What is Social Selling

According to Gartner, social selling is strategizing ways to increase demand and lead generation through social media. With social media being one of the main pillars of marketing, strategizing the right way of social selling can boost profits for your business. Irrespective of what business you own, now is the time to get your brand's social profiles ready for targeting prospects.

What is the difference between social selling and social media marketing?

Before getting started with social selling, it is necessary to understand the difference between social selling and social media marketing.To put it in simple words, social media marketing is about bringing the limelight and making people aware about your brand on social media. Whereas social selling brings a sales approach to the interactions happening between the brand and a lead on social media and the end goal is profit. Let's understand the difference better:

Social Selling

Aims to reach out to prospects and build customer relationships.
Involves cold outreach and sales approach to the interactions happening between the brand and leads.
Includes a narrowed pipe of prospects and leads that are likely to convert as customers.
Key metrics include response rate, conversion rate, revenue.

Social Media Marketing

Aims to increase brand awareness and image.
Involves marketing activities such as posting on social channels, ads and campaigns.
Includes a broad spectrum of audience who are likely to be interested in knowing more about your brand.
Key metrics include engagement actions such as likes, comments, audience growth, mentions and reshares.

The Benefits of Social Selling

Considering today's marketing landscape, you must work on strategies that let you converse and bring you close to your customers. While thinking of such marketing plans, one can't deny the vital role social media plays in letting businesses empathize with their message.

Brings a new-sales approach

With social media emerging to be one of the lead generation platforms, social selling introduces you to a new sales approach. The traditional way includes booking a call to get to know the prospect better, but now social media can be the bridge you use to connect with and understand the needs of a prospect by viewing their profile and interacting with them. This not only adds details to prospects' profile research but also saves a lot of time.

Increases brand awareness

Social selling requires a consistent presence on social media. Be it posting relevant content or prompt replies to customers, all of this increases brand awareness as your brand will get noticed by the right target group. For example, when you share a customer testimonial on social media channels, prospects with similar interests will be eager to learn how your product/service can help them as well.

Strengthens customer relationships

Social selling involves a lot of one-on-one conversations with customers and the community. This strengthens the relationship with them as their queries are answered then and there. The value this adds to your business is foundational as it makes you easily accessible and approachable.

How to get started with Social Selling for your business?

Getting started with social selling as a business can be confusing at times, but the key is to understand its benefits and see how well you can yield through it for your business. And here are a few steps you can follow to get started with social selling:

Setting your goal
Finding the right channel
Optimize content
Stay on track
Improvising your strategies

Setting your goal

With social media emerging to be one of the lead generation platforms, social selling introduces you to a new sales approach. The traditional way includes booking a call to get to know the prospect better, unlike that with social media being the bridge you can connect and understand the needs of a prospect by viewing their profile and interacting with them. This not only adds details to prospects' profile research but also saves a lot of time.

Finding the right channel

After jotting your goals, start researching the social media channels that'll help you connect with your target audience. You can also set channel-specific goals. For example, if you're a marketing agency and you want to be noticed by marketing thought leaders, LinkedIn could be the right channel. Further, if you want to find influencers who will collaborate with you, Instagram could be the best pick. This approach will help you start choosing platforms that'll pave a hassle-free way to attain your goals.

Optimize content creation to build trust

We can't deny that content creation is the key to getting the audience to engage with your brand on social media platforms. After picking the right set of channels, start working on your content calendar. Make sure to create content that resonates well with your followers' interests—doing this'll help you build a community. For instance, you can initiate discussions around a problem they face in the product vertical of your business and follow it up with a) how to solve the problem and b) how your specific solution can solve their problem.

Stay on track and keep monitoring

You're halfway through mastering social selling when your followers/prospects trust you. To gain credibility among your audience, you must never miss an update from them. Especially the engagements you get on your posts—this will also help you improve the sales process by knowing those who engage with your brand the most. These are the people who would be more likely to try out your product/service.

Start measuring and improvising your strategies

Ensure to measure the results of your activities frequently, and with that, look into the strategies that might need improvisation and those that work well for you. Look for engagement metrics from respective social media channels and get to the next stage of the goals you want to attain through social selling. For example, at first the goal was to drive 20% of traffic to your webpage; after achieving that, find out how you can get them to sign up for a trial of your service.

Your guide to starting social selling using Zoho Social

If you are looking for social media management tools that will make your social selling journey, here is Zoho Social. Here are our best-in-class features that will ease social selling for you.

A unified Inbox that makes social Selling easy

When it comes to social selling, replying promptly to customers and prospects is important. But sometimes as a business, you might tend to miss messages. Worry not! Here are the various ways in which Zoho Social's unified Inbox helps you stay on track and never miss anything important

Track Interactions

Bring together messages and engagements from various social channels such as Facebook, X, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIN, and Google Business Profile.

Assign queries

Assign queries and important engagements such as comments and messages to your team on low or high-priority bases. You can also assign queries to your team members based on specific channels and engagement actions.

Conversation history

Track your brand's conversation history with a user on social media and get to know them well.

Integrate with a CRM tool and enhance your social selling strategies

Social selling involves finding and reaching out to a lot of prospects, and the social media management tool you use must integrate with a CRM platform. Zoho Social's integration with Zoho CRM bridges the gap between sales and social media marketing enhancing social selling.

Identify potentials

Identify engagements that can be a potential lead/contact and add them to your Zoho CRM with just a click using the "Add to CRM" button.

Automate sync

Turn positive engagements—such as likes for a certain post, messages, and comments—into potential leads for your business. Automatically sync these positive leads to Zoho CRM.

Lead stage

Track the CRM stage status, such as lead or contact, of your audience's social profiles live from Zoho Social's monitor tab and add them to your contact list.

Stay consistent with our publishing calendar and build trust

We can't stress enough how publishing consistently is the key to making your brand familiar among prospects. But we understand how overwhelming it can get! Having a publishing calendar that will do it all for you takes the stress away and here are all the ways Zoho Social's calendar helps you stay consistent:

Plan ahead

Schedule posts across social media channels and have a clear view of your monthly/weekly content plan. Reschedule by just dragging and dropping posts from the publishing calendar.

Smart scheduling

Get the best slot to post with the help of SmartQ, a feature that analyzes your previous post engagements and fetches the right time to take your posts live.

Repeat post

Use the repeat post feature whenever you want to ensure that your most important post stays on top.

Monitor what matters to your brand and never miss any prospect

Social listening is among the top features that you should look out for in a social media management tool when it comes to social selling. You must keep a watch of all engagements and trends happening on social media platforms to find more prospects. Here is everything you can do with Zoho Social's monitoring features to stay keen on your social selling journey.

Live stream

Track engagements 24*7 using our livestream dashboard.

Customize listening columns

Create customized listening columns with engagements that matter to your brand across various social media platforms.

Monitor trends

Follow hashtags and trends around your business and create columns to track them.

Competitive benefits

See what competitors post daily by creating columns for the profiles you want to keep an eye on.

Analyse your efforts and improvise your social selling strategies

After you implement your social selling strategies, it is important to measure your efforts. This includes analyzing your posts, interactions, conversions, and other significant metrics. Having a social media marketing tool that fetches all this for you under a single dashboard will enhance the way you do social selling. Here is everything Zoho Social's reports dashboard can do for you:

Demographic details

View audience summary and essential demographic details such as age, country, and gender that will help you tweak your way of communicating and messaging.

Essential metrics

Analyze your post engagements and find out the best type of content that works for your brand. Get insights into essential metrics like comments, likes, and reshares.

Paid vs organic reach

Learn more about your brand's paid vs organic reach and know where to concentrate better.