people with insightful topics, people will only view them as regular advertising means. Similarly, if they only present themselves as thought leaders, they will have more social followers but audience will not know about your brand or patronize your business.
Below are some content strategies for your sales team
Post a mix of Third-party content along with branded content
Make sure to curate content for the sales team to post on digital platforms that has a good mix of branded and industry related content. Your sales team is viewed by the public as sales representatives, so it is not ideal to present them as someone trying to close a deal. People tend to avoid those who only bring talk about themselves in a social gathering. For more engagements, it is advisable to use third party content on industry topics, trends, and problems to position your sales team as thought leaders. This improves employee credibility and engagement.
Industry trends and news
Keep your sales team up to date with the current trend industry and related news. Audience tend to interact with those who share current perceptive information and this can position your sales team as a credible source to get answers
Customer reviews are very effective
What others have to say about your brand goes a long way in social selling. The secret to a great employee advocacy program is to include client testimonials in your content strategy. Get positive reviews about your brand’s product and services, and promote it through your employee advocacy program.
Final words
While social selling is a great tool to attain your sales goal, Employee advocacy equips your sales team with necessary things to be more active and confident on digital platforms.
