Social media has become a selling force for the marketing world and marketers are taking a great advantage of it. Recent survey shows that about 75% of sales and purchase decisions are done through social media evaluations in one way or the other. Even the way we do business and maintain customer relationship has changed drastically within the last few years all because of social media. The traditional way of selling both offline and online has changed from email marketing, networking, phone calls and face to face discussions to almost complete social media selling. That been said doesn’t mean our traditional ways of selling are no longer good or in use but, we rather make better use of them combining social media selling information and experiments to grow sales using social media.

Growing sales using social media

Social media selling is simple but a tactical way of reaching your audience based on their demographics and at the right time through the right source depending on the most popular social media channel your local or global audience are using at a particular time. Properly using your networks on LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, and other social networks, you will be able to easily identify potential prospects, then gain intelligence on your audience needs and challenges, and then leverage this knowledge. This valuable information will make a way for you to engage them in conversation that will give you the opportunity to email, call or even meet them in person and present your offers to them. It is no news that the potentials social media have help marketers uncover new selling opportunities and also develop the existing business relationships that leads them to grow sales using social media.

To succeed on social media, you have to properly plan, set out a clear strategy, devote some time and work hard work before you can even think of succeeding on social media selling. Below are some of the best tips every selling rep should follow in other to be successful on social media.

1. Defined your Brand or Products/Services

Before you even start anything on social media, you as a person or group have to first define your brand, products and services. This means that, how do you want to be seen as a brand? Is it that you are have the best quality products with the lowest cost or do you offer the fastest and efficient services within your niche. Do you want your audience to see you as the best team or group of experts in a particular field? it all have to be first defined. By doing this, you will determine how you want to be perceived in the eyes of your audience and also know the right source of social network you will need to use.

2. Create and complete your social media profiles

After defining your brand and having a full knowledge of how you want to be perceived on the media among your audience and potential clients, the next thing you need to is to create attracted accounts on all the social media platforms within your reach. Whether is Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and also create and update your LinkedIn profile. Connect your site with all the above mentioned social sites and not LinkedIn company page. Make sure you don’t have previous information on those pages that will hurt your brand and create controversy among your visitors and potential customers. These social media pages represent your brand, products and services to great extent and they must be kept clean and filled with information appealing to customers only.

3. Identify your targeted audience and go after them

There are so many ways of searching for your targeted audience on social network these days. You know them easily by what they like, their subscriptions, what they share and view on daily bases. Another way to search for your audience is through LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a great tool for this because they allow you to search for people according to their demographics e.g. by their titles, regions, specific departments, companies, industries, and more. Same thing can be done with Twitter and now with Facebook posting updated to target specific audience to increase engagement. You could also find your potential customers through your competitors’ fan pages and make attempts to steel them in ways I won’t discuss here. In case you need more information about this, email or contact the admin of this post.

4. Build your social Network with your targeted audience

After getting to know who are your targeted audience on those social networks, Start building your network with the people you know by inviting them to like and share your pages. There are a lot of chances that those people might know who you want to sell to and make sure you add all the people from your past and present job places, your family and friends and encourage them to share your information among their friends. This for sure will lead to your pages attracting new members and so the growth will continue. Make a good use of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ to start this process.

5. Identify platforms your audience are using

Knowing the social network platforms your targeted audience are on regularly will help you a lot in targeting them and bringing them to your pages on same social networks channels. You have to understand where your targeted audience spend most of their time, discuss their challenges and share information about topics interesting to them. Once you identify those platforms, join the groups, and subscribe to those platforms. There are chances you would meet a lot of your targeted audience there and convert them to becoming your fans and subscribers. You would do better is you spend more time on those social platforms where your audience spend most of their time. These will lead to more subscribers and potential customers you would keep forever.

6. Grow sales using social media

Learn and monitor your Potential clients on those social media platforms

Some tools like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite and Google Alerts are just great peace of software that can help you monitor in real time what your potential customers are talking about online which will allow you to quickly respond to them in a timely manner. Your target audience are continuously sharing information on social network sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and more which send messages to what their needs and wants are. Sometimes even their profile update might review what their needs are at a time. Knowing all these will give you great insight on what to create and how to target them based on their behavior on social media.

7. Offer Target and valuable content that will impress and engage your audience

Now that you have defined your brand, create and enhanced your social media profiles, identified your target audience and where they spend most of their time on the social media platforms, started building your social network, and began learning more about your target audience, the next challenge will be to start offering great information about your products, services and brand. This will help you to build trust and establish yourself as an expert within a particular field. these days you need to share targeted valuable insights with your prospective customers in the form of quality content using the different social media platforms they use and also make sure these contents are sent to them at the right times and through the right source.