The role between sales and marketing can be clearly defined. Marketing is the process of warming up clients or customers where sales directly encourages the transaction.
When trying to navigate the world of social media, businesses and individuals can get a bit muddled up with what they are trying to do.
Social media can prove a great platform for your audience to learn and engage with your brand, without having to have a physical experience so ensuring they have the best online experience is key.
Ensuring that your business has effective sales and marketing alignment can help build your relationship with your customer and make your customer buying journey a breeze.
Some companies will use social media very differently to others. Here are a few tips and tricks to help make more sales through social media.
Learn what makes your audience tick
Audience or customer research is one of the most valuable tools a sales or marketing team can have in their toolbox.
To approach your potential customers on social media you need to understand who they are, where they spend their time, what content they will respond to and how they make decisions in their company.
If your audience spends the majority of their time on LinkedIn, engaging with other pages or individuals like a recruitment agency, then the majority of your resource will be best put into LinkedIn. Creating content, serving ads, engaging with your community or building your network. Investing in other platforms like Twitter or YouTube may be a waste of your resources if yielding little results.
In addition to the platform, it is useful to know what your target audience engages with. What pages do they follow, what type of post do they like best and how they engage with content they like.
Using this information you can create a hybrid profile of all the best bits from your research and make an impact to you audience.
This step is incredibly important so although potentially time consuming, it is incredible valuable.
Marketing teams will primarily create content that caters to the audience at every step of the buyers journey in different media types too. Helping reach new audiences and engage followers to encourage them down the funnel to where the sales team can convert them through specific account based research and clever engagement tactics.
Different content for different stages
It is essential for both teams to understand what content the customer or potential customer needs for each of the different buying stages.
There is no use sending a potential customer a case study if they are unaware of the services you offer.
It is up to the both teams team to make available the different types of content to the right audience at the right time.
Encouraging your audience to convert further down the funnel can be as simple as giving their email address, registering for an event or joining a group, here you can then start to classify your audience and quantify your funnel.
You will then have the option of serving this audience content specific for them, i.e. bottom of the funnel content like case studies, product descriptions or price lists.
As they are showing higher levels of interest in your offering, it will be easier to convert the audience who is further down the funnel.
Using hubspot.com's flywheel model, you attract with your interesting content from marketing, convert using the bottom of the funnel content with sales and delight with your great product or service.
Treat followers like a community
Serving these different types of content to your followers or group members can sometimes be tricky.
It is hard to find a way to include the range of content you need for your followers who will be undoubtedly in different stages of their buying journey.
This is where treating your followers like a community can really provide a huge benefit. If you think that audiences will follow you if your content resonates with them.
Use your marketing team to generate campaigns or collateral that resonates with your audience and your sales team to be personable representatives of your brand.
Build personality with your social media channels, grow your trust with your audience and make it easy for your audience to recognise your values. Community management is all about building your relationships and recognising that people work with people. Even in high performing companies, businesses is built on strong relationships with suppliers, clients, employees and stakeholders.
If you can boost your ability to connect personally with your audience through social media then your audience will be more receptive to a sales outreach call, an offer through email or even a direct message from their sales representative.
Establish your tone of voice
Using a personable tone of voice and establishing clear and strong brand guidelines when it comes to social media is essential to building that trust with your audience.
The way you speak and address your social media following will certainly have an effect on the way they feel and can help establish your business as approachable and welcoming as opposed to cold and corporate.
Using more informal terms and casual language can help give a less intimidating feel to your content. A few different terms can help turn a simple blog promotion into an engaging post that makes your social media feel like it is being run by a human and not by a robot! Check out the examples below and see how adding a few different phrases, different language and questions can change the feel of a simple blog promo.
Example 1
Read our new blog that outlines the benefits of using social media to engage your audience.
Example 2
Hey everybody! Check out our brand-spanking new blog on how using social media can engage your audience written by our fabulous content wizard Harry Smith. Let our team know how you engage your audience on social media by dropping a comment below!
Example 2 helps the audience feel like they can have a conversation with the page and thus building trust with the page.
However, consider the sector you are operating in. Legal or medical companies will require a more formal tone of voice and language selection. When researching your audience (in tip 1) make sure you research your audiences favoured tone of voice too.
Have clear call to actions
To help boost your conversion rates, having one or two clear call to actions within your social media posts can help direct your audience.
These call to actions will need to be in line with where they are on their customer journey. Whether it is a link to read a blog, to comment below, to purchase online or to get in touch, there are a wide range of call to actions your post can make.
Think about the media type your post is and the suitable call to action to direct your audience too. In a poll, the obvious call to action is to vote, whereas a video may direct your audience to comment on the video or reach out to whoever is in the video.
Make sure to mix up your content types to encourage different types of call to actions throughout your social media posting. Not all posts need to encourage visits to a specific blog, ask a question or engage your audience some other way.
Keeping your tone of voice whilst encouraging these call to actions is essential to establish that trust. Including more casual and informal language that matches your other posts can really help engage your audience.
Social media can often feel quite daunting to those who are not sure how to approach it, but businesses often find that with a bit of direction they have loads of content and can establish those online relationships through the power of social media.
If you need further direction with your social media marketing or marketing strategy, reach out with any questions you may have.